A critic complained that an early P. G. Wodehouse novel had all of the usual Wodehouse characters under new names.  In the preface to “Summer Lightning” Wodehouse boasted that he had outsmarted that critic by populating the new book with the same characters under the exact same names.  The Downton Abbey movie does the same thing, but where Wodehouse ensnares his familiar characters in plots of ever-growing complexity and novelty, Julian Fellowes puts our old friends into situations that seem merely hard to believe.

Apart from two scenes of action and suspense carried out for questionable purposes, which we will get to in due course, the story is fairly thin material draped over the scaffolding of a visit to Downton in 1927 by King George V and Queen Mary.  We listen in to the witty conversation among the upper classes as they glide from dining room to drawing room to ballroom.  There are frequent interludes in dressing rooms as the upper classes rehabilitate.  The costume budget for this production must have been astronomical.

When the acidity (or vapidity) of the conversation from the toffs gets too strong, we are taken below stairs for comic relief supplied by the servants as they wrestle control of Downton from the insufferable staff of the royal household who plan to occupy Downton and manage its operation during the royal visit.  There are stately homes where the royal household staff can get away with this kind of thing.  They learned not to try it at Downton Abbey.

Tom Branson is a nice example of the tendency of the characters in this story to display fully formed the personality that was still developing during the TV series.  He is a man who fixes things.  When we first met him, he was a chauffeur, a man who could keep an engine ticking over.  That skill helped to move the plot along when the car of the village socialist with whom he had a romantic interlude broke down on a deserted road.  He happened to be passing by with a kit full of tools.

His skill with engines had broader implications.  He wanted to re-engineer the social and economic system of his time.  The Crawley daughter who married him, Sibyl, and the young socialist schoolteacher shared this ambition, which was part of the attraction he felt for each of them.  To be fair, Tom did go through a destructive phase.  Remember that at one time he helped to burn an Anglo-Irish family out of their castle.  The daughter of the family was a friend of Mary’s.  It took an intervention by the Home Secretary to settle things.

Put aside that one blemish on his record – a youthful indiscretion, no doubt the Inspector General of the day would have found no evidence of political bias – we can see that Tom’s penchant for fixing things has progressed from cars, to social systems, to the Downton farm, and has now reached the point where he fixes everything in sight.  He sees a distraught young woman sitting on a bench on Downton’s spacious grounds – plenty of room for multiple dramas to unfold concurrently.  She is unhappy in her marriage and stands, or to be accurate sits, at a crossroads.  Tom is able to dispense some sound advice to this unknown woman on the strength of which she decides to take control of her relationship with her difficult husband.  He has done his part to save the marriage of George and Mary’s only daughter (also named Mary).

Tom helps to resolve another subplot.  The Queen has a lady-in-waiting – I wonder if that means she was chief of staff, or social secretary, or simply a companion – who is a Crawley cousin.  She is quite wealthy, a widow with no children.  The Dowager Countess – Maggie Smith – wants that wealth to go to the Downton estate when the cousin, named Maud, dies.  Maud insists that she is going to leave her fortune to her maid, a young lady named Lucy.

Julian Fellowes allows the audience to deduce the true situation before it is revealed to any Downton characters.  No doubt most of the Downton gang would have figured it out for themselves had they the time, but they are busy with countless other tasks – looking down their noses, repartee, eating, dressing, what have you – while we in the audience have no other job than to sit back and put two together with two.

Isobel comes to the service of any audience members who failed to see that Lucy is Maud’s daughter, born out of wedlock. Isobel has demonstrated some growth since we last saw her on TV.  She has developed a sharp wit.  However, she remains a kind-hearted soul, so she aims her verbal missiles against Violet alone and does not direct them at innocent bystanders, as Violet and her granddaughter Mary have been known to do.

Isobel has remained the same in one respect: she cannot resist meddling in other people’s business in an effort to improve things.  Isobel visits Maud in Maud’s room, to let her know that she has figured out the Lucy mystery and is prepared to offer her vast resources of empathy to assist in any way.  So persuasive is Isobel, so clearly genuine in her concern, that Maud tells a near-stranger all the details of the secret that she has kept for Lucy’s entire life.  (She told Lucy when the lass turned 18.)  In 1927, a woman with a “natural” child would not be considered a suitable companion for the Queen, so Maud is risking everything by acknowledging the facts.  The conversation did not seem credible, but it’s necessary to the storytelling.  We need all of the audience members on board for the conclusion of this particular episode.

Maud is determined to leave her money to her daughter.  Once Violet learns Lucy’s story, she drops all objections about the inheritance.  You don’t have to tell Violet that blood is blood.  Yet, she does produce a sly smile when she sees that Tom is taken by Lucy’s humble background, her pleasant manner, and possibly other features that appeal to the superficial male.  Violet sees that the fortune that has slipped away may come back to the family a generation or two down the line.  An awful lot of things would have to go right for that to happen.  Perhaps Violet feels that her granddaughter Mary will be able to arrange it all in a couple of decades.  If Lucy and Tom have a daughter, she will be a distant cousin of Mary’s son George.  The relation is close enough to ensure frequent contact over the years ahead, yet sufficiently distant to avoid problems of consanguinity.  If the young lady will have him, I’m sure he will find her and her money very pleasant.  That’s a long way off.  Look for that story in Downton Abbey VII.

The main job of the other characters is to be themselves in vignettes that help us remember why we are so fond of them but that do little to develop character or storyline.  Robert remains the decent, upstanding, thick-headed titular head of the family.  The real work of managing Downton above stairs falls to his wife Cora, his mother Violet, and his eldest daughter Mary.

Mary must have Carson in charge of the staff for the royal visit and is able to magnify every flaw in Thomas’s stewardship – silver polishing not up to standard and running late, boiler repairs unsatisfactory – until she gets her way and Carson is brought out of retirement to take up the heavy burden of command.  Those sweets that Carson fed to Mary from the butler’s pantry when she was a child continue to pay dividends decades later.

However, Carson is as much a figurehead downstairs as Robert is in the main house (or as the King is in his government or in his family).  He is soon swept along in the rebellion staged by Mrs. Hughes the housekeeper (Carson’s spouse), Mrs. Patmore the cook, Anna Bates and others when the staff of the royal household make their move to take over the Downton operation during the royals’ time in residence.  Carson can lend tone with his perfect and imperturbable manners, but the real power below stairs is held by other hands.  When all the king’s men try to move in on Downton as they have on so many other fine establishments, the countercharge is led by the Hughes-Patmore-Bates troika who pull Mr. Carson along behind.  When the royal staff get their comeuppance, it reminded me of that moment in Lord of the Rings when Sauron realizes that he has allowed the One Ring to be marched right to the edge of the Cracks of Doom.

This light-hearted drawing-room comedy of manners above stairs combined with some broad physical humor from the staff is interrupted only twice by scenes of action.  At the beginning, Tom Branson singlehandedly stops an attempt to murder King George V.  That requires some running, manhandling, and subduing.  Later on, the police raid a gay dance club where Thomas (the butler) happens to be present.  Come to think of it, that incident also involves some running, manhandling, and subduing.

You wonder what the IRA (the ones in the movie, not the real ones) were trying to accomplish.  Why assassinate a constitutional monarch who was slightly more than a figurehead?  The king did not make British policy for Ireland.  The real-life IRA knew that.  The incident is fictional.  No one tried to assassinate George V in 1927 or any other time.

And what were the police (the ones in the movie and the real ones, too) trying to accomplish by raiding a club where no women were to be found?  On a business trip to London in the 1980s, I was invited by a member to a dinner at the Carlton Club.  I learned later that the Carlton’s membership is made up mostly of Tory party leaders, officials, and backbenchers, which explained the distinctly chilly reaction I got from the cabbie when I gave him the address.  Up until the election of Margaret Thatcher, this had been an exclusively male club.  They made an exception for her alone.  In 1927, I don’t think anyone at the Carlton was worried about a police raid, even though it was an all-male establishment.  Not so the men at the club where Thomas visited.  Yet all they were doing was drinking and talking, just as they do at the Carlton, and (unlike the Carlton) dancing.  Undoubtedly, some of the quiet conversations at the establishment in York that Thomas visited spoke of more intimate meetings to take place after closing (something that may also go on at the Carlton from time to time for all anyone knows). Hardly a sufficient threat to the public peace to divert police resources away from robbery, burglary, rape, and murder.

Thomas was a visitor at a gay night club in the city of York because, alone among the Downton servants, he had made a separate peace with a member of the royal household staff, a man named Richard Ellis, the king’s dresser.  Thomas is annoyed that he has been displaced by Carson and needs only the smallest excuse to leave the chaos of Downton.  The attraction he feels for Richard and the chance for an adventure provide the slight tug necessary to put Thomas and Richard on the road to York.

Richard has some family business to attend to and leaves Thomas at a pub for a few hours.  From there, Thomas is lured by a stranger to the dance club where he is caught in the police raid.

An arrest on a charge of this kind would have been ruinous at the time.  Thomas might well have been unemployable as a domestic servant, and he had no other qualifications.  Many British men saw their lives ruined in just this way.  Any number committed suicide, including Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computing, a man who broke the German Enigma code during World War II.  Incidentally, Turing’s portrait now appears on Britain’s 50-pound note.

When we recall that Thomas attempted suicide during the TV series and nearly succeeded, it is easy to imagine that he might have been tempted to make another try.  Fortunately, his new friend Richard is able to spring Thomas from jail.  Here is another incongruity in the story.  Once Richard figures out where Thomas is, he rushes to the York jail and flashes his royal household card before the desk sergeant.  The ploy works.  Thomas is released and, as far as we can tell, no record of the event remains at the police station.

It’s more likely that the sergeant had an existing relationship with the local press and had already given, or sold, the story to a local reporter of the arrest on a morals charge of a high-toned butler from one of the big Yorkshire estates.  Even if the sergeant is less opportunistic than that, how likely is it that a rank and file local official could be talked round by a high-hat member of the royal household, probably gay himself, who wants the sergeant to cook the books?  My advice – don’t bet on it.

But this is the movies, so it all works out.  As Richard and Thomas depart the station to drive away in Richard’s car, they wonder out loud if the day will ever come when people such as they will not be outside the law.  Nice of the writers to permit the audience a moment of self-satisfaction over this bit of progress.  Of course, the police and prosecutors are still persecuting people, but different people.

The final incongruity I’ll touch on belongs to Violet, the Dowager Countess. It appears that we have seen the last of Maggie Smith in this role.  She tells Mary, the descendant whose character and personality most resemble her own, that she has a fatal condition.  Is this because Maggie Smith and Julian Fellowes have had a falling out?  Or is Ms. Smith contemplating retirement? Or possibly, the Dowager Countess’ character has gotten out of hand and the task of producing verbal zingers for her to launch has become a chore, suggesting that the time has come for the Dowager Countess to step onto an ice floe and wave goodbye.

It’s the way she says goodbye that I found incongruous.  Violet is not a person who spends any time on introspection.  She has absorbed the standards, the prejudices, and the virtues of her social class so fully that she has no need to step outside herself to examine her role in life, much less how she and her peers (literally) fit into the broader scheme.  She is herself; others are themselves, and no further analysis is required.

