Practicing History

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  More fundamentally troublesome to Japan’s foreign relations than the disability or disinclination to use Occidental tactics in the practice of diplomacy is the combination of an inferiority and a persecution complex which she feels vis-à-vis the West. The original cause lies in the fact that at the time the white man first set foot in the Orient, he was able to assume and hold a superior attitude; the attitude of teacher to pupil, of governor to subject. Though in Japan this unjustified relationship no longer exists, traces of its influence will not be obliterated for a long time. Sixty years ago the Japanese made up their minds that the only way to end an unequal association would be to adapt to themselves the civilization of the West. They have succeeded, but at the cost of part of their own integrity. For now the Japanese live under a system not their own; it is one which they have copied. They have become imitators, and an imitator can never feel himself the equal of an originator.

  Although well concealed behind an aggressive front, the sense of inequality is always present to make Japan suspect a slight or threat in every act of her neighbors. She is, for instance, extremely sensitive to any possible slur on her position as a major power. With that in mind one realizes that her demand for naval parity is due less to strategical reasons than to a desire to have her status as a major power vindicated before the whole world.

  Where her sensitivity is even more acute is in the realm of racial prejudice. Apropos of anti-Japanese activities in the United States, a Tokyo newspaper says: “A contributing factor to this agitation is racial. We, who take pride in the fact that we are one of the three greatest nations in the world, and comparable in any way with any foreign country, cannot tolerate the slight put upon us by the Americans.”*7

  Although Japan’s racial sensitivity has undoubtedly received provocation from without, especially from the United States, her quickness to see a threat in every act of her fellow nations is born of an inherent feeling of insecurity. This in turn generates a persecution complex which finds expression in Japan’s shrill cries of “Danger!” each time one of her neighbors makes a move. For example, American naval maneuvers in the western Pacific last summer were denounced as being actuated by the desire “to dominate over”*8 Japan, and an announcement of the proposed trans-Pacific air route was described as “exposing to the whole world the United States’ aggressive plans against the Far East.”*9 And that perennial irritant, the naval ratio system, calls forth this characteristic comment: “It passes the understanding of the Japanese that the equality proposal, so fair and just, should have failed to find the support of Great Britain and the United States, except on the theory that the Anglo-Saxon races are bent on arresting the advance of the Yamato race.”*10

  In these conditions the relations between Japan and the West will continue to present most difficult problems of diplomacy.

  * * *

  Foreign Affairs, April 1936.

  *1 From the Jiji, July 10, 1935. (This and subsequent quotations are taken from the Japan Advertiser’s daily translations of editorials appearing in the vernacular press. The sources given, however, refer to the Japanese paper in which the particular passage was originally printed.)

  *2 Major-General Itagaki, Assistant Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, quoted by Rengo News Agency in the Japan Advertiser, April 24, 1935.

  *3 Miyako, April 20, 1935.

  *4 Gaiko Jiho (Revue Diplomatique), August 1935.

  *5 Jiji, January 5, 1935.

  *6 Translation of the pamphlet printed by the Japan Advertiser, May 28, 1935.

  *7 Miyako, February 19, 1935.

  *8 Ibid., May 1, 1935.

  *9 Nichi Nichi, April 26, 1935.

  *10 Kokumin Domei, February 13, 1935.

  Campaign Train

  “HERE COMES THE BOSS NOW,” said one of the newspapermen indifferently. It was dark on the station platform, with only a few lights shining through the rain. Reporters and photographers who were going along on the campaign tour stood around in slickers, talking in small groups. The President climbed on board in silence. There were no greetings; no one said anything. Only a Secret Service man standing on the rear platform, every muscle alert, his head turning this way and that, his eyes darting over the groups of men below as if to ward off any hostility, gave one a sense of excitement.

