https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJg5Op5W7yw On August 28 we should honour Mahalia Jackson. Starting by Googling her. I had to.

It turns out that she was a very successful gospel singer in the United States whose long and successful recording career made her internationally famous as “the Queen of Gospel”. She was also an influential civil rights activist. But on August 28 1963 she did something that went virtually unnoticed except by those closest to her. Or rather it was noticed around the world; it was only her part that went unremarked.

You see, she was at the Lincoln Memorial, standing behind Martin Luther King Jr. as he delivered what would quickly be recognized as one of the greatest speeches in American history, certainly the greatest since the invention of recording technology. He famously improvised the ending to that speech, the overwhelmingly powerful and brilliant “I Have a Dream” conclusion. And apparently he did so because Mahalia Jackson leaned over and said “Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream, doctor.”

He had spoken of his dream in other speeches. But he wasn’t planning to finish with it in this one until she prompted him. Then he did, in words that changed a nation and still bring tears to the eye. If you have not listened to it, or watched the classic video (you can find it on YouTube), you must do so. And then I think it might be time to rediscover the music of Mahalia Jackson, who changed the course of history in a moment of undeniable inspiration.

On August 27 back in 1916 Romania entered World War I on the Allied side in the hope of seizing Transylvania. But I’m brushing that aside as “it didn’t even seem like a good idea at the time” to talk about an intriguing mystery connected with George Washington’s 1776 defeat at Brooklyn Heights by General William Howe and his brother Admiral Richard Howe. The mystery isn’t why they won. It’s why they didn’t follow up.

Washington’s force was outgunned by the British and he knew his job wasn’t to win battles. It was to win the war. But for that he had to avoid overly disastrous defeats. And on two occasions during Brooklyn Heights Howe failed to seize obvious chances to capture Washington and his senior commanders, which probably would have finished the rebellion. And while he did capture New York, his tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in America from October 1775 to his resignation in 1778 was marked by a peculiar overall lethargy in prosecuting the war.

Now possibly he was simply lazy, drunk or confused. But it’s also possible that he didn’t want to win the war, especially as he was regarded then and later as one of the best officers in the British army then and later.

He certainly wasn’t generally noted for incompetence or sloth. His distinguished military career including leading a hotly contested amphibious landing at Louisbourg in 1758 and commanding a battalion under Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham; in fact he led the famous ascent up from the St. Lawrence to the battlefield. He also helped capture Havana in 1762. After his older brother, also a General, was killed during a skirmish outside Fort Carillon (now Fort Ticonderoga) in 1758 during the Seven Years’ War, he was elected to Parliament for Nottingham, a seat he retained until 1780. And after leaving America, he continued to serve with distinction into his seventies.

So surely it is revealing, given his passive conduct of the American war, that he was known to be sympathetic to the rebels, opposing the “Intolerable Acts” as an MP and assuring constituents in 1774 that he would resist service against the colonists and insisting that the whole British army could not defeat them.

Suppose such a man were nevertheless given the job of doing so, and was unwilling, as he said publicly at the time, to incur “the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.” Might he not instead execute his tactical duties with dispatch but avoid strategic enterprise?

It’s not something a man could publicly avow then or later. Indeed, it would be a distinctly awkward position for a principled patriot to find himself in. But if he did, is it not plausible that he would act as Howe did?

When he resigned and returned home, along with his brother Richard, it was partly to answer charges of dereliction of duty. Indeed, they demanded a Parliamentary inquiry. That both duly cleared and went on to serve with distinction including in the French Revolutionary Wars suggests that there may have been many others in the British military establishment, and government, who understood what the Howes had done and why.

I do not see how such a thesis could ever be proved unless extremely indiscreet letters should somehow come to light. And I resist conspiracy theories as a rule. But if I were ever going to toast a loyal and honourable man who “threw” a war, it would be William Howe.

August 26 is the day the Democratic National Convention in Chicago kicked off back in 1968, surrounded by angry protesters who quickly turned the event into a left-wing riot. Which didn’t work out too well for them in the short run but certainly changed their party over time.

The backdrop to the rioting, and its targeting of the Democrats, is that in “the Sixties” many agitated left-wing types felt that the real obstacle to change in America wasn’t the openly conservative Republican Party. It was supposedly liberal reformers who co-opted discontent and subtly blocked genuinely radical alternatives.