Yet, when Mary expresses sympathy for Violet’s condition, we get one of those melodramatic “No, no my dear; don’t feel sorry for me” speeches.  Suddenly, Violet has become a dramaturge.  She professes that she has lived a life of comfort and privilege and is ready for the end.  Did Violet ever speak the word “privilege” in her life?  Perhaps when lecturing a social inferior, but never about herself.  When the great golfer Bobby Jones received a fatal diagnosis and a friend expressed sympathy, Jones said “We play the ball as it lies.”  I expect Violet, had she been allowed to stay in character, would have said “We’ll say no more about that.”

We are again leaving our characters in a condition as happy as could be expected under the circumstances.  As I noted at the end of the TV show, Britain at this point was just below the crest of the wave.  One of the greatest imperial enterprises the world has ever known was still enjoying a warm late summer with every confidence that the present state would continue indefinitely.  What lay ahead was depression, war, loss of empire, and loss of confidence.  I hope that Mr. Fellowes, having brought us this far, gives us a sequel or two (or more) so that we can see how the Crawleys, their friends and relations manage through the challenges to come.  In the meantime, he has given us two pleasant hours of diversion.

The current year is the 400^th anniversary of the first documented arrival of Africans in Virginia.  British colonists had purchased human lives a year before the Pilgrims arrived. The New York Times dates the founding of the United States to the Africans’ arrival.

Attributing American progress to forced labor is an apology, well-deserved, to the ancestors of African Americans whose contribution to the growth of the republic was overlooked by historians of an earlier time.  It is also a cudgel against the traditional claims that the hard work, grit, determination, and bootstrap tugging performed by the nation’s European settlers were the keys to the republic’s achievements.

Slavery did not begin in Virginia nor did it begin in 1619.  It is an ancient institution.  If the achievements of a slaveholding society are held to be the fruits of labor stolen from persons held in servitude, that charge should not be restricted to the United States nor can it be limited to the period beginning in 1619.  If the founding is dated to 1619 to buttress the claim that the enormous prosperity and progress achieved by the American republic should be credited to the individuals who were forced to provide their labor to the American enterprise, that judgment should be assessed against all slaveholding societies.

If slavery is the key to prosperity, then more slaves mean more wealth. It should follow that the relative prosperity of the other slave-importing nations in the Americas can be measured by the number of enslaved persons they held.  During the period when Africa exported some ten million human beings to work without compensation in the western hemisphere, about 45% of those individuals went to Brazil.  Another 45% went to the Caribbean.  Some 5% were carried to Spanish colonies in North and South America.  The remaining 5%, not quite 500,000 individuals, were taken to what is now the United States.

Cuba and Brazil each held far more persons in slavery than did the United States.  Why did the United States become more prosperous than Brazil and the Caribbean nations?

Let’s not forget that this miserable commerce flowed in two directions.  What about the nations of north Africa?  Millions of Europeans were captured and held in slavery along the “Barbary Coast” into the 19^th century.  What do Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya have to show for the vast numbers of persons that were held as slaves in those countries?

Roman civilization lasted more than a millennium.  Slaves may have constituted more than a third of the Roman population at times.  Are Roman achievements in law, administration, architecture, construction, and literature to be attributed to the slaves who contributed massive amounts of labor without compensation?  Athens relied on slave labor.  So did China, the Caliphate, and the Moghuls.  Shall we date their founding to the first arrival of enslaved persons?  Shall we credit their achievements to the work of those unfortunates held in slavery?

Why is the claim that progress is the result of the forced labor of slaves aimed particularly at the United States?  The charge stings only because the United States was founded on principles that are antithetical to slaveholding, racism, and racial or ethnic superiority.  A nation based on racism and white supremacy would laugh at the accusation.  We take the accusation seriously, even if we reject it, because it is a challenge to our founding principles.  Those principles were published in 1776, the true year of the American founding.

Dating the American founding to 1619 lays the charge that slavery, subjugation, racism, and white supremacy are at the heart of the American enterprise.  If you think the charge is fair, how do you account for the behavior of the English colonies at the moment when they declared their independence from Great Britain?  Why did they base their declaration on the principle of universal human equality, contradicting the validity of the institution that the 1619 memorialists say is at the heart of the founding?

There are two easy answers, neither of them credible.  One is that the framers were imprecise.  They intended the inspiring statements in the Declaration to apply to the English subjects of the British crown living in the American colonies – or, slightly more generously, to the white residents of those colonies —  but their meaning was misinterpreted by soft-hearted descendants who were mistaken when they thought that the words “all men are created equal” applied to all persons. [1]  Careful drafting would have avoided the misunderstanding.

This view was adopted in the 1850s by numerous Democratic party politicians, Stephen A. Douglas prominent among them.  It underlies the Dred Scott decision.  It informs Howard Zinn’s critical view of American history.  It fits the outlook of the 1619 memorialists.  If the 1776 drafters were white supremacists, they could hardly have believed that the persons they held to involuntary service were their equals in natural rights.  On this view, the only way to make sense of the Declaration is to believe that if the individuals who adopted it had thought longer about how the content of the Declaration could later be misinterpreted, they would have written it differently.

The problem with this interpretation, a fatal defect that Abraham Lincoln pointed out in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, is that there is no record of anyone of any political persuasion holding this view prior to the middle 1850s.  No commentary at the time the Declaration was issued supports the view, nor does anything in the decades that followed until slavery’s defenders found the words of the Declaration inconvenient.  Until the 1850s, the widely adopted position among both the defenders of slavery and its critics was that the institution was an evil that was foisted on the colonies by Britain.  As the idea developed in the 1850s in some quarters that slavery was a “positive good” – but, as Lincoln noted, a good thing that no one seems to want the good of for himself – the Declaration, still held in reverence by the populace, was a stumbling block.  The position that the Declaration applies to some people only was manufactured to assist in a political debate.  When the claim arises from time to time, as it is doing now, it is in service to winning an argument.  It isn’t based in fact.

The second answer is that the founders were hypocrites.  If they really believed what they published on July 4, 1776, why did they not act on their belief and abolish slavery?  About a decade later, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant codified his “categorical imperative”: “Act only according that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law.”  Viewed that way, the American colonists were play-acting, preening before the mirror of history with no intention to carry into action the principles they stated so blithely in their Declaration.  They did not act on the maxim they pretended to adopt.  The conclusion must be that they didn’t believe in the maxim in the first place.  They meant what they said, but they didn’t believe it.

Abraham Lincoln’s rejoinder was that the accusation of hypocrisy “comes to nothing at all”.  The principle of the equal natural rights of all persons is not a categorical imperative but rather the “standard maxim of free society”.  It is the ultimate goal and purpose of government, to be advanced and, we can hope, ultimately achieved in the fullness of time.  “They meant simply to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

Think of the damage that has been done by individuals devoted to Kant’s Categorical Imperative when they gain power.  German National Socialists rolled trains full of human beings into death camps.  International Socialists in the Soviet Union, China, eastern Europe, southeast Asia, Cuba and the rest are responsible for some one hundred million deaths in the 20^th century.  All of them were acting to universalize the principle that motivated them, to act on the maxim – the elevation of a master race, the dictatorship of the world’s workers, take your pick, or add a different one – that they willed to make a universal law.

It doesn’t seem so bad, in contrast, to declare a self-evident truth that you plan to actualize and implement as circumstances allow.  Nevertheless, a republic founded on the principle that all humans are equal in their inalienable natural rights held slaves.  Many of the 56 members of the congress that issued the Declaration owned slaves.  Indeed, the author of the instrument, the clearest and most elegant statement ever written on the subject of human equality, himself owned slaves.  There is no getting around this central dilemma.  Dating the founding to the first arrival of enslaved persons doesn’t do anything to confront it.

Harry Jaffa treats the Declaration as a syllogism.  Its major premise – that all humans are equal in their natural rights – has a corollary: a government is legitimate only insofar as it protects the equal natural rights of the governed.  The syllogism’s minor premise is the long bill of particulars accusing the British Crown of failing to protect the rights of the colonists.  The conclusion is then inevitable.  The colonists were not bound to obey the dictates of an illegitimate government and were for that reason free and independent of all allegiance to their former sovereign.

Yet, the major premise is stronger than it needs to be to carry the argument.  The colonists would have had an unanswerable case even if they had argued from the weaker proposition that as the subjects of the British Crown, they were entitled to certain historical rights and privileges that adhere to all of their fellow-subjects, not by nature, but by virtue of the unique history that produced the British Constitution and established the rights of subjects of the British Crown.

There was precedent for a declaration based on the more modest premise.  When some of the Dutch provinces declared their independence of the Spanish crown in 1581, they justified their action on the basis that the sovereign’s obligation was to protect his people and govern them to protect their “ancient customs and privileges”.  They held that the right to replace a sovereign who governed as a tyrant derived from the “law of nature” but they did not claim that the rights that the sovereign was bound to protect were themselves derived from nature.  It appears that members of the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration – including the document’s author – were familiar with the Dutch precedent.  Yet, the American Congress took the additional step nearly 200 years later to found a republic on the wider and deeper principle that a government is legitimate only if it governs with the consent of the governed for the purpose of protecting and preserving their natural rights.

Why would a Congress populated with intelligent men, well-read, with full knowledge of ancient and modern history, publish a document proclaiming to the world a principle that they were not observing in practice and that, if they truly were white supremacists, they didn’t believe?  After all, the world was not holding its breath waiting for someone somewhere to proclaim that all persons are equal. The survival of the United States was going to depend on an alliance with the French monarchy, whose support was not contingent upon the new republic’s declaration of a revolutionary principle.  There was nothing to be gained diplomatically by stating it.  Nor would a society based on racism and white supremacy have bothered with that kind of justification for its actions.  Nor would their descendants have volunteered in the hundreds of thousands in the 1860s to fight a war that ended slavery.  Nor would they have gathered in Washington in 1963 to listen to Martin Luther King restate the principles of the Declaration, nor would they have provided a prominent place in the national pantheon to honor the author of that restatement, nor enacted legislation to reverse racial discrimination.

The parsimonious explanation is that the Declaration meant and means what it says, that the founding of the American republic dates to 1776 because that was when the founding principles were enshrined for all time.  Surely Abraham Lincoln was right when he interpreted American history as the working out over a vast territory and hundreds of years as the attempt to actualize the standard maxim of free society.  A year before he entered the contest for the presidency he wrote:

All honor to Jefferson–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Those harbingers have re-appeared, holding the 1619 banner as they advance.  The plan is to march the 1619 program into the American educational system, to remove the stumbling blocks by undermining them.  Our founding propositions are being tested again.  I think the undermining effort will fail eventually.  I think Lincoln was right – the principle of the equal rights of all individuals will in time prove to be a rebuke to this attempt to replace it.  But it’s always a close, near-run thing.

[1] I know that the word “men” is a show-stopper for some people.  If it had that effect on you, I will point out for what it may be worth that at the time the Declaration was written and for more than 200 years afterward, the word “man” was commonly used as a synecdoche for “person” or “human” in the same way that “horse” “dog” or “bee” can refer to a member of the species without regard to sex.