  Our first stop the next morning was Thomas, a little mining town in West Virginia. Because of the rain none of us knew whether the President would take the drive through the hills that had been planned. Dr. Ross McIntire, his physician, came out on the platform, looked worriedly at the sky, shook his head as he held out his hand to the rain, and went in again. “Old Doc Mac doesn’t like it,” said one of the reporters. “He gets worried sick if the President gets his feet wet.” But Roosevelt came out anyway, and as he climbed into the open car shrill cheers broke from the hillside, where people from miles around had been waiting patiently in the rain to see the President. Their faces as we drove by were all slightly agape with a look of delighted wonder at being visited by the nation’s number-one celebrity.

  We made five stops at mining towns, each one bigger and grimier than the last. The crowds, too, grew in size and enthusiasm till we reached Fairmont, where there were over fifteen thousand massed in the station, the streets, on the bridge and housetops. At one stop I shoved in among the crowd, hoping to hear revealing comments, but all I heard was, “There he is! No, that ain’t him. Sure that’s him,” which was no help in predicting how West Virginia’s eight electoral votes would go. No distinguished guests were in our party, but just before each station we would make a short stop and several cigar-smoking, well-fed gentlemen in thick overcoats would climb on. These, in the words of the irreverent press, were the “local boll weevils”; they would then appear on the rear platform, smiling and graciously waving to the crowd, which was so proud to see its home-state leaders traveling with the President.

  At these stops the newspapermen would rush back to hear the President express his joy at seeing smoke coming out of the chimneys again and tell about that telegram he had “just received” announcing the first year in fifty-five with no national-bank failures. As he finished, everyone would clamber back on board, disappear into separate compartments, and immediately fill the train with the sound of clicking typewriters. Nearing Pittsburgh, we wondered why no release of the speech was forthcoming, the delay, some said, being to safeguard against a possible Landon spy wiring its contents on to Al Smith in New York. As a matter of fact, although there were many pro-Landon papers represented, there were very few pro-Landon journalists. One reporter told me that while eighty percent of the newspaper owners are Republican, eighty percent of the individual journalists are pro-Roosevelt. And there is the story of the still unpublished poll taken by the Herald Tribune of fifty editorial employees, which showed forty-four for the President. When one of the correspondents said he was going to stay on the train and listen to the Pittsburgh speech over the radio in order that the enthusiasm of the crowd might not color his story, I asked why he wanted to be so objective. “When you’re a New Dealer writing for a Republican paper,” he said, “you have to be as objective as hell.”

  Judging from the reception Pittsburgh gave to Roosevelt, Pennsylvania, which has been steadfastly Republican in every election since Lincoln, stands a good chance to go Democratic for the first time this November. Hardly listening to what the President said, the crowd cheered their heads off, blew whistles, and jangled cowbells whenever he paused for breath. Once when he said, “And during the late war we piled up a national debt of twenty-five billions,” the crowd answered, “Hooray!” And when Governor Earle gave his list of Pennsylvania bad men—the Mellons, Pew, Ware—the crowd delightedly roared back “Boo!” to each name, ending with the richest, fruitiest boo of all when the Governor, drawing out the final s into a long hiss, cried, “the du Ponts!” As the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the end, and the President stood erect, his profile immobile and stern, he looked (consciously perhaps?) not unlike
one of those heads of Washington carved out of a mountain. Just then an aide nudged him, and without looking down the President reached for his hat and folded it across his bosom in the proper gesture of patriotic reverence. An almost imperceptible move, but it made him once more a mortal. Everywhere we went, with his sumptuous voice and dominating presence, he was invariably the best speaker on the program.

  In Jersey City the next morning the reporters’ theme song, “Hey, Bill, what do you estimate the crowd?” was brought into full play as we drove through the incredible demonstration staged by Mayor Hague, who was making show of his loyalty to the man he called a “weakling” when he led the “Stop Roosevelt” movement in Chicago in 1932. As we crawled through the three miles of shrieking, flag-waving schoolchildren (half of Hague’s turnout was below voting age), we were heckled with such remarks as “Aw, it’s oney de press … say, ya got it pretty soft … gimme a lift, mister?… hey, mister, take my pitcha … ooh, lookit, a woman repawter, hiya, toots.”

