From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 10, 2020 at 9:50:56 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Smith on Startt, 'Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, and the Fourth Estate'
Reply-To: h-review@...

James D. Startt.  Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, and the Fourth
Estate.  College Station  Texas A&amp;M University Press, 2017.  416
pp.  $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-62349-531-2.

Reviewed by Zachary Smith (Samford University)
Published on H-War (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

Historians of the United States during the First World War and of
Woodrow Wilson's presidency tend to concentrate their attention on
Wilson's relationships with fellow politicians, the German
government, or the Allied leaders in Paris. In this authoritative and
exhaustively researched study, James D. Startt shows that Wilson's
most consequential relationship may have been with the American
press. In this valuable book, Startt focuses his attention squarely
on the relationship between the Wilson presidency and the press,
arguing that Wilson shaped press coverage of his neutrality and
wartime policies while, at the same time, his relationship with the
press directly influenced his policymaking decisions.

Most previous scholars of Wilson's interactions with the press have
attempted to place him in the broader context of his predecessors.
These studies are valuable in that they show how the evolution of
news media--driven mostly by technology--changed the ways presidents
communicated their policies and worked to influence public opinion.
But Startt's more myopic approach is perhaps more valuable in that it
reveals not only how presidents could manipulate the press but also
how the press in turn could influence the policies and ideals of a
president. This symbiotic relationship between the White House and
the press was particularly critical because of the war waging in
Europe.

Through sixteen chronological chapters starting with American
neutrality and ending with the failed struggle over the ratification
of the Versailles Treaty, Startt lays out in significant detail the
president's regular interactions with the press, Wilson's thoughts on
the press, and the press's thoughts on the Wilson administration. In
the process, Startt provides a tremendous amount of insight into
Wilson's personality, his decision-making processes, and the somewhat
limited framework within which he made those decisions. Most Wilson
biographers have noted his severe stubbornness, especially later in
the president's life as his health began to rapidly decline. Startt's
portrait, however, indicates that Wilson's inability to endure
contrary opinions was a major obstacle to clear decision-making long
before his cardiovascular issues became severe in 1919. For instance,
Startt reveals that Wilson's personal secretary Joseph Tumulty daily
presented the president with selected news clippings from the very
few newspapers Wilson trusted. At the same time, Wilson's special
advisor Edward House frequently invited reporters to his apartment to
ensure the White House effectively got its message across to
newspapers that the intractable Wilson deemed unworthy of his
attention. His aides' censorship provided Wilson with a skewed
understanding of press and public opinion and, as Startt suggests,
only increased Wilson's distrust of editors and reporters whose views
did not match his own.

Startt also clearly shows Wilson's understanding that the press could
be a valuable tool in preparing the public for certain policy
decisions and assessing--as much as possible--the public's sentiment
about those in place. As Startt explains, Wilson's weekly press
conferences early in his presidency "allow[ed] him to shield himself
from" distrusted reporters "while engaging them collectively" (p. 4).
Yet these press conferences reflected Wilson's mistrust of the press.
Most reporters left them incredibly dissatisfied, often criticizing
Wilson for saying little of substance during them. Wilson came to
loathe them as well. Startt argues that Wilson's decision to
discontinue his regular press conferences in June 1915--out of fear
that he would be misquoted, which could lead to dire diplomatic
consequences--was a colossal mistake. By doing this, Startt rightly
contends, Wilson had created the situation he had wanted to avoid,
which was a press that drew its own conclusions about the motivations
behind the president's actions.

As Startt shows, Wilson's decision to distance himself from the press
would have devastating consequences for his vision of the postwar
peace and the world. Startt's explanation of the press's role in the
political battle over ratification of the Versailles Treaty (and,
consequently, US entry into the League of Nations) is perhaps his
most valuable contribution to our understanding of Wilson's wartime
presidency. During the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919, Wilson
rarely spoke with American reporters, leaving most communication with
reporters to his press bureau and the members of his entourage.
Startt contends that Wilson's relative inaccessibility "ranks among
his major mistakes at the conference" (p. 260). Public and editorial
opinion would be critical to overcoming Republican opposition to the
final treaty, but Wilson again had turned away many potential allies
in the press. Consequently, few editors outside of his trusted few
were willing to help him in the critical task of persuading the
public to support the treaty and the League of Nations. An American
president's relationship with the press, Startt clearly demonstrates,
can have global ramifications.