Dwight Eisenhower played Contract Bridge to relax.  Terrence Reese, one of the game’s strongest players, has written: “You play chess with your brain, but in bridge your whole character and personality is expressed.“  Risk-taking and deception are critical to success, while judgment and decision-making are at the heart of the game.  A man grappling with the most daunting decisions a military leader could face enjoyed a game where he could take risks and make decisions for low stakes.

June 5 and June 6, 1944 were dates that provided the conditions that the Anglo-Canadian-American forces required for the massive Normandy landing.  The invaders wanted a night with a full moon when the tide would be halfway to full and still rising at dawn.  The incoming flood would aid the landing craft, while the less than full tide would expose hazards that the enemy had placed on the beach.  The moon would be full on June 6, nearly full on June 5.

The weather was miserable on June 5.  Eisenhower decided to wait another day.  If the weather worsened or failed to improve, the next dates with favorable tides would have been June 19 and 20, but there would have been a new moon on those dates, a disadvantage.  The pressure experienced by a person making the decision to proceed under these conditions cannot be imagined.

This was the largest sea-borne invasion force ever assembled.  The landing included 153,000 troops.  We Americans sometimes overlook the fact that the contribution made by the combined British and Canadian forces was greater than the American.  Britain sent more than 60,000 troops, while Canada provided some 20,000.  The Americans numbered about 73,000, the largest contingent but less than half of the total.

The one thing that almost all of the invaders had in common was language.  Apart from a few French paratroopers and liaison staff, the invasion force was Anglophone.  It has been said that the most important fact of the twentieth century was that Americans speak English.

This point was not lost on Charles de Gaulle.  He had no official position. The United States recognized the Vichy government, yet de Gaulle insisted that he spoke for France.  In the days before the invasion, de Gaulle and Churchill had argued about post-invasion politics.  Churchill’s final word was that Eisenhower was in charge of the invasion, so his decisions on political matters in the immediate post-invasion environment would stand.  If de Gaulle wanted to change that, he had to talk to President Roosevelt.

This proposal drove de Gaulle into a fury.  Why should he have to see Roosevelt about the restoration of the French government?  The upshot was that on the night of June 5-6, when Eisenhower had scores of things to worry about, when the first reports pointing to success or failure were only hours away, he had to deal with a ferociously angry Charles de Gaulle.

De Gaulle wanted to make a public announcement as the invasion unfolded.  Eisenhower explained that he himself would make the initial proclamation.  Eisenhower showed his visitor a copy of the printed text.  The document failed to mention French forces or de Gaulle himself.  De Gaulle was not pleased.  Nor was his mood lightened when Eisenhower offered de Gaulle the chance to broadcast following Eisenhower.  De Gaulle had no intention of speaking after anyone, much less an American general.

Eisenhower had arranged for a scrip currency denominated in Francs to be printed so that the troops could purchase supplies locally as the need arose.  De Gaulle said the Americans were counterfeiting.  Eisenhower intended to declare a provisional military government that would work with local political leaders until permanent arrangements were in place.  De Gaulle found this unacceptable; he intended to organize French politics on his terms.

At a later date, General Eisenhower wrote (I paraphrase): “Apart from the weather, no other element in the war gave me as much difficulty as the French.”  Those “other elements” included the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht.  The thought had undoubtedly occurred to General Eisenhower prior to the night of June 5-6, but I imagine de Gaulle’s behavior on D-Day helped to fasten the idea in Eisenhower’s mind.

Give de Gaulle credit for seeing past the fighting to the political situation as it would exist after the war.  He shared with Churchill and Stalin this view of war as “diplomacy by other means”.  The Allied invasion of France was not a purely military operation.  Churchill and Stalin also planned war strategy with the post-war political situation in mind.  The interplay of their ambitions, umpired by Franklin Roosevelt, produced a vector of forces that pointed at Normandy.  Still, there were alternatives that the Anglophones might have pursued.  One of those alternatives stemmed from the uncelebrated, barely remembered invasion of Italy that began in July 1943, eleven months before D-Day.

I was in London on business on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1984.  The commemoration in Normandy was elaborately done.  Thousands of American veterans made the trip.  On the day, Ronald Reagan made one of his finest speeches (“The Boys of Pointe du Hoc”).  My British colleagues were puzzled by the big deal the Americans were making of the fortieth anniversary of the event.

I thought I knew why.  Previous round-number anniversaries had provided an occasion first for the surviving political leaders, then in their turn the generals, and later the senior officers.  The fortieth anniversary was the moment for the men who had ridden the landing craft up to the shore, jumped into cold water, and stormed the beaches.  Or they had jumped out of planes or dropped bombs or fired at the shore from the armada that shepherded the invasion force.  The fiftieth anniversary might be more memorable still, but the warriors of 1944 were already in their 60s and couldn’t count on ten more good years.  The fortieth anniversary was the time to go.

At the time I didn’t ask why we were celebrating the invasion of Normandy while ignoring the earlier invasion of Italy.  Seventy-five years after this dramatic event, I would like to understand why the western allies chose to invade France at all.  The answers are not comforting.

Churchill had not favored a cross-Channel invasion.  The prospect of an attack through France must have conjured a repetition of the trench warfare that had bled Britain dry during the First World War.  Churchill preferred an attack through Italy, which he called the “soft underbelly of Europe”.  Italy offered an additional advantage.  Once the western allies had broken out of Italy, they could advance through the Hungarian Plain to attack Germany from the east.  German troops on the eastern front would be caught between the Anglophones on one side and the Soviets on the other.  The western allies had been active in Italy since July 1943 and were pressing northward during the planning and execution of the Normandy invasion.

Unfortunately, the Italian campaign was more difficult, the going slower and tougher than Churchill had anticipated.  The Allied command allowed itself to be sidetracked into liberating Rome when more important strategic targets were available.  In the Spring of 1944, the moment when the campaign could have succeeded, it suffered two setbacks.  First, additional forces were denied Italy and stockpiled in Britain in preparation for Normandy.  Second, forces were withdrawn from Italy to support Operation Sword, the invasion of France’s Mediterranean coast.  After the war, both the American commander in Italy, Mark Clark, and his German counterpart, Albert Kesselring, openly questioned the wisdom of weakening the Italian front in order to support an invasion of southern France, an area with little strategic importance.  The same could be said of the decision to divert forces from Italy to Normandy, although General Clark does not push this point.

Why invade two French coasts when success so much closer to the German frontier was possible?  The area in eastern Europe that would be occupied by the Anglophones if General Clark’s army had been able to break out to the north was where that other geopolitical strategist Josef Stalin intended to be operating during the late stages of the war.  He did not want anyone else getting there first.  From the moment that the United States entered the war, Stalin started calling for a second front.  When the western allies landed in north Africa, he continued the call.  The invasion of Italy did not satisfy him.  He did not consider Italy a “second front”.  The Normandy beaches are more than 700 miles west of the line that the western allies would have followed had they taken northern Italy and marched north toward Berlin from the east.

The decision to choose the high-risk invasion of a well-defended coast when Allied troops were already on the ground in Italy has set up a debate between the radical revisionist view of Diana West in her book “American Betrayal” and the conventional view that the Normandy invasion established the second front that ensured Allied victory in Europe in the Second World War.

An excellent defense of the conventional view comes from an unconventional source.  Conrad Black is a conservative who admires Franklin Roosevelt; his biography of FDR is subtitled “Champion of Freedom.”  Black points out that on the day the United States entered the Second World War, Japan, Germany, and Italy were governed by totalitarian dictatorships, while western Europe and vast territories in the Pacific were under military occupation.  At the end of the war, democracy was restored to France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway, while Italy, Germany (west of the Elbe), and Japan joined the club of liberal democracies.  Austria, once again independent of Germany, became neutral to accommodate the Soviets, as did Finland.  On this accounting, Mr. Roosevelt earned his subtitle.

A skeptic would note that when the treaties ending the First World War were signed, all of those nations were part of the community of liberal societies.  Japan had been an ally of Britain in the First World War and after the war wanted to continue its friendly relations.  (Britain declined the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty in 1922 at the insistence of the United States.)  Germany was a model republic (on paper), while France’s Third Republic was at the peak of its power.  Italy was soon to prove an exception when the life-long socialist Benito Mussolini instituted Fascism, a movement very similar to what would be called National Socialism in Germany and (after diluting the German version’s anti-Semitism and racism) Democratic Socialism in other places.  Italy aside, the skeptic could note that by 1945, the United States had done nothing more than achieve par.  It had recovered the ground that had been gained in 1919 and later lost.

However, achieving par in western Europe had come at a terrible cost in eastern Europe.  Communist control of Soviet territory was tenuous in 1919.  By 1945, Communist control of all of the Soviet Union was complete, the three Baltic republics had been digested courtesy of the 1939 treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the area of Soviet control had moved to the Elbe.  Even then, Stalin wanted more.  At the 1945 Allied conference in Potsdam, a Berlin suburb, an American official (Averill Harriman) asked Stalin why he looked glum at a moment of historical triumph.  Stalin’s reply was that “Alexander the First [the Czar who helped to defeat Napoleon] got to Paris.”

In contrast to the conventional and near-worshipful view of Roosevelt held by Mr. Black, Ms. West believes that the U.S. conducted the Second World War under the influence of Soviet agents.  She is convinced that the diversion of forces from Italy to Normandy was the work of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s Grand Vizier and, what is more, that Hopkins was a Soviet agent.

That the Roosevelt administration was honeycombed with Soviet agents is well-documented, although it is too often overlooked in the adulatory coverage afforded to Mr. Roosevelt by journalists and historians.  I have written before that the problem with conspiracy theories is that they require their advocates to force the facts to fit the theory.  They work backwards from conclusions reached before any evidence has been evaluated.

The belief that hundreds of Soviet agents held positions of influence in the Roosevelt administration does not suffer from these defects.  It is supported by plentiful eyewitness, physical, and documentary evidence that has held up under scrutiny and is internally consistent.  In fact, the behavior characteristic of the conspiracy theorist – dismissal of evidence that does not support a deeply held conclusion – is exhibited by those who deny that the conspiracy existed.

The existence of a Soviet network of spies active within the Roosevelt administration does not establish that Harry Hopkins was part of that network nor that he was acting at the direction of Soviet spymasters when he used his influence to carry out Stalin’s preferred role for US forces in Europe.

The Roosevelt worshipers will dismiss the possibility out of hand.  After all, Roosevelt was a “champion of freedom”.   It might disturb that camp to learn that Roosevelt was unconcerned about espionage in his administration.  In September 1939, Adolph Berle, an Assistant Secretary of State charged with managing internal security, disclosed to Roosevelt a report that Berle had received from an eyewitness (Whittaker Chambers) naming some two dozen Soviet agents who held posts in the administration.  One of the names was Laughlin Currie, a member of Roosevelt’s White House staff.  Incidentally, Chambers’s accusations have been confirmed by independent evidence, although the effort took decades in some cases.

Roosevelt’s reaction was to shoot the messenger.  Berle reported that the President had told him to “jump in the lake”.  (It seems that Berle was cleaning up his boss’s language.  Reading between the lines, it appears that Roosevelt’s actual suggestion involved a biologically impossible act.)  It is sobering to learn that the President was unworried about traitors even among his personal staff.  Still, that doesn’t mean that Hopkins was a spy.