  Back in New York no machine organization turned out the crowds which sprang up impromptu to cheer the President. Except on Park Avenue. There the sidewalks were no more crowded than usual, and the only heads peering out the windows were the servants’. It called to mind the story, which no one would swear was not apocryphal, of Knox in San Francisco. As he was driving through the streets, someone in the crowd yelled, “Hurrah for Roosevelt!” The cry was taken up and Knox began to get red in the face until a Republican committee-woman driving with him leaned over and said, “Never mind, Colonel, they’re only working people.”

  * * *

  The Nation, October 10, 1936.

  What Madrid Reads

  “AND SO Puss-in-Boots made the miller’s son into a marquis and he married the Princess Violet Ink, the daughter of the king of that country who was called Saxofon XIII. Soon afterward the king died from having eaten a rice pudding made of pearls instead of rice and the miller’s son inherited the crown. But he kept his promise to Puss-in-Boots and published a royal decree handing over the country to the workers. Then the workers of all classes formed a council and elected a president of the republic. And they gave the crown to the dentists to make gold fillings for the poor people who had lost their teeth.”

  So runs the Madrid 1937 version of the old fairy tale. Little Red Riding Hood, too, has suffered a war change. She has become a worker in a chocolate factory. After her tragic end her fellow workers get together and kill the wolf and chase all his rich and powerful friends out of the country forever. But Madrid’s literature has become Marxist only in spots. The Army, which through the efforts of the Cultural Militia is learning to read as fast as it is learning to fight, has an extraordinarily eclectic literary taste. At the Escorial, where the 3rd Division is in training, the soldiers’ library contains a collection of works ranging from Homer to Elinor Glyn, the latter, it should be added, represented by La Filosofía del Amor. Among the authors in between are Plato, Sophocles, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dostoevski, Marx, Henry George, Freud, Jules Verne, Lenin, Galsworthy, Ortega y Gasset, Dos Passos, García Lorca, and Sinclair Lewis.

  At the rear, the effect of the war on the printed word is apparent everywhere. It is dark inside the big bookstore on the Gran Vía because all the windows have been blocked up with sandbags. But it is not too dark to see the blaze of civil-war literature spread out on the front tables. Because prices must meet hard times, most of it is in the form of paperbacks and pamphlets with covers that are vivid and striking: raised fists, broken chains, and bombs bursting. Guernica in flames proclaims “the torch of fascism”; Marx’s beard flows over innumerable volumes; the sandaled foot of the Spanish worker crushes the swastika; Stalin’s profile is uplifted to a fleet of conquering airplanes; Lenin’s fist pounds the table; Durutti, the fallen Anarchist hero, summons Spanish comrades to victory. Soldiers, for the most part, are buying these books, for the trenches have been fertile soil for the growth of political curiosity.

  But behind the front tables the regular stock is still displayed and still sought. You can find El Mundo de Guermantes of Proust, La Montaña Mágica of Thomas Mann, Contrapunta of Aldous Huxley, and the collected works of H. G. Wells, Pierre Loti, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, the last a tremendous favorite.

  Secondhand books are sold in stalls and from pushcarts in the streets. As the war literature has not had time to simmer down to the secondhand stage, the civil war is ignored here as completely as if the bookstalls were in Fourth Avenue or 59th Street. You find chiefly dime novels, detective stories, and Mexican “Westerns.” Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, S. S. Van Dine, and James Oliver Curwood lead the field in translation. I did see two books on Russia, but they could hardly be said to indicate a trend. One, with a picture of Lenin on the cover, was Santa Rusia by Jacinto Benavente. The other was Esplendor y Ocaso de los Romanof (Glory and Decadence of the Romanoffs) by Ana Wyrubova, “la favorita de la Zarina.”