It may sound like typical fringe nonsense. But they had a point. It incensed these protesters that the Democrats were waging the Vietnam War. And it sent them right round the bend that, after anti-war protests led President Lyndon Johnson to declare that he would not seek another term in 1968 and John Kennedy’s brother Robert was assassinated, the Democratic backroom boys foisted VP Hubert Humphrey on the party as its presidential nominee without his entering a single primary.

They were able to do so because enough states still chose their delegates to the party’s national convention in tightly managed “caucuses”. And thus Humphrey defeated the anti-war candidate Senator (and poet) Eugene McCarthy of Maine, and the convention itself voted down a key anti-Vietnam War resolution even though 80% of delegates chosen in primaries supported it.

Rage boiled over, and into the convention hall by August 28, where Dan Rather of CBS got manhandled and Mike Wallace got punched in the face… by guards not protesters. Indeed, the general reaction of the press was that it was the police who were out of control at the convention.

The public begged to differ, and their hostile reaction to the protesters at the DNC helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon was not, by more modern standards, much of a conservative even on economic issues, let alone social ones. But he was a law and order man and people wanted law and order not rampaging smelly punks with beards. And they felt, with some justice, that the soul of the Democratic Party was with the radicals not the squares in white shirts, narrow ties and horn-rimmed glasses who were on the verge of losing control of the party.

The party wound up agreeing. In 1972 the Democrats nominated the far left peacenik George McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, by the way, but ideologically a dangerous man, and in 1976 Jimmy Carter. And the party certainly conceded much of the protesters’ case in other ways too. For instance it would be unthinkable now to nominate someone who had not won in competitive primaries of various sorts.

A series of presidential electoral debacles including 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988 led to a faction within the Democratic party trying to pull it back to the centre, a major reason they picked the Ozark Casanova in 1992. And so the aftermath of the 1968 DNC might seem a salutary lesson about the political hazards of listening to your radical base. But the protesters had been right about where the heart of the party lay even if they were wrong in their tactics and the level of their paranoid rage even by the standards of 1968. And in the long run, their influence on the party has not been especially harmful electorally.

The radicalized Democratic party had trouble in presidential elections from 1968 through 1988 because the American people did not share their views. Democrats did better in Congressional contests because the looser party American system leaves much more room for openly expressed ideological diversity; indeed although the Democrats have by now purged their ranks of pro-lifers they still have more than a few Senators and Representatives with fairly sensible foreign policy views. But over time Democrats mostly kept true to their beliefs, and concentrated on pulling the public toward their views instead of sneaking into the White House by pretending they believed things they didn’t. And by now it’s working pretty well.

Since 1988 the Republicans have won only two of six presidential elections. The current two-term incumbent, Barack Obama, has Dalton McGuinty’s gift of seeming like a boring moderate while espousing extreme ideas. And yet pundits are convinced, with some justification looking at recent Electoral College patterns, that the GOP now faces a stern uphill battle even against as flawed a nominee as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

So there’s much to be said for being true to thine own self politically as well as personally. Win or lose, the Democrats have been true to their radical inclinations for most of the period since 1968. And the Republicans have done much better when they listened to their base and nominated Reagan than when they went squishy with Mitt Romney or Bush Sr.

None of it justifies rioting, of course. But when the radicals in 1968 insisted that their party had been stolen from them and they just wanted it back, they had a point. They ditched the rioting, mostly, but kept the beliefs. And in the past half century they’ve shifted their country dramatically to the left by doing so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNugTWHnSfw On August 25 back in 1939, amid much that was dismal and terrifying in the world, the wonderful Wizard of Oz had its cinema debut. And it is an interesting reflection on the nature of technological “progress” that it must indeed have been wonderful to be seated in a theatre staring in astonished delight at that magical moment when Dorothy steps out into Oz and takes you into the world of colour movies. And yet today, with far better colour and special effects, we experience little or none of that wonder. And yet the movie remains wonderful.

This technological point actually hit me hard from an unexpected angle when I was reading the Harry Potter novels and thinking how marvelous it would be to have paintings that moved as they do at Hogwarts. And then I realized we had them all around us, even on our pocket telephones, and I was so jaded I didn’t even notice. Nothing gets old faster than novelty; remember film itself was a novelty in the 1890s and the first feature-length “talkie” was The Jazz Singer in 1927.

