Russell Kirk on Brooks Adams

From Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953).

Kirk on Henry Adams here.

Just how far the acceleration of the human movement may go it is impossible to determine; but it seems certain that, sooner or later, consolidation, having reached its limit, will necessarily stop. There is nothing stationary in the universe. Not to advance is to go backward, and when a highly centralized society disintegrates under the pressure of economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been exhausted.
-- Brooks Adams, preface to the French edition of The Law of Civilization and Decay

Brooks Adams confessed himself to be an eccentric; and so he was; but he belonged to the grand tradition of eccentricity, and published his novel and gloomy doctrines with the old Adams fearlessness. Whether he ought to be called a conservative is more debatable. He was disgusted with American society in his day; his books were calculated to win the attention of the free-silver men and the socialists; he thought inertia was social death, and that the only chance for survival

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lay in acceptance of progress and adjustment to change; he denounced the capitalists and bankers nearly as vehemently as Marx had done-and in several particulars, notably his economic determinism, Brooks Adams' ideas ran parallel with Marx's. All the same, he detested the very process of change which he urged society to accept, longed hopelessly for the republic of Washington and John Adams, condemned democracy as symptom and cause of social decay, and toward the end of his days professed his faith in the church of his ancestors. His detestation of capitalism resulted from his abhorrence of turbulent competition; he seems to have been desperately hungry for stability and order; but by the logic of his own economic and historical theories, permanence never is found in this universe.

In this crisis of my fate [the panic of 1893] I learned, as a lawyer and a student of history and of economics, to look on man, as a pure automaton, who is moved along the paths of least resistance by forces over which he has no control. In short, I reverted to the pure Calvinistic philosophy. As I perceived that the strongest of human passions are fear and greed, I inferred that so much and no more might be expected from a pure democracy as might be expected from any automaton so actuated. As a forecast I suggested that the first great social movement we might expect, should be the advent of something resembling an usurer's paradise, to be presently followed by some such convulsion as has always formed a part of such conditions since the beginning of time.

This is the general theme of his four books, The Law of Civilization and Decay, America's Economic Supremacy, The New Empire, and The Theory of Social Revolutions; they expound his cyclical theory of history and his conviction that man is the prisoner of economic force. Civilization is the product of centralization, and grows up about the centers of exchange; as the agents of central political and economic organization subdue the men of simpler rural economies-the Romans conquering their provinces, the middle classes accomplishing the Reformation, the proprietors evicting the yeomen, Spain crushing the Indians-civilization grows richer and richer. The highest product of this civilization, ironically enough, is the usurer; he extirpates the military classes which once predominated; but the usurer and his gross culture seem to infect the race with morbid afflictions, quite as they stifle the spirit of art. Social vitality dwindles, the great centralized economy no longer can operate efficiently, decay and collapse follow,

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and decentralized, barbarous life is triumphant once more--to be succeeded, in the course of centuries, by a repetition of the same bloody and purposeless history.

The economic center of the civilized world--which determines the social equilibrium--has shifted westward throughout history: Babylon to Rome, Rome to Constantinople, Constantinople to Venice, Venice to Antwerp. It flourished in Holland as late as 1760, but by 1815 it was in London; the tide has been running since toward America, and that transfer of economic and political power now is nearly complete - so Brooks Adams wrote in 1900. The Spanish-American War was a token of American economic supremacy. England is faced with a long and dreadful decay, and America must take precautions to avoid participating in the ultimate collapse of Britain. A tremendous contest begins to loom between the power of Asia, possibly dominated by Russia, and the American power; the question will be decided in China and Korea, and in years to come, the mineral resources of China will produce a new economic phase. To win in this competition will require intense centralization: "If expansion and concentration are necessary, because the administration of the largest mass is the least costly, then America must expand and concentrate until the limit of the possible is attained; for Governments are simply huge corporations in competition, in which the most economical, in proportion to its energy, survives, and in which the wasteful and slow are undersold and eliminated."

Cheapness of production and distribution is the source of success in economic life, and therefore in civilization. Centralization probably is proportionate to velocity, and the most vertiginous nation triumphs over its neighbors. These contentions are sustained by an examination of Syrian, Persian, Hellenic, Roman, Central Asian, Flemish, Spanish, and Russian civilizations.

Although the immediate consequence of competition and centralization is success, its ultimate effect is degradation. The usurer, whose whole view is economic, is at once the most complete product of civilization and the most limited and ignoble type of man. "To this money-making attribute all else has been sacrificed, and the modern capitalist thinks in terms of money more exclusively than the French aristocrat or lawyer before the French Revolution ever thought in terms of caste." Too stupid even to realize the necessity for reverencing and obeying the law that shelters him from social revolution, the

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capitalist lacks capacity sufficient for the administration of the society he has made his own. Woman and the producer and the man of thought already have been debased by the rule of capitalism or state socialism -- two sides of a coin -- so that no vitality remains in society to prevent a sickening decay. Democracy, simultaneously the ally and the dupe of this soulless material civilization, proves unable to fulfill the duties of sacrifice and leadership; so the structure of social organization collapses, and the dreary cycle of endeavor commences afresh.

Yet despite his contempt for capitalistic society, despite his hereditary antipathy toward centralization, despite his abhorrence of socialism, despite his wholehearted rejection of cheapness as the real standard of achievement, still Brooks Adams accepted the triumph of consolidation as inevitable. He urged co-operation in the process as a counterpoise to the insatiable capitalist, as homage to the instinct for self-preservation. Conservatism, social inertia, obedience to tradition - these courses of action are doomed to destruction by the impersonal processes of economic destiny. Conservatism, he writes, "resists change instinctively and not intelligently, and it is this conservatism which largely causes those violent explosions of pent-up energy which we term revolutions. . . . With conservative populations slaughter is nature's remedy." Our educational institutions should adjust themselves to this tremendous process of change, that they may make its progress less violent. We should dismiss the emotional instinct to keep things as they are, and regard government dispassionately, as we would any other business, accepting moral change, too, like all other alteration; for nothing can be done to prevent its ultimate overwhelming victory. "In American industry friction will infallibly exist between capital and labor; but that necessary friction may be indefinitely increased by conservatism. History teems with examples of civilizations which have been destroyed through an unreasoning inertia like that of Brutus, or the French privileged classes, or Patrick Henry." We must hold every judgment in suspense, subject to new evidence. "There is but one great boon which the passing generation can confer upon its successors: it can aid them to ameliorate that servitude to tradition which has so often retarded submission to the inevitable until too late."

The trouble with this injunction is that Brooks Adams neither obeyed nor believed it. No man was less likely to submit in silence to a future régime of centralization and stifling grossness; no man was less likely to abandon the moral rigidity of the Adams family for a suspension of

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certitude. The conclusions of Brooks Adams rub his every prejudice the wrong way. If he had really believed in resigned co-operation with the coming order, of course he would not have written his books. The Adams family--Henry most of all--had a way of expressing themselves in sardonic paradox or grim exaggeration which has led, frequently, to misinterpretation; yet one hardly can maintain that Brooks Adams' whole philosophy was an exercise in irony. It appears rather to be a half-perverse growl of protest: Adams had been taken captive by the determinists, and was endeavoring to wear his chains with dignity. In fact, the hideous uniformity which he foresaw, and compliance with which he counselled, made up the vision of terror that John Adams and all his seed had fought against for nearly a century and a half. Expansion, consolidation, and dispassionate reception of change, which he pretended to recommend, he really knew to be the poison of everything he honored, and this half-suppressed groan of torment persisted in escaping from him, giving the lie to his theories.

For the process of competition and consolidation had caused the war of 1914-1918, he wrote; and the degradation of leadership which that process entailed had made the establishment of a wise peace impossible. Even more horrifying was the unsexing of women by the industrial capitalistic movement. The sexual instinct had been suppressed in our thought, ignored in our education, and converted in woman to a shameful and shamefaced imitation of man. "The woman, as the cement of society, the head of the family, and the centre of cohesion, has, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. She has become a wandering isolated unit, rather a dispersive than a collective force." The family principle decays so that the whole structure of life is in peril. Our system of law, too, is corrupted by the poison. Taxation is making social diversity and inheritance of property negligible. The democratic proclivity for levelling downward, which we see in the trade union, conflicts with nature's system of competition, and a gigantic explosion must be the consequence. "Social war, or massacre, would seem to be the natural ending of the democratic philosophy." If this is the probable future after we submit to resistless change, it seems curious to recommend abandonment of tradition for the sake of tranquil adjustment. Brooks Adams never attained consistency in his argument with himself; his erudite and picturesque books are full of brilliant generalizations and curious deductions, but empty of orderly affirmation.

He was certain only of dissolution. "Hardly had Washington gone

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to his grave when the levelling work of the system of averages, on which democracy rests, began. . . . Democracy is an infinite mass of conflicting minds and of conflicting interests which, by the persistent action of such a solvent as the modern or competitive industrial system, becomes resolved into what it is, in substance, a vapor, which loses in collective intellectual energy in proportion to the perfection of its expansion." The new American empire, the coming American economic supremacy, must therefore be accompanied by a loss in intelligence and freedom which would efface the American system of Washington or Adams or Jefferson. We must face this expansive vista of material triumph and spiritual extirpation; indeed, we must embrace it: "Americans in former generations led a simple agricultural life. Possibly such a life was happier than ours. Very probably keen competition is not a blessing. We cannot alter our environment. Nature has cast the United States into the vortex of the fiercest struggle which the world has ever known. She has become the heart of the economic system of the age, and she must maintain her supremacy by wit and by force, or share the fate of the discarded."