There are at least two reasons for believing that Hopkins was not a Soviet agent.  First, Hopkins is mentioned in several intercepted Soviet dispatches (the “VENONA” telegrams), but always as an “asset” never as an agent.  Second, and more generally, achieving the pro-Soviet tilt of U.S. foreign policy during the Roosevelt administration required more than the efforts of some 500 Soviet agents, no matter how hard they may have worked on behalf of their adopted country.  That policy was the result of consensus, not conspiracy.  Consider a small sampling of the evidence:

• When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Roosevelt’s first impulse was to find a way to help the Soviets. In July 1941, he dispatched Harry Hopkins to Moscow to assess whether the Soviets would benefit from material aid from the United States.  Unsurprisingly, the Soviets were able to convince Hopkins that American aid would be well used.  But what need was there to take sides at all?  The United States was not at war; it was officially neutral.  Two murderous versions of the socialist vision had been allies from August 1939 (when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed) right up to the moment that the German attack began on June 22, 1941.  The Soviets had invaded Poland as agreed in their treaty.  They had actively supplied Germany with materiel and foodstuffs right up to the day Germany attacked.  What reason was there to favor one of these deviants over the other?  The standard answer is that the Soviets were able and willing to kill German soldiers.  That leaves unsaid that the Germans were able and willing to kill Soviet soldiers, who were just as dangerous.  And let us remember that both of these tyrannies were fully prepared to liquidate civilians on a massive scale and did so.
• In 1940, as the Soviets were absorbing eastern Poland, they murdered some 20,000 Polish officers. Stalin, ever the strategic thinker, did not like the idea of that many Polish patriots with proven leadership ability getting in the way of the permanent subjugation of Poland to the Soviet yoke.  Killing the Polish officers solved that problem.  When the bodies were discovered (still during the war) the Soviets blamed the atrocity on Germany.  The United States played along, in order not to upset an ally.
• After the war, high-ranking German officials were held to account for conspiracy to commit a “crime against peace” (among other things). The Soviet Union was one of the conspirators.  Would Germany have invaded Poland in 1939 without the assurances contained in the Nazi-Soviet Pact?  The answer is unknowable, but the fact is that Soviet diplomats and political figures ought to have been in the dock at Nuremberg rather than at the prosecutor’s table.  There was no practical way to put them on trial but there was no need to allow them to prosecute crimes that they themselves had committed and had facilitated.
• Also after the war, the Soviets demanded the return of some 500,000 Soviet soldiers who had ended up in the control of western governments via wartime contingencies. A return to the Soviet Union meant certain death for these unfortunates.  Even so, the western allies accommodated Stalin’s demand for their return.

The last two examples date to the Truman administration, supporting the thesis that the pro-Soviet tilt of U.S. foreign policy during this period cannot be attributed solely to the efforts of agents of the Soviet regime.  The policy preference in favor of the Soviets was far more deeply ingrained and more corrosive than can be explained by the work of spies, even if the network included moles prepared to do the bidding of their Soviet clients.

It did not require a spy in a key position in the Roosevelt administration to steer the Anglo-Canadian-American forces toward Normandy and shortly afterwards to the Rhone.  The western allies wanted to repay the sacrifices made by the Soviet armed forces and the Soviet people themselves.  Those sacrifices cannot be overlooked.  The Soviets suffered casualties in the millions, many times the casualties of the United States.  But anyone who thinks that Josef Stalin shed tears over those lost to the German invasion and swore that those honored dead will not have died in vain is mistaken.

The Normandy invasion fits the pattern of the many other accommodations made to the Soviets and to Josef Stalin particularly once the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on the same side in a war against Germany.  It suited Stalin’s purpose to keep the western allies occupied on the beaches of France while his forces pushed forward month by month through the end of 1944 and the first five months of 1945.  U.S. war plans always contemplated an invasion of France.  The Americans wanted allied troops in France headed west.  I have never seen a satisfactory explanation for why a massive Allied army moving northeast out of Italy would not have better served the cause.  Stalin’s geopolitical calculations and American sentiment outweighed Churchill’s original objections.  And Churchill has swallowed his objections.  By this time Churchill had adopted a policy of full-blown appeasement when it came to Stalin’s demands.

The second front that Stalin had demanded was opened at dawn on June 6 by an armada of some 6.000 ships carrying the largest amphibious invasion force ever assembled or likely to be assembled again.  As we know, they accomplished their mission.  Eisenhower was a master of logistics and planning.  He kept a fractious group of military commanders focused and under control.  The troops were brilliantly trained and demonstrated courage beyond our understanding as they swarmed ashore against an entrenched, battle-hardened enemy.  Their success on that day was well-earned and stands as one of the great military achievements of all time.

But imagine if that same force and all of the planning, training, courage, and fighting spirit that stormed Normandy had instead been applied to the Italian campaign.  We cannot know what would have happened on the path not chosen, but the opportunity was available to defeat Germany on terms that held Soviet tyranny within the boundaries it occupied at the moment in 1939 when it began to conspire with Germany to make war.

If I knew how to insert the image of a skull and cross-bones, I would place it here.

I tried this restaurant a couple of years ago and thought I would give it another chance.  The food and service have deteriorated since my last visit.

Service was inattentive.  We had problems with the delivery of silverware to the table.  Staff removed the original setting when they took away the first course.  They delivered the second course without bringing replacement utensils.  We waited.  No one returned.  I got up from the table to find our waiter.  When I told him we had no silverware, he said he would send someone over.

That is what he did, literally.  A busser came to the table to ask what we needed.  The waiter must have told him to “see what table 14 wants”.  What we wanted were forks, knives, and spoons – both entrees were served in a liquid sauce that called for a spoon.  He came back with multiple forks but only one spoon.  When I asked for a spoon for myself, I received, after an interval of only a couple of minutes, a small teaspoon.  It was useless for my intended purpose, but I should have hung onto it.  It would have come in handy later.

Incidentally, the diners at the next table had exactly the same problem.  Their entrees were delivered without silverware.  They waited patiently.  It was a relief to know that we weren’t being singled out.

Just as we finished our entrees, the waiter reappeared to ask if I would like another glass of wine.  A little late, but I give him points for thinking of it at all.

The low level of service begins when you enter the place.  The hostess made minimal eye contact and dropped her smile the second it was no longer needed.  (She should have given it another two seconds to avoid detection.  You never know who may be watching.)  That level of service continued right through dessert.  After we ordered it, nothing arrived.  When the waiter checked back to see how we had enjoyed the dessert, he seemed surprised that it hadn’t arrived.  Again, let’s award points for seeking our reaction but we also have to deduct points when the question about dessert is presented to a table that is missing a dessert.

To top it off, coffee was served in a mug with several deep chips in its surface and a handle that had been broken and mended – badly – with glue.  Cream arrived with coffee but without a spoon to stir it.  And I had let a precious teaspoon out of my grasp only a few minutes earlier!

I wonder – did the staff start off being inattentive and then graduate to not caring about quality of service, or did they not care in the first place and come to express the attitude through inattention?

Still, I would overlook – if not forget — these service issues if the food had compensated.  It didn’t.  It was bland, unimaginative, unmemorable.  A tagliatelle dish that was to have been flavored with truffles was instead overwhelmed with the flavor of garlic, while a veal preparation had no noticeable flavor to speak of.

I enjoyed the ambiance of the restaurant.  The décor is a pleasant combination of rustic and industrial elements.  The place is relatively quiet, considering the expanse of flat surfaces that can reflect sound.  I look forward to the next bistro to occupy the space.

Shortly after the death in 1942 of the great chess player Jose Raúl Capablanca, who had been world champion from 1921 to 1927, a reporter visited his widow at her New York apartment.  He wanted to see the great man’s chess set.  Mrs. Capablanca told the reporter that her husband had not owned one.

In the 1780s a man named James Wilmot, a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, a Doctor of Divinity and a rector of his church, a man of impeccable character and credentials, started scouring private libraries and collections in Warwickshire, where he had retired.  He was searching for books and papers that had belonged to William Shakespeare, who died in Stratford in 1616.  Imagine the insights scholars might glean from an early draft of a play or poem or even a marginal note left by Shakespeare in a book that had once sat on a shelf in his study or bedroom!

The good reverend found nothing.  He arranged for his notes to be burned shortly before his death.  He had developed the revolutionary theory that Francis Bacon wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare.  Better to destroy the evidence than to shake English literature to its foundation.

Wilmot was the first skeptic.  We have to guess at his reasoning – he burned his notes, after all – but it figures to be along these lines:  The man who wrote these plays and poems was possessed of such a lively mind that he would have had books at hand as he sounded the philosophical and poetic depths.  Time will turn every book to dust, but it needs more than the one hundred seventy years that had passed after Shakespeare’s death for that inexorable process to reach completion.  The traces left by a library assembled around 1600 would have survived to the 1780s.  Yet, not a hint of a book owned or possessed by the man Shakespeare could be found within fifty miles of his home.  Therefore, he did not possess the books.  Therefore, he did not have the kind of mind that could have written the plays.

There isn’t really any mystery here.  Capablanca and Shakespeare had something in common.  They didn’t bring their work home with them.  Shakespeare did his writing in London.  When he was in Stratford, he enjoyed his family and handled domestic business – property transactions, loans, lawsuits – that had filled his in-tray while he was away.

Even so, skeptics continue to claim that the man from Stratford did not write, could not have written the plays and poems attributed to him.  Such skepticism is born of snobbery.  His background is thought to have been too humble to have produced the man who wrote the plays, his commercial interests are said to be too banal to have been resident in the same brain that bodied forth the forms of things unknown.  The true author – as imagined by the skeptics – had to have been a person of refinement, university-educated, a member of the nobility (Earl of Oxford, perhaps) or the intellectual aristocracy (Francis Bacon, if you prefer).  On this view, the man from Stratford is an impostor.

William Shakespeare and Donald Trump don’t have much in common.  (Remember where you heard that.)  But they both have attracted their share of unbelievers.  Just as William Shakespeare’s authorship is held by skeptics to be an illusion, so is the election of Donald Trump held to be the result of collusion.  Similar reasoning is at work in both cases.

Think about the strikes against Mr. Trump, any of which ought to have been enough to sink him.  Democrats unite around a candidate, even a flawed one like Hilary Clinton, far more effectively than do Republicans.  In 2016, there was a substantial band of “Never Trumpers” in the Republican ranks.  The conservative establishment – National Review, Weekly Standard (RIP), George Will – was unalterably opposed.  The Bush wing of the Republican party was appalled.  The McCain wing was infuriated.  Mitt Romney went out of his way – no one asked his opinion – to make a speech detailing the disabling flaws presented by candidate Trump.  Meanwhile, the Democratic machine, including nearly all the news media, propped up Mrs. Clinton.  Literally, on some days.  So, Mr. Trump lacked a united party while his opponent had reliable support from hers.  (Remember Bernie Sanders saying “I don’t care about your emails, Hillary!”)

Mrs. Clinton outspent Mr. Trump two to one.  You can’t win an election for sewer inspector if your opponent has twice as much cash as you do.