As for The Wizard of Oz itself, it was not in fact the first colour movie. Not by a long stretch. Thomas Edison hand-painted Annabelle’s Dance back in 1895, and Pathé invented a stencil roller process by 1905. But it was still crude and time-consuming.

Genuine colour movies appeared in the late 1930s and in fact The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn used the Technicolor technique in 1938 and a few months before that, something called Gold Is Where You Find It that a search party would have trouble finding now.

Still, even the fine Robin Hood film looks colourized. The Wizard of Oz looks magical. And yet, I would suggest, the real magic is not technical at all.

Years after watching the movie I tracked down the original novel by L. Frank Baum. And frankly it’s so bad flying monkeys could rip its contents out for all I care. Indeed it was intentionally bad or, at least, it was written with intentions that could not fail to produce sludge. As Baum himself wrote in his April 1900 Introduction:

“Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations. Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as ‘historical’ in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer ‘wonder tales’ in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”

The result is didactic, tedious, episodic and lacking in moral worth. As Chesterton rightly said, “Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” Thus a fairy tale without a dragon is beside the point (and a world dominated by people who thought like Baum has given us horrors aplenty, I might add).

Thus the true marvel of The Wizard of Oz is that saw within this drab, misguided novel the potential for a truly great movie in the grand fairy tale tradition, with a witch who is not merely “stereotypical” but archetypal, setting the stereotype for wicked witches from then on, with horrible perils, bloodcurdling incidents and profound moral lessons.

It is the stuff nightmares and therefore dreams are made of. And it’s something to leave you slack-jawed in your seat with amazement and admiration.

They say it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Which I certainly understand when it comes to the treacherous St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France on August 24, 1572. It was a catastrophe for French Protestants, of course. But it was also very bad for France, both a sign and a cause of its underlying Constitutional weakness. So I think it would be more than a little self-absorbed to present as a significant offsetting consideration that it drove some of my Huguenot ancestors to England where the vagaries of love and life ultimately led to my being born instead of not.

Indeed, whenever you trace back all the incidents, improbable and otherwise, the sequence not merely of meetings but the specific fertilization of precisely this egg by exactly that sperm since the dawn of reproduction that is necessary for any of us to be hanging around annoying people, it is clear that none of us could ever possibly be born anyway. So let me focus instead on the big picture rather than the young Huguenot who I imagine escaping by the skin of his chattering teeth under a fisherman’s tarpaulin to England where he established a long and proud tradition of expiring penniless in Charing Cross Poorhouse to which I owe a fair slice of my maternal ancestry.

In case you don’t follow catastrophically devious treachery at the highest levels in France, finding the occupation too time-consuming, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had seen the emergence of a politically as well as demographically significant Protestant, largely Calvinist, population in France by the mid-16^th century, perhaps 2 of 16 million, known by the originally derisive epithet Huguenots. And in 1572 the weak King Charles IX was persuaded by his mother Catherine de Medici (boy, there’s a sentence that’s just never going to end well) that the Huguenots were planning rebellion and that despite the Edict of St. Germain promising them toleration, that Catherine herself had promulgated as regent back in 1562, he should slaughter them disgracefully.

Thus inspired, he arranged the wedding of his sister to the Protestant Henry of Navarre, invited a glittering roster of Protestant guests to Paris and had them butchered in an orgy of bloodshed that began with assassination and ended with mob lynchings.

Now it “worked” in the sense of crippling the Huguenot movement by decapitating it and leading many moderates to convert back to Catholicism and many others to become more radical. In the “War of the Three Henris” that followed the massacre, Henri III was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic, the House of Valois fizzled ignominiously out, and the victor, Henry of Navarre, converted to Catholicism to become the first Bourbon monarch, uttering the memorable quip “Paris is well worth a Mass.”

I suppose it depends how you define “worth”. He did rule for 21 years and is much admired but was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. And his Edict of Nantes issued in 1598 entrenching toleration for Protestants was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685.

Behind all this jiggery-pokery was a deep and unsettling problem. France had neither the mechanisms nor the cultural foundation to extend genuine liberty under law. Instead Protestants hid or fled, often bringing valuable skills and talents to their new homelands including Britain’s colonies while the loss of these people sapped France’s economic, cultural and even military vitality.