There is a ring of Huxley and Spencer in this, the echo of "competitive evolution" and aggressive positivism; the chains of Brooks Adams' captivity to the scientific determinists clank. After all, might not "sharing the fate of the discarded" be preferable to sharing the fate of the victors, in a contest of this description, where the sacrifices seem to exceed the prizes? This is imperialism without the assurance of Roosevelt or Chamberlain, without the hope and consecration of Kipling. From the viewpoint of orthodox Christianity, it would be better far to join the discarded, rather than enter voluntarily upon the next phase of degradation; but Brooks Adams' religious convictions, like his brother's, were hardly more than vestiginal. Marxism's ravages upon traditional society have not been inflicted chiefly by revolutionary proselytizing: the corrosive influences of Marxist deterministic theories, instead, have sapped the resolution of men who despise the Marxist creed as a whole. The prophecies of Marxism are of the order which accomplish their own fulfillment, if they are given initial credence. Comte, Marx, and the exponents of scientific positivism destroyed in Henry and Brooks Adams the belief that had made the Adams family great: the idea of Providence and Purpose.

Such were the fortunes of American conservative belief in a swaggering half-century. Insatiable expansion was the passion of that age,

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and the forces of aggrandizement pressed their assault upon the broken walls of prescription and convention. The ruin of the South deprived the nation of that region's conservative influence. It opened the way for protective tariffs undreamed of before, for exploitation of the empty West, for the triumph of urban interests over the rural population, for a system of life in which culture was wholly subordinated to economic appetite. The immigration this age demanded to satisfy its booming industries changed the character of the American population, so that Lowell's "New Ireland" soon was engulfed by the deluge of Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and Central Europeans whose bewilderment secured the urban bosses in their mastery of public life. The cake of custom was more than broken: it was ground underfoot. The American educational system, relied upon to discipline this rough age and assimilate these alien masses, was itself confused and lowered in tone by the inundation of change. And, appetite whetting yet newer appetite, the nation blundered with McKinley into an unblushing rapacity, with Theodore Roosevelt into a rubicund belligerence. Genuine conservatives found no chance to catch their breath.

Even had conservatives been able to command any substantial body of public opinion, they scarcely would have known what way to lead the nation. Unsettled in their first principles by the claims of nineteenth-century science, doubting their old metaphysical values, they shrank before the Positivists, the Darwinians, and the astronomers. Lowell endeavored to ignore the new science; Brooks Adams was reduced to nihilism by his deductions from it. By the time the First World War ended, true conservatism was nearly extinct in the United States-existing only in little circles of stubborn men who refused to be caught up in the expansive lust of their epoch, or in the vague resistance to change still prevalent among the rural population, or, in a muddled and half-hearted fashion, within certain churches and colleges. Everywhere else, change was preferred to continuity.

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city-life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass-production techniques which made it possible, could alter national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivalled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of old ways than was the gasoline engine

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itself. Henry Ford, the Midas of velocity, swept out of memory the simplicities of his boyhood; and, growing old, he sought a refuge within the brick walls of his gigantic open-air museum of antiquities, a man of physical forms confounded by the influence of gadgets on ideas. The mass-production methods of which he was the most eminent exploiter were accomplishing more to alter human nature than even the steam-engine had done, dissolving pride of station and family. "It destroys the social prestige of traditional occupations and skills and with it the satisfaction of the individual in his traditional work," Mr. Peter Drucker says of the assembly-line and the new-style industrialism. "It uproots-quite literally-the individual from the social soil in which he has grown. It devaluates his traditional values, and paralyzes his traditional behavior."

Government was doing its best to equal the velocity of the industrial world. The federal income-tax amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1913, was accepted as a painful expedient in emergency, as it had been in England after Corn Law repeal; and, as in England, neither political party could manage to abolish income tax when the emergency was past. As an instrument for deliberate social alteration, the income tax soon would supplement that unconscious force, the second industrial revolution. Buffeted by these innovations and others nearly as formidable, their very principles confounded with apologies for "free enterprise" and the self-made man, it is no wonder that the conservatives were routed; it is a matter for surprise that they did not surrender incontinently. "The various horizons which you and I have passed through since the '40's are now as remote as though we had existed in the time of Marcus Aurelius," Henry Adams wrote, in the last month of his life, to his friend Gaskell; "and, in fact, I rather think that we should have been more at home among the Stoics, than we could ever hope to be in the legislative bodies of the future." It was 1918, and America was the greatest power of the world, and if the old values of life were to be conserved at all, probably America must take up the cause.

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America didn’t.

Russell Kirk on Henry Adams

From Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953).

Today finishes, I apprehend, the silver period of our society, and gives it the coup-de-grace. We must now brace ourselves to the struggle for gold. Unless you and I are wholly in error, this struggle has got to break much old crockery and bric-à-brac, and to make a clear field for some new variety of social, political, and economic man. I have of late tended to see in it the compulsion which is to suppress still more the individual and to make society still more centralized and automatic, but the fun is in the process, and not in the result. The process bids fair to be long enough to furnish us with more than a life-long amusement.
-- Henry Adams to Brooks Adams, October 23, 1897

To dislike Henry Adams is easy. Full of the censoriousness which was so prominent a characteristic in his great ancestors, mercilessly candid in his estimate of everyone, often mocking even toward what he loved best, perfectly certain that his great-grandfather and grand-

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father and father had been consistently right and their adversaries sunk in delusion or hypocrisy, but swearing by no other certitudes-this gloomy yet humorous man, whom Albert Jay Nock calls the most accomplished of all the Adams family, is the most irritating person in American letters-and the most provocative writer, and the best historian, and possibly the most penetrating critic of ideas. The best cure for vexation with Henry Adams is to read his detractors; for against his Olympian amusement at a dying world and his real inner modesty, their snarls and quibbles furnish a relief which displays Adams' learning and wit as no amount of adulation could.

A case might be made that Henry Adams represents the zenith of American civilization. Unmistakably and almost belligerently American, the end--product of four generations of exceptional rectitude and remarkable intelligence, very likely (despite his autobiography) the best-educated man American society has produced, Adams knew the history of medieval Europe as well as he knew the administration of Jefferson, understood Japan and the South Seas as he understood New England character, and perceived as no other American of his generation did the catastrophic influence which modern science would exert upon the twentieth--century mind and society. But the product of these grand gifts was a pessimism deep and unsparing as Schopenhauer's, intensified by Adams' long examination and complete rejection of popular American aspirations. Henry Adams' conservatism is the view of a man who sees before him a steep and terrible declivity, from which there can be no returning: one may have leisure to recollect past nobility, now and then one may perform the duty of delaying mankind for a moment in this descent; but the end is not to be averted.

In any account of American conservatism, the house of Adams and Harvard College must occupy a space conspicuously disproportionate, on the face of things. But one may say, without much exaggeration, that this family and that college were the conservative mind, at least in the North. Henry and Brooks Adams carry right into the triumphant imperial America of 1918 the courageous and prescient conservative tradition that John Adams founded in the days of the Boston Massacre. Harvard, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, manifests in Henry Adams, Charles Eliot Norton, Barrett Wendell, George Santayana, and Irving Babbitt the legacy of conservative republicanism which was one face of New England's genius. As professor of history at Harvard, for a few years, and editor

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of the North American Review, Adams exercised upon the American mind an influence still discernible, commencing in pupils and disciples like Henry Osborn Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge and Ralph Adams Cram, and extending now in some degree to every respectable university and college in America. But this sort of influence Adams cared little for; first he hoped to become a leader of political society through the law, and later through the press; defeated in both aspirations, he turned to Chartres and the thirteenth century for consolation. "There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions," he wrote in 1858, from Berlin, to Charles Francis Adams, Jr.; "one is a continual tendency toward politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us." Fifty-three years later, it was clear to Adams how both political attainment and gratification of family pride had been frustrated for the fourth generation of his house. "I have always considered that Grant wrecked my own life, and the last hope or chance of lifting society back to a reasonably high plane. Grant's administration is to me the dividing line between what we hoped, and what we have got." In the Gilded Age and its aftermath, an Adams could not lead with success or serve with honor.

What are the sources of the monstrous corruption of modern life, the sickness Adams detected in England and in the Continent and in the comparative innocence of American civilization? He spent half his life asking that question. When a very young man at the American legation in London, Adams read John Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville, and the other liberals, and presently Comte, and Marx; but though all these authors left some trace upon Adams, he dismissed the liberals with a wry smile, retained from Comte only the idea of phase, and observed of Marx, "I think I never struck a book which taught me so much, and with which I disagreed so radically in conclusion." His convictions were inherited ideas, substantially, the convictions of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. His History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, in style and method the finest historical work by an American, judges those fateful years with the impartial dislike his grandfather and great-grandfather felt for both Jeffersonians and Hamiltonian Federalists; his novel Democracy expresses the high contempt of the Adams breed for a nation led by Blaines and Conklings, living a complex lie. What is wrong with this society, whose gifts befoul, warping the character of Roosevelt

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and of Taft, cheapening even his intimate friend Hay? Adams rejected the popular answers to this question, as he rejected the popular specifics; and turning, like his ancestors, to science and history for enlightenment, he saw at work in modern times the culminating stages of a tremendous and impersonal process of degradation which had commenced centuries before, was signalized in his age by the triumph of gold over silver as a standard of value, and would rumble on resistlessly to further consolidation and centralization until socialism should be ascendant everywhere; then socialism, and civilization, would rot out.

"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces," he wrote in his Education. "The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces." For centuries, society has frenziedly sought centralization and cheapness and incalculable physical power; now all these things are near to attainment; and they mean the end of civilized life. Once man turned from the ideal of spiritual power, the Virgin, to the ideal of physical power, the Dynamo, his doom was sure. The faith and beauty of the thirteenth century, this descendant of the Puritans declared, made that age the noblest epoch of mankind; he could imagine only one state of society worse than the rule of the capitalists in the nineteenth century-the coming rule of the trade unions in the twentieth century.