Mr. Trump was prone to making outlandish statements, often because he had spent no time studying issues of public importance.  He altered his opinions on the fly.  (That came out wrong.)  He was opposed to policies that had been common ground for the American establishment since the second world war.  The US has promoted free trade; Mr. Trump is a protectionist.  The US has anchored its foreign policy to NATO; he wanted to withdraw.  The US establishment wanted to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Mr. Trump rejected it because he didn’t trust China – but China was intentionally excluded from TPP.  He wanted criminal charges against women who had abortions, a position that it was obvious that he adopted on the spot in response to a question he had not anticipated.  And so on.

Moderate swing voters, those deciders of elections, ought to have fled from the scary Mr. Trump to the familiar Mrs. Clinton, who had been part of our lives for a quarter century, going back to the early 1990s.

So how did this gaffe-prone, ill-prepared candidate with a divided party, facing hostile media find a way to win against an experienced candidate, widely admired by opinion leaders, who had two dollars to spend for every one he could come up with?

Mr. Shakespeare’s authorship and Mr. Trump’s election each had to have been the product of conspiracy.  The problem with most conspiracy theories – not all – is the evidence.  Too often, it has to be imagined.  For the two gentlemen under consideration, their critics have drawn a conclusion and then cut the evidence to fit.

Consider the Stratford man first.  In 1623, nine years after his death, Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues John Heminge and Henrie Condell published a book now known as the First Folio.  Their title:

William SHAKESPEARES Comedies, Histories & Tragedies,
Published according to the True Original Copies

The book contained 35 plays.  Heminge and Condell presented them as having been written by Shakespeare.  Incidentally, eighteen plays had not been published previously.  We owe these two gentlemen an enormous debt.

They placed his portrait at the start of the book.  They arranged for Ben Jonson to write two poems to appear in the Folio – a short one about the portrait and a long one about the man and his works.  Jonson and Shakespeare were colleagues and rivals, possibly friends.  It’s impossible to read the two poems (google: first folio Jonson) without concluding that Ben Jonson thought that Shakespeare wrote the plays included in the First Folio.

For example, Jonson gives us these lines:

My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome :
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

When Delia Bacon explained her views on the Shakespeare authorship to Ralph Waldo Emerson – she believed that her namesake Francis Bacon was the leader of a team of profound “wits” who had written the plays using “Will the Jester” as their front man – Emerson is said to have replied “Ben Jonson must be answered.”

Perhaps Jonson was in on the secret?  If so, he wrote the two poems seven years after Shakespeare’s death to help cement in place for all time the illusion that the man from Stratford had written these plays.  The First Folio poetry would be part of the conspiracy.  Indeed, if Shakespeare did not write the plays, he could hardly have kept the secret from Jonson, so Jonson’s knowing participation in the conspiracy would be the only explanation for his First Folio poems.

There is no evidence that there was a conspiracy of this kind, much less that Jonson was part of it.  It’s only when you start with the assumption that the man from Stratford didn’t write the plays that you are forced to invent the rest.  Evidence to the contrary has to be discredited, not because it lacks weight but because it leads to a conclusion that the skeptic has discredited from the start.

Apply the same reasoning to Donald Trump.  Given his political disabilities, he couldn’t have won the 2016 presidential election.  That’s the skeptic’s starting point.  All we need now is evidence to fit.  And where is that evidence?

I have written before that if Russia interfered in the 2016 election in any meaningful way (something that I personally doubt, but that’s not the point) it was by publishing stolen emails from Democratic party and Clinton campaign officials[i].  Mrs. Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of reduced participation by African American voters and a swing to the Republican ticket by blue collar workers.  It is doubtful that either group was influenced by the revelations that came from the stolen emails.

Robert Mueller and his team did not find the evidence that would have shown participation by the Trump campaign in whatever dirty tricks the Russian government pulled.  Whatever conspiracy took place, members of the Trump campaign weren’t part of it.  We are left with the conclusion that the most unconventional major party presidential candidate in American history won the 2016 election fair and square even after being outspent two to one and without the support of significant constituencies within the political party he had adopted.

Which is more surprising, harder to believe – that a small-town man from the county shires of England with a grammar school education wrote the most profound, the wittiest, and the most entertaining works ever penned in the English language, or that a big-city real estate developer with no political experience and a marked reluctance to finish a sentence after he has begun to speak it would be elected President of the United States?

[i] Interested readers are referred to “The Latest Mueller Indictments” posted July 15, 2017 (https://the-passing-scene.com/2018/07/15/the-latest-mueller-indictments/) and “Thoughts on the Opposition to Donald Trump” posted March 26, 2017 (https://the-passing-scene.com/2017/03/26/thoughts-on-the-opposition-to-donald-trump/)

In the year 376, tens of thousands of Goths arrived on the left bank of the Danube seeking entrance into the Roman Empire.  The petitioners included women, children, and the aged plus perhaps twenty thousand warriors.  They had loaded up their wagons to carry all the provisions and household goods that they could bring with them.

The Rhine and the Danube formed the natural boundaries of the Roman Empire in Europe but there was plenty of cross-border activity.  Some of this was friendly, as when Roman garrisons purchased supplies from their Germanic neighbors.  Yet, many people living on the German side of the rivers were tempted to raid the richer Roman side.  The Romans would cross a river now and then to punish the offenders while practicing rough diplomacy by rewarding favored leaders over troublemakers.

In the past, the Goths had lived far to the east.  In the third century, Goths living north of the Black Sea had raided Roman territory on the sea’s south shore.  In the century that followed, the Goths moved west.  In the 360s, Roman armies crossed the Danube to conduct punitive raids on miscreant Goths north of the river.

This was not the first time that non-Romans had sought entry into the Empire.  When the Romans granted a right of entry to foreigners, they did so with tight controls.  The price of admission was the draft of a designated number of young men into the army and the dispersal of the rest of the population to locations chosen by Rome.  The migrants were not permitted to retain a separate identity within the Empire.

The entrance of the Goths into the Roman Empire in 376 did not follow this pattern.  The Romans admitted half of the Goths as a group.  (Two different political groupings– the Tervingi and the Greuthungi – had sought entry.  Only the Tervingi were admitted.)  These Goths rolled into the Balkans and started living off the land.

Roman propaganda presented their arrival as a godsend.  By admitting the Goths, the (eastern) emperor Valens would gain the Goths’ manpower and their wealth.  Why, then, did the emperor admit only one of the clans, leaving the other to fend for themselves on the far side of the Danube?  (The Greuthungi forced their way across anyway.) The official Roman account of the incident omitted the detail that the main body of the eastern army was off in the desert fighting the Persians.

The entry of the Goths onto Roman territory was a turning point.  After 376, there would be at least one foreign force operating inside the Roman Empire against the will of the government.  It’s one of those odd coincidences that exactly one hundred years later the last western emperor would be deposed.

Were Rome’s borders leaking because of internal rot that disabled the Empire?  Or was the catastrophe the result of happenstance and a thick slice of bad luck?  Should we look to internal factors or external events to explain the one-hundred-year span that began with Goths on the Danube in 376 and ended with the dissolution of the central imperial government in the west in 476?  Edward Gibbon is the foremost example of the “internal rot” school.  Peter Heather is a contemporary historian who can meet Gibbon on his own ground as he makes a strong case – I think an overwhelming case – that outside factors are the chief explanation for the collapse.

Gibbon begins his history around 200 AD and concludes it with the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire when Ottoman Turks took the city of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453.  When I got to the last western emperor in 476, I put Gibbon aside for a while.  I may return later to read through to the bitter end in 1453.  When I stopped reading, my Kindle showed I was 30% of the way through the entire work.  That’s one measure of the monumental size of the project that Gibbon took on when he began his study in the mid-1760s.  The first volume of his masterwork was published in 1776, the last in 1788.

Three features in particular characterize the work: his use of sources; his writing style; his stern judgment upon the character of the individuals whose lives he chronicles.  He used primary source material whenever it was available.  He appears to have read everything, ancient and modern, primary and secondary, that there was to read on his subject.  It’s a measure of the educational level of his contemporary audience that he will sometimes quote extensive passages in Latin without offering a translation.  He didn’t think his readers needed one.

His style is distinctive, notable for its detached, Olympian posture.  He makes the elements of his sentences do extra work in a way that is all his own.  Four examples:

Speaking of the Greeks (a people he refers to as Grecians, just as George W. Bush did):

They had too much taste to relinquish their language, and too much vanity to adopt any foreign institutions.  Still preserving the prejudices, after they had lost the virtues, of their ancestors, they affected to despise the unpolished manners of the Roman conquerors, whilst they were compelled to respect their superior power and wisdom.

 

His evaluation of a Roman matron who was married to one emperor and the mother to another:

 

Her amiable qualities never made any deep impression on the dark and jealous temper of her husband; but in her son’s reign, she administered the principal affairs of the empire, with a prudence that supported his authority, and with a moderation that sometimes corrected his wild extravagancies [sic].

 

Comparing the respective importance of iron and precious metals to human progress:

 

Money, in a word, is the most universal incitement, iron the most powerful instrument, of human industry; and it is very difficult to conceive by what means a people, neither actuated by the one, nor seconded by the other, could emerge from the grossest barbarism.

 

Finally, a small joke.  Speaking of an emperor (Gordian II) who came to the throne as a young man and was murdered for his trouble:

 

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.

 

He must have chuckled as he sharpened his quill after writing that one.

 

Gibbon was a man of strong opinions who did not only report events.  He keeps the reader advised of his evaluation of the moral qualities of the actors upon the historical stage.  On his view, the empire began to fall when it adopted Christianity as the state religion in the first half of the fourth century.  Funds that might have been devoted to public works and to social improvement instead supported the state-sponsored church.  Taxation to pay for the state religion diverted funds away from the army, while the fighting spirit that had formerly fueled Rome’s expansion was wasted on civil war and excessive love of luxury.  The public spirit that had built a massive empire dissolved into the pursuit of office for private gain and dissipation.

Peter Heather can answer each of these points, but the biggest difference between the two comes from a more fundamental question.  Where Gibbon asks why the Roman empire collapsed, Peter Heather asks how did it last as long as it did.  At a time when there were no telecommunications, when the horse provided the fastest available ground transport, when banking, credit, data management, and administration were in primitive conditions, the Roman empire ruled some 70,000,000 people in Europe, Africa, and Asia.  It included all of Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube plus modern England and Wales.  Rome ruled northern Africa, including Egypt, from the Mediterranean south to the desert.  In Asia, the empire included modern Turkey, Armenia, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Sinai, and part of Iraq.

Heather estimates that the civilian administrators who managed the Roman Empire numbered perhaps 6,000 at their peak in the fifth century.  At the time the Goths crossed the Danube, the army might have been as large as 600,000 men, although some estimates are as low as 400,000.  Something less than one percent of the Empire’s population managed to protect and administer a vast domain using technology little better than what was available to the Babylonians.

Heather’s thesis is that this enterprise might have continued indefinitely.  In the third century, Rome faced a challenge from a revived Persian Empire.  Significant military losses had caused Rome to reform its finances and to rebuild its military.  Those efforts had been a success.  In the fourth century, the Roman army’s record against Persia had improved, although Persia was still a threat and won some important victories.  According to Heather, when the Goths arrived on the Danube in 376, the Roman Empire was in decent shape to withstand the emerging threat of large numbers of Germanic peoples on the move.