  Newsstand dealers have found it necessary to move so often because of the shelling that they no longer have permanent stalls. Newspapers and magazines are spread out on the sidewalks or on soapboxes. At first you are surprised to find the smooth-paper movie, fashion, theater, and art magazines still displayed. Looking closer, you find they are pre-war issues, and the news dealer tells you that all the smooth paper was imported and is no longer obtainable. Katharine Hepburn’s portrait adorns the July 1936 issue of Cinelandia, the last movie magazine to be published in Spain.

  In the place of the luxury reviews a number of thin but lively weeklies have sprung up, each dealing in its own fashion with some aspect of the war. Some are political, some satiric, some pictorial, some literary. The paper is sleazy, the ink smells, the print comes through on the wrong side, but the writing is vigorous. A favorite subject of the caricaturists is Queipo de Llano with his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and his bottle. Known as the “Lion of the Subway” because of his preference for the rear guard, he is generally shown swaying uncertainly before the microphone. Parodies of his nightly broadcasts from Seville accompany the sketches.

  For photographers the war is a golden opportunity. Life would envy the series in the rotogravure weekly Crónico on “Blood and Fire in the Mediterranean,” dealing with the torpedoing of the British oil tanker Woodford. Even the comic strips have become war-minded. Weekly the terrible tale is unrolled, in rhymed couplets and color, of “Don Tadeo Bergante, Un fascista repugnante.”

  But if the war has permeated ninety percent of the newsprint, some pages still remain untouched by it. In one of the new weeklies, between two articles on “The Magnificent Discipline of the Republican Army” and “The New Workers’ Institute in Valencia,” appears a fiction serial entitled “Marion: Neither Maid, Wife, nor Widow.” Marion is a pure anachronism. She hails taxis and wears evening dresses, two things that might belong to the Stone Age, so vanished are they from the Madrid of today. Even the daily papers leave a corner open to matters outside the war. The siege of Gijón, the speeches of Dr. Negrín in Geneva, the problems of evacuation and food, the machinations of the “Fifth Column,” the disputes of the CNT and the UGT occupy the news and editorial columns. But you can still turn to the back page of El Liberal and find an agony column overflowing with ardor. “Single lady, serious, would like to become acquainted with gentleman of position and education.” “Gentleman, thirty-eight, cultivated, well-employed, would like to become acquainted, object matrimony, with lady thirty to thirty-five, not tall, good-natured.” That is the quality of Madrid. A year of siege and shells has shattered the surface of life, but underneath the old wheels are still turning. Life conforms to civil war where it must and clings to the old ways where it can.

  * * *

  The Nation, November 6, 1937.

  “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead”

  ON A SCENTED MEDITERRANEAN MAY EVENING in 1904 Mr. Ion Perdicaris, an elderly, wealthy American, was dining with his family on the vine-co
vered terrace of the Place of Nightingales, his summer villa in the hills above Tangier. Besides a tame demoiselle crane and two monkeys who ate orange blossoms, the family included Mrs. Perdicaris; her son by a former marriage, Cromwell Oliver Varley, who (though wearing a great name backward) was a British subject; and Mrs. Varley. Suddenly a cacophony of shrieks, commands, and barking of dogs burst from the servants’ quarters at the rear. Assuming the uproar to be a further episode in the chronic feud between their German housekeeper and their French-Zouave chef, the family headed for the servants’ hall to frustrate mayhem. They ran into the butler flying madly past them, pursued by a number of armed Moors whom at first they took to be their own household guards. Astonishingly, these persons fell upon the two gentlemen, bound them, clubbed two of the servants with their gunstocks, knocked Mrs. Varley to the floor, drew a knife against Varley’s throat when he struggled toward his wife, dragged off the housekeeper, who was screaming into the telephone, “Robbers! Help!,” cut the wire, and shoved their captives out of the house with guns pressed in their backs.