Adams' devotion to the mind and heart of the thirteenth century has exposed him to a hail of criticism, some shrewd, some shallow. The naïve idea, promulgated by certain historians of the American mind, that Adams either ignored or was ignorant of the disorder and physical dread of that age, would have been beneath Adams' contempt: there has been no man since who could teach medieval history to Henry Adams. He knew perfectly the danger and discomfort of the Middle Ages; and he knew quite as well that happiness is more dependent upon tranquil mind and conscience than upon material circumstance. "He transformed the Middle Ages by a process of subtle falsification, into a symbol of his own latter-day New England longing," Mr. Yvor Winters writes; but if this charge is better founded than its predecessor, still it remains vague; and Paul Elmer More inflicts a more serious blow when he observes of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, "There is a fateful analogy between the irresponsibility of unreasoning Force and unreasoning Love; and the Gods of Nietzsche and of Tolstoy are but two faces of one God. To change the metaphor, if it may be done

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without disrespect, the image in the cathedral of Chartres looks perilously like the ancient idol of Dinos decked out in petticoats." Did Adams, after all, nowhere perceive anything but Whirl, even in thirteenth-century Chartres? "I am a dilution of a mixture of Lord Kelvin and St. Thomas Aquinas," he told Brooks. His grandfather's tormenting doubt of the existence of Providence and Purpose seems to have condemned succeeding generations of the Adams family to an hereditary reluctant skepticism, a Maule's Curse more malign than the spell upon the House of Seven Gables. (It is curious that General Hamilton was the initial instrument of their discomfiture, General Jackson the agent of their disillusion, and General Grant the gross confirmer of their skepticism.) Yet if faith had been no more than a charming illusion even in the age of Aquinas, still it had been a beneficent delusion, Henry Adams implied. To it had succeeded a more delusory worship of Force, by 1900 incarnate in the dynamos at the Paris Exposition. "My belief is that science is to wreck us, and we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell," he wrote to Brooks in 1902.

Decay of religious conviction and the Christendom it sustained had led down to "a society of Jews and brokers"; the Trust was an instrument for converting the remnants of the old free community for which the Adamses had struggled into the complete consolidation of a monolithic state, and the despot, the anarchist, and the gold-standard lobbyist all were partners of the Trust. The next stage of society would be "economic Russianization"; thought already was regarded with distrust, and with the final triumph of centralization, individuality would be suppressed utterly. State socialism was nearly inevitable and wholly odious; it would triumph over capitalism because it is cheaper, and modern life always rewards cheapness. Confiscation by the state, of which the beginning could be discerned in death duties, was only a few generations off. Labor, rapidly gaining mastery over the capitalists, would blackmail society until the old order was quite effaced. "I maintain that . . . we are already in principles at the bottom,--that is, at the great ocean equi-potential,--and can get no further. I prove it by the fact that I live here in Paris, or there in Washington, at the mercy of any damned Socialist or Congressman or Tax-assessor, and that I can't enter the Port of New York without being made to roll on the dock, to be kicked and cuffed and spit upon by a dirty employee of a dirtier Jew cad who calls himself collector, and before whom the whole mass of American citizens voluntarily kneel." The ruling impulse of mod-

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ern humanity, indeed the very laws of natural phenomena, made this end certain. As the "conservative Christian anarchist" he whimsically called himself, Adams contended against this tide, most hotly in 1893, upon the silver question. "He thought it probably his last chance of standing up for his eighteenth-century principles, strict construction, limited powers, George Washington, John Adams, and the rest."

Gold crushed silver, as the Trust and the Socialist (really the same people under different names) were crushing out individual personality. "The attraction of mechanical power had already wrenched the American mind into a crab-like process. . . . The mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science, seemed to require that the law of mass should rule." The capitalists, expiring in their hour of triumph, must yield in their turn to greater force. "It is the socialist-not the capitalist-who is going to swallow us next, and of the two I prefer the Jew." Society, in short, obeys Gresham's Law (as Albert Jay Nock later put it): the cheap drives out the dear; and in the long run, civilization itself will be too dear for survival.

The process of degradation was now too far advanced for any exertion of will to hamper its course. Some 2,500 years of this evolution had brought us near the finish of things, he wrote to Brooks Adams in 1899: "I give it two more generations before it goes to pieces, or begins to go to pieces. That is to say, two generations should saturate the world with population, and should exhaust all the mines. When that moment comes, economical decay, or the decay of an economical civilisation, should set in." The resources of nature, like those of spirit, are running out, and all that a conscientious man can aspire to be is a literal conservative, hoarding what remains of culture and of natural wealth against the fierce appetites of modern life. The whole idea of progress, whether that theory entertained by John Adams' old enemy Condorcet or the biological version of the Darwinians, had been nonsense. "That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called-and should actually and truly be--the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone enough to upset Darwin."

And man's very acquisition of scientific knowledge was become the instrument of his moral and physical destruction. The discovery of

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the nature of radium, in 1900, meant the beginning of a revolution which must end in disintegration. "Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Force grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile. . . . If Karl Pearson's notions of the universe were sound, men like Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton should have stopped the progress of science before 1700, supposing them to have been honest in the religious convictions they expressed. In 1900 they were plainly forced back on faith in a unity unproved and an order they had themselves disproved. They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to themselves. They had reduced themselves to motion in a universe of motions, with an acceleration, in their own case, of vertiginous violence." The Virgin had ceased to inspire faith; the Dynamo, or science, had lost all significance; Whirl remained.

In three essays, reprinted in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, Adams condensed these reflections with melancholy lucidity into "a historical study of the scientific grounds of Socialism, Collectivism, and Humanitarianism and Democracy and all the rest": "The Tendency of History" (1894), "The Rule of Phase Applied to History" (1900), and "A Letter to American Teachers of History" (1910). Shorn of Adams' supporting evidence, the general argument he advances may be put briefly enough. It is just this: as the exhaustion of energy is an inevitable condition of all nature, so social energies must be exhausted, and are now running out; and many of the types of "progress" upon which we congratulate ourselves are no more than symptoms and afflictions of this decay. The Laws of Thermodynamics are our doom. By the Law of Dissipation, nothing can be added to the sum of energy, but intensity must always be lost. Work can be done only by degrading energy, as water can work only by running down hill. Society does its work at the same price; and as scientists realize this sombre fact, they are becoming oppressed by a stifling pessimism. All vital processes suffer degradation, inevitably incident to their operation; the growth of the brain enfeebles the human body, for instance. A supernatural will or directive power seems to account for the existence of energy, but this power does not provide for the replenishing of energy. Even the rise of human consciousness was a phase in the decline of vital force. Human activity reached its point of greatest intensity in the Middle Ages, with the Crusades and the cathedrals;

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since then, true vitality has been waning rapidly. The year 1830, which marked the beginning of a gigantic harnessing of natural physical energies in the service of man, at the same time enfeebled humanity, for power gains at the expense of vitality. Industrialized, we are that much nearer to social ruin and total extirpation. "The dead alone give us energy," says Le Bon, and we moderns, having severed our ties with the past, are not long for this world.

Future historians must be guided by a knowledge of physics; and if the dilemma of degradation of energy is to be explained away, another Newton will be required. As perhaps the ape, a hundred thousand years ago, groped dimly for further development of his kind, and failed, so mankind now is trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly. Human evolution has passed perihelion, after the fashion of the Comet of 1843, and now, with terrible speed, we are rushing away from the day of our nobility. Adams applies the law of squares to the problem of modern decay, and suggests that the Mechanical Phase of modern history, beginning in 1600, reached its highest authority about 1870, and then turned sharply into the Electric Phase, which may be considered under way by 1900; and the Electric Phase will endure only until 1917, when it will pass into the Ethereal Phase--and more prophecies beyond this. Adams' celebrated predictions of the outbreak and duration of the First World War, of a possible subjugation by Thought of "the molecule, the atom, and the electron to that costless servitude to which it has reduced the old elements of earth and air, fire and water . . ." are by-products of this rule of phase. But prolongation of such resources cannot prevent the final total degradation of energy.

In this catastrophe, the social degradation represented by triumphant consolidation and its heir socialism are developments quite as natural and fatal as the general extinction of energy. Socialism must be succeeded by social rot, a disguised blessing, since socialism's continuance would be unendurable; indeed, it is in itself corruption. Politics, too, will end as water does, at sea-level, or like heat, at 1° Centigrade. Like the Comet, humanity hurtles into the oblivion of eternal night and endless space.

Christian orthodoxy believes in an eternity which, as it is superhuman, is supra-terrestrial; and the real world being a world of spirit, man's fate is not dependent upon the vicissitudes of this planet, but may be translated by Divine purpose into a realm apart from our pres-

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ent world of space and time. In this certitude, Christians escape from the problem of degradation of energy; but Adams, however much he might revere the Virgin of Chartres as incarnation of the idea and as a symbol of eternal beauty, could not put credence in the idea of Providence. He was determined that history must be "scientific"; although so independent of mind, he complied willingly with the well-known tendency of metaphysics and theology to follow the lead of scientific theory; he found it impossible to disbelieve Thomson and Pearson and Kelvin. If science "should prove that society must at a given time revert to the church and recover its old foundation of religion, it commits suicide." The phase of religion was far nobler, to Adams' mind, than the phase of electricity; but he felt himself borne irresistibly along by the wave of progress. One might reverence the Virgin, in the Electric Phase; but one could not really worship. The blunt noncomformist piety of John Adams gave way to the doubts of John Quincy Adams, the humanitarianism of Charles Francis Adams, the despair of Henry Adams. Belief in Providence, so enduringly rooted in Burke's conservatism, was lost in the vicissitudes of New England's conservative thought.