He does not believe that Christianity played a role in bringing down the Roman Empire.  The funds that were devoted to Christian endeavors had previously been spent on pagan temples and monuments.  Economically, Rome was as prosperous in the fifth century as it had ever been.  There was an agricultural boom going on in many parts of the Empire.  (That information is derived from archaeological studies that were not available to Gibbon.)

The empire enjoyed the deep loyalty of the elites who benefited from Roman citizenship.  Rome was a one-party state where violent death was the standard method for dealing with political opposition.  Throughout the empire’s history, with no established constitutional method for transferring power, there were frequent bloody struggles to get or to keep power.

Still, most of the Roman elite sought prestige, acclaim, and wealth rather than political power.  High-born Romans who could suppress a thirst for political power could enjoy a life of spectacular wealth, leisure, and refinement.  This upper ten percent or so saw Roman civilization as a model of how life should be lived.  They saw themselves as an example to the rest of humankind.  Before the conversion to Christianity, elite Romans believed they had been selected by the gods to achieve this mission.  After the conversion, they believed that it was God who had picked them.  It was the same ideal either way, and the change in the deity’s identity doesn’t appear to have been debilitating to the everyday functioning of Roman society.

On this view, Roman civilization was a success because it was able to deliver to its elites a version of the good life that they all shared.  While it was a one-party state that used violence to maintain political power, it did not require force to maintain the devotion of the elites who controlled the empire’s wealth.  There was no reason in 376 to think that things were going to start to unravel.  According to Heather, what brought the western empire down were forces acting outside the Empire’s borders plus some bad luck.

The Huns got the process rolling in the 370s.  Originally from the Steppe, the Huns began moving west in the middle of the fourth century.  They impacted Rome even when they were hundreds of miles east of the empire’s border.  In fact, Heather’s thesis is that the Huns did less damage when they were Rome’s neighbor – roughly the mid-430s to the mid-450s – than in the decades when they were moving towards Rome and in the brief period after 453 when Hunnic power collapsed.

It was the Huns who drove tens of thousands of Goths to the Danube at a moment when the eastern Roman army was off fighting Rome’s main enemy, Persia.  Now that hungry Goths were inside the Empire, the Roman plan was to temporize for the short term and then destroy the Goths in battle or by ambush and attrition as the opportunity arose.  The Roman plan to destroy the Goths was to have reached its climax in August 378.  The Goths were busy consuming the production of a large area of the Balkans, administered by the eastern empire.  They needed food and took it from the yeoman farmers of the Roman Balkans.

The eastern emperor, Valens, had made peace with Persia so that he could bring Roman military power to bear against these troublesome Goths.  By this time the Goths had wandered south and east to the vicinity of the town of Hadrianople.  The Roman plan was to catch the Goths in a vice.  Valens brought his army into the vicinity of the town of Hadrianople, facing Goths to the west.  The western emperor, Valens’s nephew Gratian, was to have brought an army from the western empire to the same location, attacking the Goths from the east.  But Gratian had been delayed by a disruption on the Rhine.  He was on his way, but Valens didn’t know where he was.

Valens faced a tough decision.  Half of his military advisors thought he should wait for Gratian.  The others thought an immediate attack was advisable.  This was the finest professional army the world had known to that point in time.  Yet the intelligence available to them was not good enough to support a decision either way.

The situation reminds me of what George A. Custer faced on the day before the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  He knew that his side had massive reinforcements available in the vicinity, but he wasn’t sure where they were and he didn’t have an easy way to communicate with them.  The enemy was directly in front of him.  He didn’t want them to get away.  He was sure his forces were superior.  He underestimated the size and quality of the force he faced.

The deciding factor may have been that Valens didn’t want to share the glory of the coming victory with his nephew.  On August 9, 378, he marched his army 12 miles in the hot sun to attack the Goths.  The terrain did not allow the Romans room to deploy their most effective tactics.  The Goths were thicker on the ground than the Romans had expected.  The eastern Roman army was routed.  Valens died in the course of the massacre of the troops under his command.

Rome and the Goths made peace in 382.  The Goths remained a coherent and viable nation inside the Empire.  In fact, when the end came, the first non-Roman king of Italy, the man who deposed the last emperor, was a Goth, although not from the branch of the Gothic nation that won at Hadrianople.

Even after Hadrianople, no one on the Roman side figured that the Goths were the thin end of a wedge that would lead to the collapse of the western empire.  Contemporary Romans continued to believe that the biggest threat to the empire came from Persia, not from the Germanic peoples of Europe.

After two tribes of Goths became a permanent feature of Roman political life, troubles boiled up every thirty years or so.  The period 405 to 410 saw the unfolding of four separate calamities.  Another wave started in the 430s and continued to the mid-450s.  A last Roman effort in 468 to retrieve the situation failed, leading to the end of imperial government in the west when the last German thrust came in 476.

That’s not to say that things were calm between outbreaks.  There were frequent civil wars over succession.  Provincial armies would rebel when they felt they were being disrespected by the central authority.  The power that went with the imperial purple attracted many who were willing to risk everything to gain it.  Heather’s argument is that these political crises strained the Empire but were not enough to bring it down.

The powerful point that seals his argument is this: the Eastern Roman Empire survived for a millennium after the fall of the west, during which it practiced Christianity as a state religion while facing crises of succession and challenges to the legitimacy of the emperor of the day, just as the western empire had done.  The eastern empire did not possess moral qualities superior to those of the west.  If internal rot was the cause of the collapse, why did the eastern empire survive?  I don’t know if Heather is the first historian to make this point. It was a palm-to-forehead moment when I first read it.

The story of the unraveling can be told without reference to any internal moral decay.  The catastrophe can be explained as the unfolding of the fortunes of war and the twists and turns of international politics and diplomacy.

As the fourth century ended, the Huns again shifted further west.  They engaged directly with the eastern empire in the Caucasus and they put fresh pressure on the Germanic peoples to the west.  If you were in the path of the Huns, your options were flight or surrender.  The Germans who escaped from the Huns produced another set of crises for the western empire in the second half of the first decade of the fifth century.  In 405, a Gothic army invaded Italy from the northwest – not the Goths who entered in 376 – and laid siege to Florence before they were done in by a Roman counterattack.  Tens of thousands of Vandals, Suevi, and Alans poured over the Rhine at the end of 406.  They had a merry time consuming whatever wasn’t nailed down in Gaul.  Then, to stay out of the way of the Roman army, the Vandals and their friends crossed the Pyrenees and settled for a time in Spain.  They divided the peninsula among themselves.  Meanwhile, Burgundians moved into a pleasant slice of eastern Gaul.

The capstone of the troubles of the “aughts” of the fifth century was the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410.  These were the Goths who had crossed the Danube in 376.  The two polities had formed into one supergroup, known as the Visigoths, that also included the remnants of the Gothic invaders of 405.  They had never been happy with the peace settlement of 382.  In 410, they were still looking for a permanent place to call their own and they were still being put off by the Roman government.

The Visigoths, united under a king named Alaric, had a long list of demands that they gradually whittled down in an effort to get the Roman government to grant them a place to settle.  They tried playing the Roman Emperor, sitting in Ravenna, against the Senate, still sitting in Rome.  When Alaric couldn’t get a decision out of either of them, he threatened to sack the City of Rome itself.  When the government failed to respond, the Goths moved into the city and looted it.

Both Gibbon and Heather agree that this was not a sack in the usual sense of the term.  There was minimal loss of life.  Christian Goths would lead nuns to safety before ransacking their churches.  The sack was part of a larger negotiation by which Alaric was attempting to find a permanent home for his people.  Alaric died in 411. The Goths had to wait until 418 for their long-desired permanent home.  They were settled in southwestern Gaul.  No doubt remnants of Gothic blood flow in the veins of the vintners and wine merchants of Bordeaux.

Even though the sack of Rome in 410 did not feature heavy doses of murder and assault, unlike the previous sack in the year 390 B.C., 800 years earlier, or the one that was coming in 455, the event demonstrated to contemporaries that the threats to the western empire had grown significantly from the problem presented by the arrival of the Goths in 376.  After the sack, the emperor of the day sent a letter to Britain telling its citizens that they could no longer look to the Roman army to defend them.  Britain was gone or going, Spain wasn’t producing any tax revenue, large segments of Gaul were under foreign control, and parts of Italy had been damaged by two different Gothic attacks.  Things threatened to spin out of control.

A political and military leader named Flavius Constantius helped pull things together against the odds.  He created an alliance with the Visigoths and with their help he started to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula from the Vandals, Suevi, and Alans.  He unfortunately died in 422, leaving a leadership vacuum in the west that lasted into the 430s.

His success against the Vandals and their friends led to the next major crisis.  The survivors of the Roman counterattack joined with the Hasding Vandals, who had avoided an encounter with Roman troops, to form a new Vandal supergroup.  They decided that their hold on Spain was insecure and couldn’t last.  They decamped to North Africa in 427.

Meanwhile, the last great hero of the western empire, a man named Flavius Aetius, came to power in 433.  He effectively recaptured Gaul for Rome.  With the Vandals and friends mostly out of Spain, things were once again looking up for the western empire.

As the 430s closed and the 440s opened, the next round of crises arrived right on schedule.  The Vandals had been granted land in the western provinces of Roman Africa, where, it was hoped, they wouldn’t create any more trouble.  They wanted more.  They moved east in the late 430s and in 439 captured the city of Carthage.  This was the second city of the western empire, a massive port that supplied grain to Rome.  With Carthage gone, the west would starve.

The two halves of the empire planned an invasion to dislodge the Vandals.  A huge armada of naval and land forces was assembled in Sicily in 441 to invade Africa and reclaim Carthage.  The attack had to be called off.  The Huns had arrived on the Hungarian plain and were invading the Balkans.  It would take some 25 years to organize another expedition.

The Huns were approaching the peak of their power.  They were under new leadership from two brothers, Attila and Bleda, who had inherited power from their uncle around 440.  As Heather explains it, a Hunnic leader got and kept power by leading his troops to fresh conquests, receiving tribute from conquered peoples, and distributing a large share of the goods to his followers.  Every success resulted in more people within the Hunnic tent.  To keep the leaders of the new members of the club happy, more conquests were needed.

That may explain why the Huns kept moving west.  Their early victims would have been farmers and shepherds out on the Steppe.  There is only so much lucre to be gained from people who earn their living that way.  The peoples of the area north of the Black Sea would have offered better value.  When the Huns encountered the Roman Empire, first in the east, later in the west, they had hit the motherlode.

The key to the Huns’ success was the design of the bow that was their principal weapon.  They used a recurve design – the tips of the bow pointing away from the archer – but this had been in use for millennia.  Their bows were exceptionally long, ranging from 130 cm (51 inches) to 160 cm (63 inches).  The Huns were mounted archers. A bow that long cannot be used from horseback – the horse’s neck would get in the way.  The Huns found a brilliant solution.  Their bows were asymmetric.  The lower half had a much smaller arc than the upper.

This design allowed a mass of Huns to fire arrows from horseback at a distance.  The enemy’s weapons could not reach them, while the Huns could rain down masses of arrows on their victims.  Eventually, the opposition broke in panic under the stress produced by the flood of arrows.  Once the enemy had broken ranks, the Huns could run in on horseback and pick off individuals or small groups.