The French inability to provide solid limited government, and their achievement of only a half-open society, would ultimately doom the Bourbons as well in the French Revolution, another outburst of bloodshed and chaos that brought far too much slaughter, destruction and upheaval and far too little genuine reconciliation and tolerance.

Despite many difficulties along the way, I think my Huguenot ancestors gained considerably by leaving France. But it was France’s loss that they had to go.

Oh boy. Today was a bad one. At least it was in 1939, when August 23 saw the unveiling of the “Nazi-Soviet Pact”.

It is hard to recapture the shock this non-aggression treaty caused at the time, because we are used to thinking of both philosophies as “totalitarian” and sharing many loathsome features that democracies lack. In the famous metaphor, right and left may seem to be at opposite ends of the ruler with self-government in the middle, but if you bend the ruler far enough you find that the extremes meet.

They certainly did on August 23; it was the prelude to Hitler launching a European war in which he and Stalin carved up Poland and then Stalin grabbed Finland while Hitler went after France and Britain. (As Churchill later noted, it took unmitigated gall for Stalin and Molotov to nag endlessly about a second front once Hitler turned on them, since they had been instrumental in allowing the Nazi dictator to conquer France. But then Stalin had unmitigated gall, among many other worse extreme qualities.)

The immediate shock of the Pact was strategic rather than intellectual. The more alert politicians and citizens of the democracies had felt that if war came, as seemed increasingly probable, it would be very like World War I, slow and static and bloody, with Germany held back by the task of fighting on two broad fronts. Nazis and Bolsheviks were, after all, sworn enemies, seeing Western nations primarily as potential assets in their mortal conflict.

When Stalin suddenly eliminated the Eastern front problem for Hitler, it didn’t just leave British and French strategy in a state of conspicuous and ruinous disarray for which no solution was found before the spring of 1940 with disastrous consequences, bad as that was. It also revealed the shallowness of citizens and “statesmen” alike in their evaluation of the true nature of the Nazi, and Bolshevik, menace.

Even Churchill fumbles early on to take the true measure of the Nazis, calling them “gangsters” and other insults that, while unmistakably hostile, do not begin to plumb the metaphysical depths of their depravity and hostility to all that is good, normal or part of the Western tradition. There is a love of death in totalitarian movements that goes right to the core.

It was not until George Orwell’s 1948 masterpiece Nineteen Eighty Four that people began to think they understood how and why it was that Stalin should have found Hitler easier to deal with and predict than the Western partners he was forced to work with after Hitler turned on him.

It is now three quarters of a century since that awful shock in the late summer of 1939 that unleashed the horrors of World War II. But it makes me uneasy, as I survey the various loathsome regimes and movements around the globe that hate Western civilization and compete with one another to do it more harm and denounce it more savagely.

They often have as little in common on the surface as Nazism and Bolshevism. But they might well suddenly unite to try to do us in. If they do, I fear we will be as unprepared strategically and intellectually as our forebears were in August 1939.

August 22 was a very bad day for Richard III. He died. That was at the Battle of Bosworth field in 1485. And I’m still steamed about it.

It might seem eccentric to be angry about something over 500 years in the past. But when I teach university history I tell my students that my goal is to get them passionate about past controversies too. I generally say we’ll start with things 50 or 60 years old, so they don’t remember them and the specific issues are no longer current, and take it from there. But my general point is that if events in the past no longer matter, if the things people thought worth standing up for and possibly dying for are now merely antiquarian, then nothing we care about today is really important either.

Disregard of the past is just another form of moral relativism, of saying that what was “true” and “right” in 1485 has no connection with what is “true” or “right” today, that values are not eternal and transcendent. Either Richard III deserved to keep his crown in 1485 or he did not, in 1485 and today.

Now I grant that the prospects of restoring the House of York are poor at this point regardless of how you end up feeling on this question. There was some revival of interest in poor Richard a few years back when they found his bones in an unmarked grave under a car park and gave them a proper burial. But most of it was fairly generic, though there was spirited debate about where to put his remains given that he was a king which argued for Westminster Cathedral, Catholic which argued for a Catholic Cathedral, and from the House of York and had personally wanted to be interred in York Cathedral. But ultimately he was put in Leicester Cathedral and given a Christian but non-sectarian service of remembrance on the theory that he’d have had a funeral service when first buried. Bland, but prudent, I think.