Just one moral support in trial was nearly sufficient, Adams once wrote to Henry Osborn Taylor, and that the Stoic--but only "in theory." Marcus Aurelius was Adams' type of highest human attainment, and with the Antonine ended the story of moral adjustment. Irving Babbitt refers to "the desolate and pathetic Marcus Aurelius," and indeed the spectacle of the Emperor's devouring loneliness takes on renewed and frightening significance when contemplated with his disciple Henry Adams in the foreground. "The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos," said Adams. "In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. . . . The Church alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity could not be proved as a contradiction." Karl Pearson seemed to agree with the Church; and so, in passionate desire, did Adams himself; but his overmastering Adams rationality could not submit to his heart. Paul Elmer More, a conservative of the next generation, writes thus of Henry Adams' frustrated conservative loyalties:

This breed of New England, of whom he was so consciously a titled representative, had once come out from the world for the sake of a religious and

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political affirmation-the two were originally one-to confirm which they were ready to deny all the other values of life. For the liberty to follow this affirmation they would discard tradition and authority and form and symbol and all that ordinarily binds men together in the bonds of habit. But the liberty of denying may itself become a habit. The intellectual history of New England is in fact the record of the encroachment of this liberty upon the very affirmation for which it was at first the bulwark. By a gradual elimination of its positive content the faith of the people had passed from Calvinism to Unitarianism, and from this to free thinking, until in the days of our Adams there was little left to the intellect but a great denial.

Here an heir of Hooker and Laud sits in judgment on an inheritor of Mather and Cotton. Deprived of the sanctions of religion, does conservative instinct verge toward extinction? The ideas of the house of Adams, carried by Henry Adams to their twentieth-century philosophical culmination, obtained their political summary in the writings of Brooks Adams--like his brother, fascinated by that determinism the consequences of which he hated.

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‘The Same old Hun?’: Anti-German Propaganda II

A third post of extracts from Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1979), continuing the story of British WWII anti-German propaganda from a prior post.

See also ‘Morale and Morale Busting’ about WWII preparations for the coming multicult.

Keywords/themes: Holocausts posited for propaganda gain, fair-play, a Christian crusade against paganism, congenitally barbaric Germans, ‘primitive’ Japanese slated for total social and cultural destruction, ‘astonishment and awe,’ remarkable plasticity of public feeling toward the enemy dictated by day-to-day events, lies about civilian bombing, WWI style atrocity propaganda, don’t mention the Jews -- British public feeling is that ‘one thing Hitler had done is to put those damned Jews in their place’ etc...

There was in the Ministry’s anti-German propaganda a certain element of defensiveness, perhaps aggravated by the veto on statements about domestic reform, but stemming chiefly from the belief that the frenetic ‘dynamism’ of Nazi ideology was not unattractive to the British people. Two and a half years after the outbreak of war Home Intelligence observed:

The public has no clearly worked out conception of the purpose of the war. The Russians have a clear-cut purpose: they have a way of living that they think worth fighting for and which enables them to fight well. The Germans are believed to have

[p.149]

a purpose. We have only vague conceptions, fluctuating between ideas of holding what we have got and ideas of right and wrong.

The tone of the report echoed the stale, even bored, mood of the public in the first half of 1942, a period which witnessed considerable parliamentary and public dissatisfaction with the government’s conduct of the war. Britain seemed to be having a minimal impact on the course of events and, having in 1940 achieved the supreme feat of thwarting Hitler’s invasion plan, the public could now only set before themselves the distant prospect of victory. The Ministry appears to have believed that the British people, observing from the sidelines the fierce struggle of two nations fighting for opposed but compelling ideologies, yearned for a set of ideas that might invest their sacrifices with a greater significance than the preservation of national sovereignty.

An ideology of sorts was proclaimed by the Ministry of Information. Although used principally to discredit specific aspects of Nazism, it was supposed to represent something worth fighting for. Diffuse, vague and lacking the immediacy of Nazism and communism, it nonetheless reflected the sincere ideas of men forced by circumstances to articulate their convictions. These may be conveniently examined in terms of what the propagandists had to say about the past, the role of Christianity and the future.

The Ministry contrived to stretch a Whiggish interpretation of history back to the pre-Christian era. As part of that civilisation whose ‘ideal of a good life men have created through 2,000 years’, Britain had contributed the latest ideal:

... human history has been marked by certain definite phases of advancement, each one of which produced its own special contribution to the improvement of Man (e.g. Greece: the freedom of human intelligence. Rome: the sanctity of contracts. Middle Ages: chivalry. France: intellectual sincerity. Britain: fair play).

While the concept of ‘fair play’ may be deeply embedded in the British consciousness and was possibly a factor in the people’s dislike of German behaviour, it was hardly a stirring call to action. Nicolson preferred to speak of Britain’s past record in achieving social justice while at the same time preserving the rights of man. The conjunction of the ideas of Britain as a pioneer of freedom and justice, against both domestic and foreign tyrants, and of balanced, gradual social improvement was central to the propaganda, for the Ministry

[p.150]

could simultaneously combat the supposed attractiveness of Nazi social promises and represent the country as the defender of Western civilisation. RIOs were therefore asked to preach the following social philosophy:

Evolutionary revolution as distinct from revolutionary revolution is the characteristic British method of ensuring political, social and economic progress. The difference between our method and that of the Germans should be emphasised. One results in forward progression: the other in a reversion to systems long abandoned by the democracies.

[…] Germany’s claim to be the sole bulwark of Christian Europe against Bolshevism was reason enough for the Ministry to insist that a true reading of the situation pitted Christian Britain against pagan Germany. But the constant theme of Britain as a Christian nation, and a nation of Christians, also derived from the received opinion which stated that belief in Christianity informed the country’s secular virtues. There seem to have been few qualms about pressing religion into the service of propaganda. Pausing only to observe that the churches should ‘not be suspected of being used as channels of propaganda’, the senior officials set up the Religions Division, whose purpose at home was to impart ‘a real conviction of the Christian contribution to our civilisation and of the essential anti-Christian character of Nazism’.

‘God is on our side’ has ever been the cry of nations at war and the Religions Division, although aware of the dangers in resurrecting it, comforted themselves with the knowledge ‘that the Nazi regime has openly derided Christianity and announced that it is setting up a new religion. The Christian issue has therefore become much

[p.151]

more important than in previous wars, when both sides invoked the same creed’. Organised in Protestant, Roman Catholic and, later, Orthodox and Jewish sections, the division worked chiefly through contacts in the churches. It encouraged public meetings, distributed printed material such as a weekly series called The Spiritual Issues of the War, stimulated the religious press and put out direct propaganda to the wider public on religious matters. John Betjeman, who was then the press attache in Dublin, was not a member of the Ministry but corresponded with the Religions Division on the extremely delicate matter of British propaganda in Eire - addressing officers of the Division as ‘Brother’ and occasionally concluding his letters with ‘Yours in Calvin’s name’. The Sword of the Spirit, founded by Cardinal Hinsley as a body to proclaim the Church’s hostility to Nazism, received a great deal of assistance from the Ministry of Information, a fact which the Religions Division was anxious to conceal.

The word ‘crusade’ sprang easily to the lips of the propagandists, since it was very tempting to cast Britain in the role of a Christian warrior opposing the forces of darkness. In September 1939 Lord Macmillan addressed a meeting of church leaders at Lambeth Palace and asked them to issue a joint manifesto declaring their attitude to the war, taking care to emphasise that the Ministry wished to appear in no way connected with the statement. A joint declaration was issued but it was not published until 21 December 1940 and, although exploited for propaganda purposes, could hardly have pleased the Ministry. Signed by the Archbishops of Canterbury, York and Westminster and the Moderator of the Free Churches, the statement made no mention of the enemy and, instead, dwelt on the religious and ethical foundations of a future peace, going so far as to recommend the abolition of material inequality and a fair distribution of the earth's resources. Clearly the leaders of the churches were not going to be drawn into a ‘crusade’ inspired by a government department.

But Duff Cooper had no reservations about characterising the conflict as a ‘religious war’. Nor did the members of the Religions Division, although in a slightly more qualified fashion:

... to speak of a Christian crusade is dangerously misleading. But our civilisation is based ultimately on Christian principles ... You cannot spread Christianity by the sword, but you can defend a society in which Christian principles are allowed scope and in which there is freedom of thought and worship.

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Thus the Ministry turned its affirmation of Britain’s Christianity into an attack on Nazi Germany. And almost anything could be and was interpreted as an affront to the spirit of Christianity. The persecution of German clerics such as Pastor Niemoller and Bishop Galen and of churches throughout occupied Europe, the practice of euthanasia - these more obvious crimes were supplemented with accusations of paganism, sexual immorality, Fuhrer-worship and the perversion of children’s education. British Catholics were sternly warned:

No true Catholic can watch with a clear conscience the holocaust of his co-religionists in Nazi-occupied Europe. There can be no compromise or indifference in the realms of the spirit. Those who are not actively against Nazism must ask themselves whether by their passivity they are not actually for Nazism.

The imperative tone of such pronouncements was as strong as that found in the department’s general statements about Germany. But, staffed by clerics and working largely through the churches, the Religions Division adroitly sidestepped the potential embarrassment to the Ministry of a situation in which religion was seen to be a creature of propaganda.

Full use was made of symbols designed to fashion an image of the Briton as a tolerant, peaceable, home-loving family man - as opposed to the Germans who, because they found ‘it difficult to credit the individual as such with dignity and worth ... tried to acquire them by huddling into rigid hierarchies and disciplined formations, by reverencing rank and drill’. Furthermore, they ‘are dead - dead to joy, dead to decency, dead to thought, dead to reason, virtue and to freedom, dead to themselves, to that humanity which makes men men’.

[p.153]

Vansittart’s broadcasts late in 1940 and the publication of his Black Record, in which he tried to show that the Germans since earliest times had been violent and aggressive, enjoyed considerable public attention and provoked much controversy. Not that his views were novel. At a meeting of the British Psychological Society in March 1940, Dr H. G. Barnes referred to Jung’s description of the periodic madness of the German people as ‘furor teutonicus’:

It must be assumed to be a latent potentiality of the German unconscious which has remained concealed like an underground mine since barbarian times. When the civilised Christian superstructure was undermined by defeat in war, physical deprivation, and a deep and galling sense of inferiority, ‘Wotan’ swept the nation away like a whirlwind. The individual man is hunted back into a herd collectivity by a daemonic spirit which Hitler himself identifies with Antichrist, and which has devoured Hitler’s own individuality.