By 445, Atilla had eliminated his brother and was the sole ruler of a vast territory.  He had many more mouths to feed than before, but he had found a way to bring thousands of pounds of gold into the Hunnic empire every year.  The eastern empire was prepared to deliver massive quantities of gold, 21,000 pounds in some years – that would be $400,000,000 at 21st-century gold prices – to buy peace.  Atilla distributed that gold to stay in power.  Gold appears in Germanic graves in significant quantities during this period.

Atilla’s record against the western empire was mixed.  He sometimes allied with Rome to attack other groups.  Sometimes he attacked Roman assets.  His army invaded Italy on one occasion, Gaul on another.  The western Romans held their own in battle against Atilla.  They ended his reputation as an invincible force.

Atilla died suddenly in 453.  His sons were not able to keep his enterprise together.  Hunnic power began to collapse.  Heather believes that the Hunnic empire did more damage to Rome by collapsing than it did during the short period when it was Rome’s neighbor.  With the Huns no longer around to control them, the formerly subject peoples were now free to join forces and go on the road to attack Rome.  While the Roman contenders for political power continued the merry game of assassination, civil war, and treachery to determine who would control the high offices of the empire, new waves of Goths, Franks, Alemanni, and others invaded the west.  The Vandals made a visit to Italy and sacked Rome in 455.  Unlike the sack of 410, this one was done with malicious intent.  The Vandals cemented their future place in the English language by looting, plundering, and assaulting at will.

But even after all of this mayhem, the Roman empire was able to function and had a decent shot at a comeback.  The expedition to regain Carthage that was postponed in 441 was laid on in 468.  Some 1,100 vessels, every ship the Romans, east and west, could find, were ready to sail.  Some 50,000 troops were on board.  The plan was to sail to a point near Carthage, form up on land, invade, and retake the city.

The flotilla arrived off a body of land known as Point Bon.  The Roman commander, Basiliscus, chose that spot because it was close to Carthage, leaving the troops a short march to retake the city once they had landed.  In hindsight, a location further away might have been preferable.  An invasion that close to Carthage allowed the Vandals to keep track of Roman dispositions.

Even so, all might have been well.  The Roman navy was positioned on the east side of the Gulf of Tunis.  The prevailing winds in that area at that time of year are easterly.  The wind would allow the Romans to maneuver at will, and would hold off any opposing forces of the Vandals.  As Heather notes, with Carthage and north Africa back in the Roman fold, the western empire might have gone on for centuries.  It would not have been the overpowering force it had been in, say, 350, but it would have been a serious contender for power.

The possibility of Rome’s survival floated away on a changing wind.  A northwest wind, unusual at that time of year, began to blow the Roman ships toward shore.  Roman sailing vessels were square-rigged; the only way they could move into the wind was by oar.  Most vessels weren’t equipped with galleys for rowers.  Even those with galleys had to surrender to an unfavorable wind when the strength of the rowers gave out.

While the Romans were sorting things out, the Vandals used the wind at their backs to launch fire ships into the middle of the Roman fleet.  A wooden sailing vessel has no defense against fire.  The invasion fleet was wrecked in a matter of hours.  The operation was called off.  There was nothing left for the western imperial government to do but wait for the end.

It was another branch of the Goths, the Ostrogoths, who delivered the final blow.  Oddly, the final stroke was a legal maneuver.  The Ostrogothic king, Odoacer, appeared before the Roman Senate with a clever proposal.  He arranged for the Senate to send a letter to the eastern Roman emperor, stating that it had proven cumbersome to have two emperors, one in Italy, the other at Constantinople.  For the future, the Senate would recognize the eastern emperor as the sole imperial authority.  Italian affairs could be managed by an official based in Rome.  They had recognized Odoacer as the King of Italy and they suggested that the emperor do the same.

The last emperor in the west was named Romulus, the same as Rome’s first king, who founded the city in 753 BC according to legend.  Known as Romulus Augustulus (“little Augustus”), the last western emperor was allowed to retire to a castle controlled by the new king.  The date of his death is not known but there is no record of his assassination.  Roman emperors were not replaced peacefully as a rule.  It appears that Odoacer did not think killing Romulus to be worth the trouble.

Odoacer collected the imperial crowns and robes, boxed them up, and shipped them off to the emperor in Constantinople.  The western empire assigned its assets for the benefit of creditors while remaining subject to the technical control of the now sole emperor.  The emperor signed off on the deal and that was that.

Central government ended but some aspects of the Roman way of life continued.  Some, but not all.  The Roman way of life was lived in cities, and the cities started to empty.  The population of the city of Rome fell from over a million (possibly 1.5 million) in the fourth century to 20,000 in the sixth.  Rome had been the first city to achieve a population that large.  The second city to do so was London in the nineteenth century.

But in other places, parts of the Roman way of life continued.  Small villages that were away from the main invasion routes survived.  In some more heavily populated districts, local and regional Roman elites found a way to stay in place.  When there was land left over after the head man of the local invasion force had paid off his followers, Roman landowners could retain a foothold.

Roman law was still applied in many cases and local Roman elites could supply the knowledge and the literacy to help administer government.  Roman coin still circulated.  Churches continued Roman religious traditions and practices.  Henri Pirenne is a historian who argues convincingly that the Mediterranean orientation that was a principal feature of Roman civilization remained after the fall of the central government and continued until Arab invasions closed off the Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Indeed, some historians go further and claim that nothing really “fell” in the late fifth century, that all that happened is that one elite replaced another.  There is precedent for that kind of “fall”.  The Norman invasion of England in 1066 is the prime example.  Several thousand Anglo-Saxon landowners were dispossessed and replaced with a like number of Normans, but the underlying population remained unchanged.

Heather is firm that something more complicated happened in fifth-century Rome.  Many archaeological sites reveal a destruction layer that can be dated to this period.  There is abundant historical and archaeological evidence that significant numbers of Germanic peoples (and others – the Alans were Iranian) crossed the rivers and settled on Roman territory.

One of the real pleasures of reading Professor Heather is his willingness to show his work.  He uses his clear conversational writing style to explain and evaluate the nature of the documentary and physical evidence that underlies his conclusion.  He has a fine sense of humor combined with a deep understanding of the way Roman society operated.  He doesn’t appear to be grinding an axe or advocating an ideology.

In the introduction to “Empires and Barbarians” he gives us a tour of some of the intellectual history that has colored the way historians and anthropologists have studied human migration.  The earliest work in the field was conducted in the nineteenth century by a German archaeologist named Gutav Kossinna.  Herr Kossinna believed that when the archaeological record revealed a significant change – when for example evidence of agriculture is found in a layer above remains left by hunters – the explanation was that agriculturists had invaded space previously occupied by hunters and had eliminated the people that were there when they arrived.  As Heather notes, an equally good explanation might be that hunters had adopted farming without anyone invading, or that farmers moved into ground occupied by a hunting culture and the two lived side by side for a time until the hunters adopted the farming way of life or were gradually replaced.  And so on.

The invasion theory was popular among German academics, so much so that when in the 1930s and 1940s the Germans again took up the old habit of crossing rivers to conduct military operations, they often rearranged boundaries and place names to correspond to their understanding of the lessons taught by archaeology.

After the second world war, academics wanted to disclaim any association with the invasion hypothesis.  Where Kossinna saw a “movement of peoples” his successors saw “elite replacement.”  Kossinna saw migrants leaving an empty spot on the earth at the point where their migration began and destroying or overwhelming the population they encountered in the place they selected for settlement.  The horror that resulted from the implementation of this theory during the National Socialist period of German history led the post-war generation to an interpretation where populations remained largely stable with only the very top slice of the social pyramid undergoing change.

The truth seems to be that the German migrations of the fourth and fifth centuries were not transfers of elites in the manner of 1066.  They were movements of groups that could include up to 100,000 or so individuals, men and women of varied ages and conditions, of whom perhaps 20% were warriors.  At the same time, these were not proto-nations.  Groups formed and re-formed on the fly as they faced opportunities and challenges – from the Romans or the Huns depending on the situation at the time.  Although they did a great deal of destruction and killing, they did not simply wipe out the populations that were in place at their destinations.

Heather also notes that it was the increase over the course of centuries of the complexity and sophistication of German political organization that gave the invaders a chance for success.  It wasn’t internal rot but internal Roman strength that created this final problem for Rome.  Rome set the Germanic peoples a challenge that they were able to meet only after centuries of contact with Rome.  Even so, they needed luck to succeed.  Change a decision by the Roman leadership at Hadrianople in 378, let the African command keep a closer eye on the Vandals as they moved across northern Africa in the 430s, pick a day for retaking Carthage when the prevailing easterly winds held at Point Bon in 468, and the western empire might have endured in some form for centuries.

Sources:

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01H23KONK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, A New History. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0044KLOXO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians, The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0035KD36U/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

To paraphrase a Swiss scholar: “When angels in heaven are at work, making music to the greater glory of God, they play Bach.  But when they are at home, they play Mozart.”

I wager that while those angels are commuting, they sing “E nel tuo, nel mio bicchiero” from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

Cosi is a late opera, first performed in January 1790, less than two years before the composer’s death.  It is the third and last opera that Mozart composed in partnership with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte.

The plot is feather light.  Fiordiligi (soprano) and her sister Dorabella (mezzo) are in love with two dashing soldiers, Guglielmo (bass) and Ferrando (tenor).  The men idolize the women, so much that they accept a bet from an old cynic, Don Alfonso, who claims that he can prove the sisters, like all women, have feet of clay. (Cosi fan tutte – All women are like that.)

With the approval of the two friends, Alfonso prepares his trap.  He tells the ladies that their lovers have been called to war.  (At no point do the sisters ask when the war started, what caused it, who the enemy is.)  The men sail away.  Don Alfonso then introduces two Albanian gentlemen to the ladies.  To spare you the suspense, these Albanians are Guglielmo and Ferrando in disguise.

Each Albanian tries to win the affection of the sister whose heart belongs to his friend.  Guglielmo proceeds to seduce Dorabella, who gives in with no more than a token struggle.  Ferrando has a lot more trouble winning the affections of Fiordiligi.  Her resistance produces two magnificent arias, one in each of the two acts, but eventually she gives way.

The two couples sign marriage contracts.  (When local law forbade presenting religious ceremonies on stage, librettists used marriage contracts to get the idea across.)  At that moment, Fiordiligi lifts her glass in a toast to drown bitter memories – the loss of old lovers, the struggle to deny new ones – and to celebrate the sweet surrender at battle’s end.

Her words – “And in your glass and mine – E nel tuo, nel mio bicchiero — may every thought be drowned and may no memory of what is past remain in our hearts” (like most operatic texts, it sounds better in Italian) – are sung to a melody of ethereal beauty, a gentle arc lightly decorated and anchored by sustained notes.  Mozart’s ability to address the nerve endings in our skin by tightening and releasing tension in each measure and each phrase of his music is on full display in this number.