I know some people who are fierce partisans of Richard III because it was his defeat by the upstart usurper Henry VII that led, under Henry’s six-wived son Henry VIII, to England’s break with Rome. It is disconcerting to realize, given the strong association of the Anglosphere with Protestantism from the 16^th century on, that Robin Hood would have been Catholic. But so it was.

It might seem that the break with Rome was highly desirable, leading to the characteristically moderate and pragmatic British conclusion that despite having a state religion, men and women should be free to worship as they see fit. But it is worth noting that it took centuries for English Protestantism to develop into a genuinely tolerant faith that shortly collapsed into indifference, whereas English Catholicism always had this curious feature of being openly defiant of the secular power of the Pope, from before King John down to Henry VIII. Who was, I might add, a singularly obnoxious and scary monarch not given to religious toleration.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, Richard was a pretty good king who did not murder his nephews (on this I strongly recommend Josephine Tay’s historical novel The Daughter of Time), while the Tudors were scary and lawless people only the last of whom, Elizabeth, was any good. She was in fact great, which goes some way to redeem the whole dynasty. But even the half-Tudor Stuarts who succeeded when Elizabeth died without heirs were a lot more trouble than they were worth.

I feel that it would have been better for England had Richard retained his throne. What’s more, I don’t see that Henry Tudor had any legitimate dynastic or constitutional claim to it, and I just can’t support a bloody, illegitimate seizure of power.

Even five centuries later.

If you find our party leaders’ debates hard to sit through, you might not have relished the prospect on August 21, 1858 of hearing two candidates for an Illinois senate seat begin a 21-hour argument about Lecompton men and other such trivia. But if so you’d have missed a treat, and a landmark, because the two men were a rising Whig turned republican star named Abraham Lincoln and the Democratic “Little Giant” Stephen A. Douglas and their encounter would not only shape America’s destiny, it would show how political debate should be done.

Well, arguably not the bit with no microphones and a long bumpy ride along a dirt road in a mule cart. But it shows how determined people were to hear what the two had to say that tens of thousands of people turned out for the debates, often traveling long distances to backwater towns whose total population was only a few thousand inhabitants (it’s good that modern debates are on TV; who today would walk eight feet to hear our leaders' drivel?), and they were not disappointed.

The debates themselves are unfamiliar to modern ears for all sorts of reasons from Lincoln’s eccentric habit of gradually bending his knees while making an argument then suddenly shooting up to his full scarecrow height at the key moment to the audience habit of shouting things like “That’s the doctrine” when they agreed with a point. I’m sometimes tempted to attend a political event just to shout it and see the weird looks I get. Of course I don’t hear much at modern political events that strikes me as sound doctrine or, indeed, as doctrine in any recognizable sense. Just talking points and cant.

One reason Lincoln and Douglas couldn’t dish out such offensive paste was the format, seven debates lasting three hours each. You actually had to say something. And as the debates were held over almost two months, there was time for participants and audiences (including those who followed them via lengthy newspaper accounts) to ponder the arguments, probe for weak points, revisit issues and actually think things through.

Indeed as the debates go on you can feel Lincoln in particular doing so, recovering from fairly weak initial performances as he zeroed in on the contradiction of Douglas claiming he did not care whether slavery were voted in or not while arguing that it was in some vague way wrong. Lincoln actually lost the Senate election, still in those days in the hands of the Illinois legislature not directly of voters. But he clearly won the argument, changing his own mind to some extent and it seems Douglas’s as well.

His performance was critical in securing him the 1860 Republican nomination. But after he won the election, and the South began to secede, Douglas rallied to his former rival and the Union, speaking strongly against secession in the crucial Border States before dying fairly young of typhoid fever in June 1861.

Of course we don’t actually know what they said; for some reason nobody has put the video on YouTube. But in teaching a seminar on American slavery at the University of Ottawa I had my students read Harold Holzer’s painstaking reconstruction of the debates from newspaper accounts, based on the intriguing and to me persuasive belief that Republican newspapers generally tried to polish up Lincoln’s presentations and Democratic ones did the same for Douglas, while each more or less recorded the other guy’s stuff verbatim, so the best source for each was the accounts of unfriendly journalists.

I don’t know what the students made of it; many may have found it hard slogging. But I was amazed at the vitality, dynamism and genuine movement in the debates as they went along. I’d far rather sit through 21 hours of those two than 21 minutes of the current crop.