At a later meeting of the same society, Professor T. H. Pear put an opposing view. He condemned Black Record for its distortion of ‘history, ethnology, sociology and social psychology in a manner which Dr Goebbels has made familiar’, and added: ‘No responsible social psychologist ... would claim that the Germans have a special innate tendency to cruelty, possessed by members of no other nation.’ Although Vansittart’s beliefs accorded with the Ministry’s indiscriminate anti-German propaganda, there took place a debate as to whether quite the correct emphasis was being given to it. At a

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Planning Committee meeting in January 1941 the question was posed whether the line ‘Germans will always be Germans’ should be continued and Sir Kenneth Clark was asked to prepare a memorandum on the subject. His paper, entitled ‘It’s the Same Old Hun’, asked:

... firstly, if the Germans are really incorrigible, what can be the outcome of the war? Are we hoping to exterminate 80 million people or to keep them in continual subjection? The question is often in the mind of the average thoughtful man, and creates a feeling of hopelessness. Secondly, the comparison of this war to the last must have a depressing and disillusioning effect on anyone old enough to remember the post-war period. It would seem in our interest to stress the very great difference between the Germany of 1914-18 and to-day, by pointing out how in the last war all the best elements of German culture and science were still in Germany and were supporting the German cause, whereas now they are outside Germany and supporting US.

His argument is difficult to follow. To say that Germany was much worse than it had been in the Great War, and to demonstrate the thesis by reference to the fine men who had fled the country, was unlikely to reassure those people who despaired of ever seeing a peaceable Germany. However, in explaining his paper, Clark said, ‘The emphasis should ... be on the deterioration of the German character since 1918’ adding, ‘The problem of what to do after the war with the Germans if they were really unteachable should be passed over in silence.’

Evidently the ‘average thoughtful man’ would continue to be troubled. But there appear to have been few of his kind. According to Home Intelligence, large numbers of people felt ‘that no peace can be considered which does not ensure that Germany will never again be able to declare war on England ... Many ... want to exterminate, or at least ostracise, the whole German race’. Reports of this kind reached a peak during the period of intensive bombing. With its passing there were remarkably few expressions of bitterness and ruthlessness towards the German people - grim satisfaction and even exultation at the bombing of enemy cities, but little reported desire for a Carthaginian peace. Some people, indeed, were said to be concerned lest the ‘effect of Vansittartism might ... eventually hamper an equitable and reasonable settlement when the war is over’. But the Ministry continued to lay stress on the moral delinquency of the Germans:

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Had it been any other nation that unleashed the present horrors upon the earth, one might well despair of twentieth-century civilisation, and feel that mankind is doomed to perish in a holocaust of ritual hatreds, brutalities and attempts at self-extermination. But the fact that for a second time in one generation it is Germany, and Germany alone, who has done these things - that, surely indicates beyond doubt where the evil lies ... In 1914 the cry was this: ‘Remember Belgium!’ Now, all who revere justice and honour have still blacker crimes to remember.

[…] The Roosevelt-Churchill declaration of August 1941 - the Atlantic Charter - and the magnanimous implications for Germany of Article 6 raised afresh the problem of the depiction of the German character. Evidently feeling some measure of responsibility for the material they produced, the members of the Publications Division asked on 28 August whether in view of the Atlantic Charter it was right to continue propaganda along Vansittart lines. On the following day the Deputy Director General issued a prompt and definitive statement:

We cannot combine a promise of peace and prosperity to all States, including the vanquished, with a quenchless feud against Germany. Nor can we regard ‘Hitlerite Germany’ as equivalent to Germany under all conditions. Nor can we equate the ‘destruction of Nazi tyranny’ with the destruction of Germany.

It follows that it is not our public aim to ostracise Germany in perpetuity. If it is not, it cannot be good propaganda to enlarge upon the theme that the Germans are a race which has no future in civilisation. What good can that do? It does not help to divide or weaken Germany: on the contrary. It does not encourage support in the USA whose people discern nothing but an age-

[p.157]

long feud which they can neither mend nor end. Its only legitimate use would be to dissipate sentimental Germanizing in this country. I do not think the public stands in any need of such a correction to-day.

This can be taken as Ministry policy.

This was the very matter touched upon by Sir Kenneth Clark early in the year. But in the intervening period the rhetoric of hate had become, if anything, even more shrill. Legitimate targets for criticism - Nazi education, the evils of occupation, racial persecution, the idiocy of Nazi ideology - did come under attack but were so uniformly drenched in emotional language as to leave the impression that everything German was and always would be abhorrent. That the future dangers of such a policy were appreciated in the Ministry is clear from the Deputy Director General’s statement. Why, then, was the policy not changed? In the absence of minutes and memoranda relating to the debate (if, indeed, it reached the proportions of a debate) the explanation can only be guessed at. Possibly the sheer momentum of the propaganda brushed aside any alternative. There is no evidence to show that such themes as were employed from the Anger Campaign had had any effect. Neither had there been objections to them. The end of the war seemed a long way off late in 1941. And it was no doubt easier for the Ministry to condemn the Germans wholesale than to embark at such a time upon what to many might have appeared as an over-refined nicety of distinction between the people and their Nazi leaders.

In this context it is instructive to examine what was said about the Japanese. For reasons which were closely related to the public’s attitude to the war in the Far East, the production of anti-Japanese propaganda was a peripheral activity. The Pacific war was remote to a people preoccupied with the European conflict and after the fall of Singapore it was regarded as very much an American sphere of responsibility.

The Japanese, described in terms appropriate to a newly discovered zoological species, were objects of amused contempt:

Smoking chimneys, policemen and traffic lights, taxis hurrying little men in black coats and bowler hats to offices that might well be in New York, bear witness to Japan’s modern technique and disguise her primitive heart.

Although undoubtedly brutal, their courageous devotion to bankrupt and hollow ideas made ‘these mediocre people assume the stature of

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tragedy’. Their defeat would present the allies with a political and social tabula rasa: once the Japanese could be taught to exercise ‘self control’, their institutions would undergo a drastic remoulding along democratic lines and the old, inferior customs and habits of thought would be destroyed. Japan, in other words, knew no better. Whereas Germany did:

Japan was ahead of Germany in the follow-my-fuhrer danse macabre, but was also tremendously influenced by Germany. Amazing though the parallel between them is - in pseudoreligions, tribalism, aggression, brutality, false-swearing, density about other mentalities, contempt of women, contempt of freedom, contempt of the human spirit and negation of God - it is not complete. Germany is a heretic, relapsed from universal standards that Japan has never known.

German barbarity for its very wilfulness was therefore all the more reprehensible and, by implication, could not be easily - if ever extirpated. To say that the Germans had once conformed to a universal standard of civilised behaviour cannot, of course, be reconciled with the Vansittart line that they had never been truly part of European Christendom, but logic is ever the least regarded component of propaganda.

Because of the government’s insistence that British policy was directed solely at knocking out enemy war production and internal communications, the Ministry was rather more circumspect in its propaganda about bombing than in other issues involving Germany. A delicate path had to be picked out between the propagandists’ desire to show that German civilians were suffering heavily and the obligation to proclaim the essentially strategic nature of Bomber Command’s operations. But after February 1942, when the decision was taken to direct the main weight of the RAF’s attack against German civilians, the Ministry did more than exercise discretion. It lied. Noble Frankland has written of the Air Ministry’s publicity: ‘The damage to the residential and central areas, which were in reality the main aim of the area attacks, was ascribed to what could unfortunately not be avoided if the factories and so on were to be hit.’ The Ministry of Information was party to the deception.
Although not wishing in 1940-41 to adopt a ‘vindictive note’, it was nonetheless thought wise to hint at the fact that Germany was sustaining civilian casualties:

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Since May 10th [1940], the RAF have carried out widespread raids on Germany ... For a number of reasons it does not pay us to adopt indiscriminate bombing for its own sake or as a measure of retaliation. The crippling of the enemy’s industry and war machine is likely to lead to far more conclusive results in a shorter space of time. Some of the targets which we have attacked are, in fact, situated in thickly populated towns and districts ... and, consequently, the enemy civilian population has by no means gone unscathed.

In April 1941 RIOs were instructed to ‘stress the point that we cannot afford to divert our striking power from the main military and other kindred objectives to actions of a secondary nature’. Indignant at the implication that Britain desisted from bombing German civilians for strategic reasons only, the London RIO asked, ‘Must Government always shirk the moral issue? Have we not the courage to say that to take reprisals is wrong in itself, unethical, unchristian and unworthy of the British people ?’ There was a distinctly uncomfortable reaction to this protest but, at the same time, a strong reluctance to antagonise the public by saying that enemy civilians were being spared on moral grounds. ‘Sir Wyndham may be right’, observed one official. ‘Fortunately it is not for us to say. Perhaps we are not all Christians?’ The matter was hastily referred to higher authority for decision, although sufficient qualms existed for the BBC ‘to be asked to avoid describing bombs as “beautiful”. There is no indication in the records to show whether the matter was considered by the War Cabinet but as the policy underwent no change it may be assumed that the Ministry’s avoidance of moral entanglements earned the government’s approval.

News of heavy attacks was greeted by the public with enthusiasm, despite the knowledge of severe losses sustained by Bomber Command, and by 1942 the earlier veiled hints of civilian casualties had become heavy nudges. Of the extremely heavy raids on Cologne of 30 May 1942, the Ministry commented in a pamphlet: ‘Ninety minutes bombing created devastation over an area eight times the size of the City of London ... Steadily the storm will increase in violence.’ No one could mistake the fact that an attack on this scale had no purpose other than to destroy large areas of civilian housing. That there were, in fact, no illusions is clear from the Home Intelligence report following news of the Cologne raid:

... nothing has given such a lift to public confidence for many months as the raid on Cologne. The public’s astonishment and awe appear to have been almost as marked as their elation and satisfaction ...