As Fiordiligi finishes the first phrase of her toast, as the audience is transported by the beauty of the moment, Mozart adds to the magic.  Ferrando joins Fiordiligi, starting the melody from the beginning as she moves to the next strain.  The two sing in counterpoint, each voice enhancing the beauty of the other.  As Ferrando finishes the first phrase, Dorabella joins in.  Now three voices gently entwine with each other.

The effect is otherworldly.  As Dorabella finishes the first phrase of her song, the orchestra and singers prepare us for Guglielmo to join in so that we can hear this lovely melody sung as a perfect canon in four voices.  At this climactic moment, Mozart reminds us that this stunning beauty is in service to an illusion.  The ladies are toasting weddings that are not going to take place, memories that are not going to be drowned.

Mozart was not only a great composer.  He was a master psychologist and dramatist.  He has more to do than express the happiness of lovers about to be married.  Ferrando took up Fiordiligi’s song because he was overwhelmed by the moment, even though he must know further back in his mind that the toast is an illusion and that he will soon return to Dorabella (if she will have him).  Not so Guglielmo.  He does not provide the canon’s fourth voice.  He sees things for what they are.   In a raw melody with no effort to blend in with the three voices above his, he sings “I wish those bitches were drinking poison.”

The number takes only two minutes to perform but it encapsulates the power of Cosi.  The plot is so light that a gentle breeze would blow it away.  The audience cannot simply suspend disbelief; we have to leave it outside the theater door.  Yet this thin story, thanks to Mozart’s magnificent music, puts the four lovers and their supporting players under the microscope in ways that more serious and more realistic tales too often fail to do.  The opera ends with the lovers paired as they were at the beginning.  The couples have been rejoined; we can doubt that they are reunited.

The best way to hear the piece is in context, as part of the entire opera.  Wikipedia lists more than thirty recordings in an entry titled “Cosi fan tutte discography.”  I like the 1962 recording with Karl Böhm conducting and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf as Fiordiligi, but I doubt that there is a bad recording. YouTube offers five full-length video presentations.  The opera deserves to be seen as well as heard, so one of these might serve, and the price is right.

If you want to hear the two-minute piece on its own, search “e nel tuo, nel mio” on YouTube to find half a dozen or so selections.  If you choose one of the video presentations, do invest two more minutes and listen to the Böhm-Schwarzkopf sound recording.  The conductor and singers were all major artists in their day and provide a perfect ensemble.  Music to see an angel home after a long day at work.

Many years ago, I made a business trip to Turkey.  When I went to the airport to fly home, my departure became complicated.  I was booked on Lufthansa. Their ticket counter was abandoned when I arrived at the airport.  The army guy standing nearby – Turkey was under military government at the time – looked at me, raised an eyebrow and asked “Lufthansa?”

“Yes! Lufthansa!” I was happy to find such a helpful person.  He said, “Come back tomorrow.”

I saw an Air France counter at the end of the terminal.  They had a flight to Paris in an hour and were happy to take my Lufthansa ticket in exchange for a seat in “club” class.  The main benefit of club class was that your kneecap didn’t crack if the passenger in front of you happened to recline his or her seat.  That benefit became academic, as my traveling companion and I were the only passengers in the front of the plane.

As soon as we were in the air, I wanted to buy a drink.  A week in Istanbul can have that effect.  Air France was offering beer and wine in club class at no (extra) charge, but I wanted something stronger. In those days, you could pay cash on an airline. I had a wallet loaded with Turkish Lira, not by choice.   I offered a handful of them in exchange for a much-desired and un-Gallic gin and tonic.

As happy as Air France had been to take my Lufthansa ticket, they turned their nose up at my Turkish lira.  If I wanted a drink, I had to pay in US Dollars.  Of course, they would have taken francs – this was pre-Euro – but I didn’t have any.

I see that the US trade deficit in December was the highest it has been in ten years.  This was reported as a “blow” to President Trump.

Possibly he sees it that way.  He shouldn’t.  It’s a sign of good times that our economy is so productive that consumers have a surplus that allows us to acquire the production of other countries as well as our own.  And, unlike the situation I faced on Air France, when the seller would not accept the paper currency in my pocket, the world of sellers outside the US is happy to accept green paper printed by our government in exchange for real, tangible goods and services.  They will take our paper in exchange for items that they have worked hard to produce.

And what will happen to the US Dollars cramming foreign wallets and pockets after the exchange?  When does the “blow” fall?  Some of those dollars will be used to buy goods that Americans produce.  Others will be used to buy services like software, movie distribution rights, patent licenses, insurance, to name a few.  There is more to trade than the exchange of physical goods.  The US has a trade surplus in services.

Non-US persons use dollars to buy US government debt instruments, which helps to finance those fabulous services – VA Hospitals, Social Security offices, military procurement, to name but three – for which the federal government is so well-known.

Still other dollars will be invested in the private economy and will finance construction, factories, purchases of capital goods, not to mention high tech ventures that are more of a gamble.  The dollars that flow out as we buy goods made abroad flow back because the US economy is attractive to investors.

And some dollars will never come back to the US.  There are lots of products traded overseas that are priced in US Dollars.  Civil aircraft and oil come to mind.  In many parts of the world, US Dollars are more welcome as a medium of exchange than the local currency.  Each dollar represents a claim on the US economy; where’s the “blow” when a chit is issued to someone who never redeems it?

I don’t mean to suggest that government has no role to play in trade.  Government has an interest in regulating the purchase and sale of military hardware and strategic materials, not to mention illicit items like drugs and pornography.  There is a legitimate public interest in inspecting food and pharmaceuticals for safety and purity. And government should control commerce with places that are outside the law, such as police states, terrorist states, and conquest states.  Regulating along these lines is in service to acknowledged governmental functions: foreign policy, national security, public safety and health.

More generally, government can facilitate trade in innocent goods and services between honest (or at least not dishonest) parties.  It’s great that governments will for a modest fee maintain ports and roads to facilitate commerce, a court system to clean up the occasional mess, and a central bank to manage the monetary system that lubricates the whole system.

It’s when government wanders from facilitating trade to managing it that problems arise.  Tariffs are too often sought by rent-seeking domestic producers.  The cry that foreigners are “dumping” goods in the US means “I can sell you the exact same thing for a higher price.”  I recall the satire composed by Frederic Bastiat about the candlemakers of Paris.  The imagined candlemakers demanded that government require homeowners to cover their windows to counteract the unfair competition from the Sun, who supplied light for free, which undercut the candlemakers and deprived them of their livelihood.

The deficit on visible trade may be a “blow” to Mr. Trump because he insists, against all the evidence, that it’s a loss to the US when a US person buys something produced outside the US.  His political opponents will argue that the trade deficit shows how his policies have failed.  If you’re not engaged in politics, it’s good news.

Stacey Abrams took on the thankless task of providing the opposition party’s response to Tuesday’s State of the Union address.  Each year, the party that does not hold the White House selects a promising younger figure to answer the President’s speech.  In most cases, he or she promptly flops in front of a national audience.  It’s hard to impress TV viewers who have been bedazzled by the pomp of a presidential address from the podium of the House of Representatives, punctuated by ovations to those seated in the gallery, which is filled on this occasion with people who have survived the most daunting personal challenges.  As those in the gallery are pulled to the national bosom, the President who highlights them hopes to draw some of the resulting warmth to himself.  It seems to work.

Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio have each swung and missed when their party offered them an at-bat after a State of the Union address from President Obama.  In contrast, I thought Stacey Abrams did a creditable job.  She was eloquent, forceful, articulate, and poised.  It’s only when I look at the content of her remarks that I take issue.

Ms. Abrams began her speech by telling us about her family.  I was not surprised to learn that both of her parents were hard-working.  I have not heard a politician speak of parents who were not hard-working.  I am waiting for an elected official to tell us “My parents maintained a good work-life balance.  They took care of our family but they used time off whenever possible and didn’t work any harder than they had to.”

It’s a high-risk approach.  If you are thinking of going into politics and your parents were not especially hard-working, I recommend that you find a different line of work.

Ms. Abrams’ father was generous as well as hard-working.  She told how the family went out looking for her father one rainy night (this was in Georgia, by the way) to find him walking without his coat, soaked to the skin.  He had given his coat to a homeless man.  The incident drove home to young Stacey the message that no one gets by without help from other people.

True enough.  We all have an obligation to help others.  What I object to is the conversion of that moral obligation that we each impose on ourselves into a legal obligation to be imposed on us by other people.  Father Abrams helped that homeless man of his own free will.  I fear that his daughter intends to extract coats by force from the rest of us.  If you don’t give up your coat, those whose impulses are more charitable than yours can jail you, fine you, and seize your assets, at their option.  To be accurate, you don’t have to give up a coat, just the money to buy it plus an overhead charge for those who will keep the books, write the memos, and audit the complex process that results from the commandeered transfer.

I have the highest regard for the father who gave up his coat.  I have respect for the energy and passion of his daughter who wants to see her father’s example multiplied.  I only wish she would use the power of his example to preach her message in church and forego the temptation to use the power of the state to accomplish purposes for which it is not suited.

Like most people, I get a lot of unwanted calls on my mobile phone.  (I get them on my landline, too, but I don’t want to lose credibility with younger readers by mentioning that I have one.)  In the last week or so, a new feature appeared on my android phone.  If the phone thinks the caller is illegitimate, it gives me the option to have Google screen the call.

Google answers the call and recites the message that the owner of the phone is using Google to screen calls.  It invites the caller to state his/her name and the reason for the call.  Without fail, the caller ends the call without leaving a message.  It’s a terrific service that appeared out of nowhere.  If Google wants to skew my search results in exchange, I think it’s a fair trade.  In fact, it’s pure gain to me, since they were skewing search results anyway.

Unfortunately, a scam caller got through to me about an hour ago.  I was in my car. I didn’t want to take my attention off the road to see who was calling and to hit the “screen call” button if needed.  Instead, I accepted the call through my car’s Bluetooth.

The caller was a young-sounding woman who told me she was calling from H-P.  My service contract was about to expire and she wanted to run a check on my laptop while it was still under contract.  I no longer have an HP laptop and I never had a service contract, so there was no question this was not a legitimate call.

I thought I would try to meet the caller on her own terms.  It’s the season when we should reach out to our fellow pilgrims upon the surface of the earth.  I told her that I had a strict limit of two scam calls per day.  Unfortunately, two other people had gotten to me before she had.  I told her that if she would like to call back tomorrow, I would be happy to take her call and let her try to scam me.

I had expected her to step back.  She had entered my car by placing a mask between us.  By putting a second mask into the scene, I had expected, or perhaps I had only hoped, that we could both put our masks aside and have a good laugh over her earnest attempt to open and then empty my wallet and my cheerful parry.

Instead, she doubled down.  She assured me that this was not a scam, that her only purpose was to ensure the continued efficient operation of my HP laptop, and that my best course was and would continue to be to allow her to walk me through the HP-tested procedures for maintaining the health of my computer.

I thought that this was not playing the game.  She had been found out.  She ought to have put down the mask and shared a laugh.  Instead, she continued to try to scam me.  For a second time, I invited her to call back tomorrow – early, before the other scammers make their attempts.  She told me she was going to cancel my HP service contract and hung up.

I wish her no ill will.  We all must find a way to put food on the table.  A Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season to her and, more importantly, dear reader (without whose continued support I would be forced to shutter this blog), to you.