Some regret has been expressed, ‘particularly by older people, that women and children should have to suffer from our bombing: but no one has been heard to suggest that we should limit our attacks on this account’, and ‘even the most soft hearted’ feel that it is ‘the only way, however distasteful, to drive home to the German people what their airmen have been doing in other countries’.

A debate which took place late in 1943 between Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief, Bomber Command, and the Air Ministry had profound implications for propaganda policy. In a letter of 25 October, Harris objected strongly to publicity which encouraged the view that Bomber Command’s operations were ‘in the nature of an experiment or side-show’ and which misrepresented the situation by stating that the intention was not ‘the obliteration of German cities and their inhabitants as such’. Harris demanded that the ‘aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilised community life throughout Germany’.

Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, circled warily around the problem by declaring that no attempt had been made to conceal the immense devastation caused by area bombing but that the emphasis had been laid ‘on the fact that our prime objective is German war industry and transport’. These were not the primary objectives, as Sinclair knew, but he drew back from admitting the truth, not wishing to ‘provoke the leaders of religious and humanitarian opinion to protest’. The Air Ministry looked hard at Bomber Command’s general directive: ‘The progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened’. In reply to Harris the Air Ministry told him that the directive ‘neither requires nor enjoins direct attack on German civilians as such’, although it was recognised that attacks on military and industrial targets entailed the virtual destruction of German cities and heavy civilian casualties.

At first sight, this seems to have been an extraordinary situation. For eight months Bomber Command had been carrying out a policy

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which was the result of a gross misinterpretation of the original directive. Harris, although placing rather more emphasis than his superiors on ‘undermining the morale of the German people’, could hardly be blamed for finding the Air Ministry’s reply ‘ambiguous’. Observing in a rather chilling way that it was not his policy to attack children, invalids and old people since they were a handicap to the German war effort, he stated:

This, however, does not imply, as the Air Ministry seems to assume that it does, that no German civilians are proper objects for bombing. The German economic system, which I am instructed by my directive to destroy, includes workers, houses and public utilities, and it is therefore meaningless to claim that the wiping out of German cities is ‘not an end in itself but the inevitable accompaniment of all-out attack on the enemy’s means and capacity to wage war’.

In an almost Byzantine fashion, the Air Ministry conceded that Bomber Command had in fact been pursuing the right operational policy:

Thus, while in the case of cities making a substantial contribution to the German war effort, the practical effects of your Command’s policy cannot be distinguished from those which would accrue from a policy of attacking cities as such, the Council cannot agree that it is impossible to draw a clear distinction between these two policies. This distinction is in fact one of great importance in the presentation to the public of the aim and achievements of the bomber offensive.

What appears to have been a serious policy disagreement, with fatal consequences for thousands of Germans, was, after all, a mere difference of view on what should be said publicly about the RAF’s air raids. And Harris left the Air Ministry in no doubt that he felt free to bomb ‘any civilian who produces more than enough to maintain himself’.

The Ministry of Information was thus spared an extremely inconvenient change of direction. Having condemned the Germans’ use of terror bombing for three years, the propagandists could not easily have manufactured reasons for Britain’s use of the same tactic persuasive enough to overcome the inevitable moral objections from important sections of the community. For everyone concerned it was much more convenient to continue the lie.

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In any event, it was unnecessary to tell the truth. The reports of Home Intelligence strongly indicated widespread public knowledge of the nature of British bombing policy. In the first place, little interest was shown in attacks on specific industrial targets, unless they were of a spectacular nature such as the destruction of the German dams in May 1943. In the period July-August 1942, for example, the public were said to be disappointed at the apparent failure of the RAF to carry out the destruction of German cities one by one:

... ‘in the light of the statements made on our policy to bomb Germany with ever increasing ferocity’ these raids are neither regular enough nor sufficiently drastic. It is asked why the 1,000 bomber raids are not materialising ...

There is a renewal of hope that with the longer nights, ‘the RAF will blow a bloody big hole where Berlin is’.

Repeated calls for thousand-bomber raids were, in fact, calls for the destruction of whole cities since few people could have been in any doubt that attacks on such a scale were aimed principally at housing and civilians. The press maintained the official fiction that Bomber Command had no such intention, although what were people to make of statements such as that which appeared in the Daily Telegraph in October 1943: ‘Hamburg has had the equivalent of at least 60 ‘Coventrys’, Cologne 17, Dusseldorf 12, and Essen 10’. The evocation of Coventry, of course, could only bring to the minds of most people a devastating attack on the thickly populated centre of a town.

Secondly, the public were reported to link their exultation at news of heavy raids with the supposed effects upon German morale, not upon industry and the general war effort as such. Similarly, demands for the bombing of Italy, and Rome in particular, seem not to have arisen because of concern about enemy war production but because the Italians were believed not to have suffered enough:

The news of the bombing of Italy is said to have been received with enthusiasm - ‘the really bright spot of the week’. It has given particular pleasure as ‘there has been a feeling for some time that the Italians are getting off too lightly - possibly for political or religious reasons’.

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Occasional expressions of sympathy for the German population and doubts about the impact of bombing upon enemy morale appear to have been founded on the knowledge that civilians were the principal targets of British air attacks. One report mentioned ‘some feeling against the bombing of Berlin, on the grounds that there are targets of military importance which do not involve so much bombing of civilians’; another spoke of ‘ “A tinge of pity” for the women and children and horror at their suffering, but acceptance that “civilians must suffer” ’, and a persistent minority continued to wonder how decisive an effect the raids were having on German morale ‘in view of the effects of the German air offensive on this country’. Significantly, another minority were said to favour the restriction of bombing to military targets, because “they don't believe the mass raids destroy morale” ’.

The evidence from Home Intelligence is fragmentary but there seems to have been little that was not known in broad outline of the nature and intention of Bomber Command’s raids. It is equally clear that the public enthusiastically endorsed them. This throws a different light on the policy of deception practised by the Ministry of Information. It should, perhaps, first be asked just how much was known in the department. Bracken, as one of Churchill’s circle of close acquaintances which included Lord Cherwell, the chief architect of terror bombing, must have been aware of the policy and its development after February 1942. And in view of the arrangement made in July 1941 between Radcliffe and the Air Ministry, under which the Ministry received a secret daily summary of air operations and intelligence, the senior officials were in possession of detailed information regarding area bombing and its effects. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the Ministry attempted to mislead the public. Statements of the following kind continued to be made until the end of the war:

British bombing of German war production centres has, during the past two years, become steadily heavier and more concentrated. Inevitably, damage to civilian life and property has increased in proportion. But incidental damage of this type, heavy though it may in fact be, is a very different thing from the deliberate terror-bombing of civilians ...

During the autumn and winter of 1943-44, Berlin received a series of paralysing raids - raids designed not to terrify the civilian population, but simply and systematically to eliminate Berlin as the focal point of the German war effort.

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Many thousands of Germans will owe their lives after the war to the fact that, given ample opportunity and provocation, BRITAIN CONTINUED TO SET HER FACE AGAINST TERROR BOMBING.

The high moral tone, shunned earlier in the war in favour of the argument from expediency, apparently satisfied the Ministry and the public, between whom there was a tacit conspiracy to pretend that Britain declined to use the methods of total war.

As the Anger Campaign paper proposed, the Ministry of Information did exploit stories of atrocities committed by the Germans. But for most of the war they were incorporated in the general propaganda about unscrupulous enemy methods rather than selected for special treatment: thus Germans were said to ‘blast and bomb their way across the homes and bodies of human beings, machine-gunning even the sick in hospital and children in the playground’. Much of this material had a perfunctory feeling, as if the Ministry were going through the motions and taking over where their predecessors had left off in 1918. ‘But the Nazis now prove’, read a pamphlet of 1941, ‘by their deeds that no infamy is too foul for them to commit - that bullying, massacre· and slavery are things in which they frankly rejoice.’ Was there no one in the Ministry who feared that this sort of material would eventually devalue the language of outrage? Apparently not, for the propagandists did not cease stressing the theme that there was nothing of which the Germans were not capable. Of a disturbingly large number of Germans this was true. But the language of hate was too exhausted to describe the enormity of what had been done in occupied Europe when it became known.

In July 1941 the Planning Committee considered whether atrocity stories should be lifted out of the context of general propaganda and given more emphatic treatment as part of a campaign to combat apathy. Sheer horror stories, it was suggested, repel the normal mind:

In self-defence people prefer to think that the victims were specially marked men - and probably a pretty bad lot anyway. A certain amount of horror is needed but it must be used very sparingly and must deal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents. And not with Jews.

It was not until late in 1942 that news of the true fate of European Jewry began to trickle out of the occupied territories,

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but certainly it had been known for a long time that the Nazis were systematically persecuting Jews of many nationalities. According to Andrew Sharf, ‘Few facts of Nazi anti-Semitism were left unstated by the British Press’. Why, then, was the Ministry reluctant to employ in its propaganda the facts that were known, even after the publication by the Inter-Allied Information Committee in December 1942 of a detailed account of Nazi extermination procedures? For example, the propagandists placed much greater emphasis on the persecution of Christian churches in Europe, whose members did not suffer as the Jews suffered.

Again, there is little to go on owing to the complete absence of minutes and memoranda relating to this issue. It cannot be doubted, however, that the Jews were regarded in the Ministry as ‘indisputably innocent’ victims of Nazism. Nor can it be doubted that there were any reservations about exploiting a crime of this magnitude as a means of demonstrating what had been said of the Germans since mid-940. The Ministry almost certainly hesitated because of the widely reported prejudice in the British community against Jews. First reported in June 1940 - when Jews were supposed to be fleeing from Britain to the United States - and reaching its first peak at the time of the East End Blitz, anti-Semitism became such a regular subject that it was placed in Home Intelligence’s ‘Constant Topics and Complaints’ at the end of each weekly report together with such matters as poor transport and shortage of crockery. Jews were said to control the black market, to display ostentatious wealth, to avoid war work and military service, even to force their way to the heads of queues and to exhibit truculent behaviour. A report of May 1942 stated:

‘The growth of anti-Semitism is reported from widely separated areas’, according to the North Midland report. Infringements of the rationing orders, dealings in black markets and ‘deliberate cunning evasions of measures instituted by the Government to meet war-time conditions’ are said to have aroused strong public feeling.

Allegations are made of ‘enormous’ numbers of young Jews boasting of evading the call-up; the expression of ‘open indignation’ is feared unless measures are adopted ‘to bring home to this race that they are inviting a similar revulsion to that which they have experienced in other countries’. This view is confirmed in another Region, whence the comment is reported that ‘one thing Hitler had done is to put those damned Jews in their place’.

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After falling off in the months between early August and December 1942, when there were only three reports, anti-Semitism appears actually to have been revived by the authoritative disclosures of the Nazis’ systematic massacre of European Jews. Although there was ‘extreme horror’ and ‘widespread indignation, anger and disgust’ at the news, there took place a recrudescence of feeling against Jews in Britain and Home Intelligence came to the conclusion ‘that “as a result of the publicity, people are more conscious of the Jews they do not like here” ’. The Bethnal Green tube disaster of 3 March 1943, when 173 persons died in a crush on the stairs leading to a shelter, was widely blamed on panicking Jews - an accusation confirmed in many people’s minds by Herbert Morrison’s decision not to release the findings of the subsequent inquiry.

It is difficult to estimate how accurately these reports reflected the degree and extent of British anti-Semitism during the war; but their frequency was such as to suggest that the propagandists drew back from giving the plight of European Jews more prominence than that of other groups and nationalities under Nazi domination. A Jewish Section was set up in July 1941 as part of the Religions Division. It was not allowed to touch ‘political problems’ - chiefly because of the Zionist controversy - and was therefore confined to disseminating propaganda to the Jewish community and explaining Jewish religious life to Christian citizens. It did not function as a centre for the compilation and distribution of material revealing the situation in Europe.

In February 1942, Robert Fraser, head of the Productions Division, issued a warning against the use of unverified atrocity stories:

It must be remembered that the twenty years between the two wars were occupied by a well conducted campaign against atrocity propaganda, and that some people are contra-suggestible to atrocity propaganda. I do not know whether there was a ‘corpse factory’ or not. But most people believe there was not.

On the whole it appears the majority of people were ready to believe reports of German brutality, especially if they concerned victims geographically close such as the Dutch and the French, but there was a sufficiently large minority sceptical both of stories and of photographs to act as a restraining influence on the Ministry. Another constraint was the evidence reaching the Ministry of the public’s hard attitude towards the enemy. ‘Hatred of Germany - “enemy No. 1” - is expressed’, read a report of February 1943, ‘as well as

[p.168]

a hope that the Russians get to Germany before we do, “as they’re more ruthless”.’ A survey conducted by the British Institute of Public Opinion in April 1943 showed that 41 per cent of the sample thought the German people, as distinct from the Nazi government alone, were the chief enemy. In September 1939 the percentage stood at 6, although it had risen to a peak of 50 per cent at the height of the blitz. The public often displayed impatience at any suggestion of a less than implacable attitude on the part of political and military leaders. In November 1942, for example, a photograph appeared in the press showing Montgomery entertaining one of the defeated Afrika Korps generals, von Thoma. It aroused ‘extreme annoyance’ and distaste, for the spectacle of the British ‘treating him as if he were the captain of an opposing cricket team’ was said to be universal. Such reports were undoubtedly instrumental in persuading the Ministry that atrocity propaganda was unnecessary.

In September 1944 A Catalogue of Crime, a pamphlet of some 5,000 words, documented extensive and authoritatively verified evidence of the Nazi extermination of Jews and other peoples, its unusually dispassionate and concise form of presentation making the facts all the more horrific. The introductory section reviewed German history since the time of Bismarck and endeavoured to show the gradual process by which Germany had irrevocably advanced towards these latest outrages. In conclusion it was stated:

The German people have accepted from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century leaders of German thought and action, and have fully supported, the principles and practice of glorification of war; pursuit of world domination; and total ruthlessness in method.

Why, at this late stage, were the German people still identified inextricably with Nazism? Having for so long insisted on the wickedness of the enemy, perhaps the Ministry could not help but regard the discoveries of the allied armies in Europe as final proof of the allegation. If there had been any question of reversing the policy, the prospect of drawing a distinction between Nazism and the German people was simply too daunting to be undertaken. Bracken was certainly in no mood to do so:

Most of the victims appear to be foreign slaves, and if the German people did not endorse the conduct of the people whom they put in power, then the German people must remember that they have to accept the consequences of the government ... In this war,

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the Germans have shown themselves to be very good in organised fighting, and let me warn the House that they will be equally good in organised whining!

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‘The Same Old Hun?’: Anti-German Propaganda

More from Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1979):

In war it is almost axiomatic that the peoples of the combatant nations must be taught to hate each other. This applied to Britain no less than it did to Germany in the Second World War. Writing before the war, Hans Speier stated, ‘In modern war, in which mass opinions count, the enemy has to be wholly identified ... with the principle of evil, so that one can mobilize the power of right for one’s own cause.’ As if with the Ministry of Information’s propaganda in mind, Joseph Geoghegan observed during the war that the enemy was denied any shred of justification:

He so blatantly represents the negation of all good, he so deliberately runs counter to every law of God or man, he carries with him such a foul string of barbarities that it becomes only right and proper to smite him hip and thigh.

While the Ministry saw it as a prime duty on the home front ‘by the dissemination of truth to attack the enemy in the minds of the public’, it became clear as the war progressed that statements made about the enemy represented a deliberate attempt to manipulate public opinion and attitude. ‘All propaganda is lies’, wrote Orwell in 1942, ‘even when one is telling the truth.’ The validity of this paradox is borne out by an examination of the Ministry’s use of the ‘truth’, for the propagandists did select facts to serve ends and they did offer as truth statements which at best could be described as convenient assumptions. On one issue - the nature of the RAF’s bombing strategy in Germany - they were not above stretching the truth to the threshold of lying.

A contemporary psychologist, E. H. Henderson, suggested that

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the aim of the propagandist is to inculcate certain attitudes by means which prevent critical thinking. That the Ministry of Information attempted to accomplish this should cause no surprise. What is worthy of comment, however, is the fact that the Ministry simultaneously attached great importance to releasing simple, unadorned news and tried to persuade other departments to limit their requests for censorship strictly to matters of security. The ambivalence in departmental attitudes cannot be attributed to poor co-ordination between one division and another, since on the same day a senior officer might berate the Admiralty for withholding unpleasant news and then suggest at a meeting that the public should be induced to regard the Germans with hatred as a means of sustaining morale. […]

To judge by the resources, man hours and thought expended on telling the public what attitudes they ought to adopt towards the· enemy, the Ministry considered the matter to be one of cardinal importance. […]

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The critical question as to whether the German people were to be characterised as incorrigibly aggressive was left for the consideration of the Ministry. Yet this matter, so closely related to a post-war settlement, should have merited the Cabinet’s closest attention. Unlike its operations in censorship and the issue of news, the Ministry was virtually unconstrained by higher authority in pronouncements on the enemy.

In July 1938 Stephen King-Hall insisted:

We must go into the war with a conviction in the minds of the people that it was forced on us and that we did all that was honourably possible to avoid it ... The danger would appear to be that in a crisis which may arise very suddenly we shall have public opinion in a muddle in this country ... we may find ourselves in the dangerous position of the Cabinet having issued threats and being committed to action for which public opinion is unprepared and might not support.

In the event, it was the public that clamoured for a firm declaration of war when Chamberlain appeared to waver after the Germans attacked Poland. Having prepared a considerable amount of material, the Ministry adopted a historical, almost scholarly, emphasis in explaining the causes of the war. In a pamphlet of some 6,000 words, D. A. Routh, the historian, reached deep into German history to expose the roots of her latest act of aggression and, while not sparing the nation from charges of wickedness, concluded:

... the tragedy of Germany is the tragedy of a great people who, through lack of political experience and for reasons lying far back in their history, have twice failed to prevent their national power from falling into the hands of violent and ambitious rulers ... The overthrow of National-Socialism is the one hope for the future of the German people.

In Assurance of Victory it was argued that Britain had striven to ameliorate the harsher provisions of the Versailles Treaty and to integrate Germany in a peaceful Europe but, misled by Hitler, the Germans had insisted on supporting a treacherous foreign policy. There was now no recourse but to prevent Germany from trampling

[p.140]

on the rights of other nations, a policy ‘which British Governments have consistently pursued in the face of the attempts of any Power to dominate Europe by force’. […]

Once the British were at war there was little sign of reluctance to pursue a struggle ‘quietly accepted as inevitable’ and as a consequence the Ministry’s long-winded statements about its cause became superfluous. A source of greater concern - and one that would continue well into 1941 - were reports of public confusion about Britain’s military aims. It was one thing to know who had started the war but quite another to know what victory was meant to achieve or, indeed, whether the government would stop short of the complete defeat of the enemy. […]

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When the war moved closer to home and it was realised the fight was on in earnest the tone of the propaganda underwent an abrupt change, a process greatly hastened by Churchill’s accession to the premiership on 10 May.

As British troops. were being evacuated from Norway, the Policy Committee agreed that the separation of the German people from Nazism should in future be avoided. And after Dunkirk:

The Director General asked whether it was thought that the Ministry should now begin to stir up people’s more primitive instincts. After discussion it was considered that we should now pay more attention to stirring up people’s anger ... It might be merely sufficient to impress the people that they were in fact angry.

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Two weeks later a paper setting out proposals for an ‘Anger Campaign’ was circulated at the Policy Committee. It is one of the more remarkable documents of wartime government, not merely because it illustrates the mood which gripped the propagandists themselves but also because it demonstrates the extent to which they were capable of misunderstanding the British public.

The public, ‘patient, long-suffering, slow to anger, slower still to hate’, were believed to be ‘harbouring little sense of real personal animus against the average German man or woman [and] accepting with amazing phlegm bitter reverses without overmuch recrimination’. This placidity must be replaced with ‘personal anger ... against the German people and Germany’. This raises two difficult questions. First, what justification was there for thinking that the people felt no anger towards the Germans? And second, was anger necessary ‘as a factor in increasing the war effort and preparing the British public for every emergency’? Such evidence as was available to the Ministry suggested that there was nothing approaching the almost hysterically bellicose mood of the British in the early months of the First World War, which is not to say that in the middle of 1940 the public regarded the Germans with equanimity. What did the Home Intelligence reports indicate? Hitler’s discomfiting ability to realise his military predictions aroused apprehension but it was Italy rather than Germany which earned the anger of the British after Mussolini’s declaration of war on 11 June. Not until September 1940 were there any reports of bitterness against the Germans, and even then they were said to have been aroused not by Nazi ideology or German victories in Europe but by direct air attacks on Britain. ‘It is so strange’, observed Harold Nicolson, ‘that in this moment of anxiety there is no hatred of Hitler or the Germans.’

Granted, then, that the Ministry had good reason to suppose that the people did not hate the enemy, what justification was there for the deduction that this represented a danger? It is too easy to be wise after the event. We know that the British people displayed resilience and determination, though in no greater measure than German civilians later in the war, but we must avoid the anachronism of imputing that knowledge to the propagandists in June 1940, when invasion seemed a distinct probability. Nevertheless, stolidity and phlegm might just as easily have indicated a sober realisation of the trials that lay ahead and a determination to withstand them; whereas anger of the semi-hysterical sort the Ministry wished to inculcate might, if spontaneously present, have revealed a certain brittleness and instability far more worrying than outward placidity.

[p.143]

It was the opinion of contemporary psychiatrists and social psychologists (whom, for the most part, the Ministry studiously avoided consulting) that hate is a poor basis for morale. The emotion, asserted one authority, prevents discrimination between good and bad individuals among the enemy, blinds one to historical realities and may, if continued into peacetime, affect post-war settlements and lay the foundation for another war. If the reasoning then current in the Ministry is followed, where does it lead? The public were not angry. They were, therefore, either not aware of the danger of the situation or were unwilling to construct for themselves good reasons for standing up to the Nazis. In consequence they were incapable of resisting whatever lay ahead.

So in order to ‘change the attitude of the most stolid and unvengeable people in the world’ it was proposed to mount a massive and, at first, clandestine campaign. Photographs, cartoons, posters, film, radio, leaflets, speeches, exhibitions, window displays - all were to be put at the service of ‘the modern art of propaganda - all pervasive, subtle and persistent’. The Ministry should be seen to enter the campaign only after non-official propaganda had succeeded and the people were beginning to feel stirrings of anger. The methods of Goebbels had not been overlooked, for, as the paper averred with a hint of admiration, ‘it is exactly upon these intensive lines that propaganda has succeeded in creating the militant Germany of to-day from a battered, helpless nation’. The officials of the Ministry were urged to regard themselves as ‘a small group of expert propagandists ... in a position to tap and colour and guide every source of public expression’. The ‘total attack’ was to have as its principal weapon the co-operation of the twenty or thirty most influential journalists of the national press who, in consultation with the Ministry, would write a ‘stream of carefully worded features’ based on certain themes. In suggesting one such theme, ‘The German Character’, the paper stressed the importance of tailoring the style and content to the class of the reader. For the broad mass the emotional appeal was felt to be most suitable:

EUROPE’S GANGSTERS RAMPANT
THE RECURRING MADNESS OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE
HUNS, GOTHS AND VANDALS
GERMAN LUST FOR WORLD DOMINATION
1870 - 1914 - 1939
‘THEY DO NOT CHANGE’
BLOWS ARE ALL THEY UNDERSTAND
FREDERICK - BISMARCK - WILHELM - HITLER
THEY SHALL NOT PASS
WHY THE KAISER CALLED THEM ‘HUNS’
THE ROUT OF THE GERMANS IN 1918
THE GERMAN IS NOT INVINCIBLE
THESE BULLIES CAN BE BEATEN
THE LESSON OF THE AIR FORCE
INFERIORITY COMPLEX -- THE ROOT OF GERMAN AGGRESSION

The ‘sophisticated and educated classes’ were to be given ‘more restrained and factual’ evidence:

The fundamental ‘rottenness’ of the German character - historical analysis.
German writers on the Germany bully complex - Nietzsche, Treitschke, etc.
Detailed instances where Germans have crumpled up.
German weaknesses.
Germany’s ‘case’ torn to shreds - refutation of Versailles Treaty attacks, etc.
Events since the war have utterly confuted the weak-kneed apologists for Hitler. His ‘lebensraum’ is the whole world. His ‘culture’ the death of every other race.

The middle classes - ‘still not mentally at war’ - had to be convinced that the Germans intended to rob them of their incomes and culture; the professional classes ‘told of refugee professional men, of how they have been hounded and put to menial tasks - like washing dishes and cleaning lavatories’; and shopkeepers, businessmen and industrial workers disabused of the idea that ‘things might go much the same way under Hitler’. While being careful to emphasise that stories of German brutality should not be allowed to arouse fear rather than hatred, the Ministry insisted that atrocity stories are believed and are effective. Thus another Nurse Cavell story was to be found and news of German ruthlessness treated so as to illustrate triumphant courage ‘such as the woman in Bruges in 1914 who slaughtered two Germans who had killed her son’.

The smaller touches were not omitted. Nazi leaders, it was recommended, should never be mentioned without an appropriate label: ‘Hitler - the Arch Gangster’, ‘Jew Baiter Streicher’ and ‘Lie Minister Goebbels’. The BBC must be persuaded to cease referring to ‘Herr’ Hitler and ‘Signor’ Mussolini. A rather more drastic suggestion was

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that ‘a few death sentences on traitors would have a great effect in heightening the public temper against the enemy’.

Hitler posed a very difficult problem. Later in the war it would be possible to make a joke of him but in 1940 it was not easy to counter the impression of his political and military omniscience, and all that could be done was to suggest somewhat feebly that the opposite was the case:

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Hitler’s success is engendering a legend of infallibility which is immensely powerful ... THIS LEGEND MUST BE DEFEATED. It must be made clear that the little countries Hitler has invaded were lying defenceless at Hitler’s door for generations. Even in France he is only making headway by sheer weight of metal. Hitler is personally fallible, despicable, cowardly ... He is important only as the embodiment of the German lust for power in the most evil guise it has ever taken.

This latter assertion contains the essence not only of the Anger Campaign but of the tenor of domestic propaganda for the rest of the war, namely that there can be no distinction between a German and a Nazi. Nazism is but the latest and most virulent manifestation of the inherent wickedness of the German race. Stephen King-Hall’s propaganda theme of 1938 - ‘we reluctantly destroy German bodies in order to save the souls of the rest’ - had been hastily jettisoned. The new orthodoxy, suggested the propagandists, should be embodied by a famous writer such as J. B. Priestley in a short wall text to be issued in millions:

The Secret Beast

In the middle of a great civilised continent, far from the sea which brings a breath of the outer world to freshen men’s minds, a secret people dwell.

Ever and again they become crazed with a spell of hero worship. A leader arises among them who tells them that they are greater than the other peoples of the world. Knowing nothing of the world’s vastness and of the seas which link land to land, they believe - and march out to slaughter and destroy.

The secret people of the Germanys are worse than fools in their folly. When their madness comes upon them, out leaps a primitive, barbarian beast-like instinct. They kill without pity, rejoicing in blood, as animals kill. They know no law, as animals know no law.

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They are Europe’s secret beasts, roused to senseless fury. It is all Europe’s mission to cower them and cage them today, as all Europe has had to do before.

The Hun is at the gate. He will rage and destroy. He will slaughter the women and the children. But in the end, he will run from the men as he has always run in the past.

Out then and kill ... the extermination of the wild animal let loose on Europe is the plain business of Europe’s citizens.

By these and other means a fundamental change of public attitude was to be wrought. The wish was very much father to the thought. No evidence was forthcoming during the brief life of the Ministry to support the belief that public opinion and emotion were so malleable, and just how seriously the proposed campaign was regarded in the department it is difficult to tell. The men responsible for approving it were well educated, intelligent and worldly and it is barely conceivable that they could contemplate treating the British public as a body of credulous simpletons. Moreover, in proposing a reversion to the crudest type of First World War propaganda, were they not aware of the scepticism which the falsity and unscrupulousness of that propaganda had engendered between the wars? The explanation must be tentatively sought in the states of mind of the propagandists themselves. They knew what the public could only strongly suspect - that the threat to Britain was imminent and grave - and the Anger Campaign seems to have been devised to stir up their own ‘primitive instincts’ as profoundly as those of the people at large. The Ministry saw about them a dangerous complacency whose cure it was their urgent duty to prescribe. While other men produced the munitions and manned the beaches the propagandists probably felt the need to do something which could be interpreted, if only by themselves, as of equal importance to the nation’s defence. It was at this time, too, that the Ministry were advocating the imposition of compulsory censorship, but this departure from the liberal attitude with which censorship was normally exercised was soon abandoned. Not so the new propaganda. For, although the Anger Campaign was not implemented on the heroic scale originally contemplated, its principal themes were embodied in the Ministry’s public attitude towards the enemy for the rest of the war.

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