If I have a bone to pick, however, it would be that too often, Startt
accepts--without reservation--the published opinions of newspaper
editors as direct reflections of public opinion at large. During
Wilson's presidency, widely circulated opinion journals such as
_Literary Digest_ and _Current Opinion_ frequently evaluated
editorial opinion on important issues and government policies. And
Startt, reasonably, turns to those sources, which are among the few
available means of gaining even the slightest sense of broad public
sentiment (public opinion polling would not exist until the 1930s).
Yet these sources are, at best, flawed measures of genuine public
opinion, being largely expressions of white male elite or
middle-class views on the topics of the day. Presenting editorial
opinion as a direct expression of public opinion, then, provides a
somewhat skewed impression of how Wilson's relationship with the
press affected Americans' views of his peace initiatives and wartime
policies.

Taken as a whole, however, Startt's in-depth analysis of Wilson's
dealings with the mainstream press during American neutrality and
wartime is an important work that scholars of Wilsonian diplomacy,
the United States during the First World War, and presidential
historians cannot afford to ignore.

Citation: Zachary Smith. Review of Startt, James D., _Woodrow Wilson,
the Great War, and the Fourth Estate_. H-War, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54120

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 10, 2020 at 9:52:08 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Achintya on Imy, 'Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Kate Imy.  Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British
Indian Army.  South Asia in Motion Series. Stanford  Stanford
University Press, 2019.  xiii + 307 pp.  $28.00 (e-book), ISBN
978-1-5036-1075-0; $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5036-1002-6; $28.00
(paper), ISBN 978-1-5036-1074-3.

Reviewed by Thirumalai Achintya (University of Virginia)
Published on H-War (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

Colonial Indian Soldiers and Their Reactions to Categorization and
Identification

_Faithful Fighters_ is, as Kate Imy notes, a book that comes amid a
"recent resurgence" on research into the Indian Army that has "added
much to military histories of the army" (p. 223). The book locates
itself as an early twentieth-century military history, following in
the footsteps of Gajendra Singh's _Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and
the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy _(2014), Yasmin Khan's
_India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War _(2015), or
Santanu Das's explorations of military and cultural history in
_India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and
Songs _(2018) and in his edited collection _Race, Empire and First
World War Writing _(2011). Yet it would be a disservice to the work
to call it only a military history. The book offers considerable
insight into the ways imperial authorities imagined and
conceptualized the colonial state and the people contained within.
Readers coming to this text from the social and cultural literary
tradition of such authors as E. M. Collingham (_Imperial Bodies
_[2001]) and David Cannadine (_Ornamentalism: How the British Saw
Their Empire _[2001]) are just as likely to find it an engaging
commentary on the questions that animate them.

Imy examines the three dominant groups within the British Indian
soldiery: the Sikhs, the Nepali Gurkhas, and the Muslim soldiers.
Across six chapters, the book first engages with each community
singly, before aggregating the research to look at broader
implications of the social and religious traditions of the three
groups and their interactions with the colonial state that employed
them. In the first three chapters, one concept of specific importance
to each community becomes the window through which interactions with
the colonial state are examined. Thus, Imy explores the Sikhs and the
question of the symbolic carrying of the _kirpan_ (sword), Muslim
soldiers and international pilgrimages like the _Haj_, and questions
of salt and of dietary restrictions with Hindu Nepali Gurkhas. The
next three chapters then address broader questions of the
government's policies on food, engagement with the rising demands of
nationalism, and the imaginations of masculine ideas in the
increasingly fascistic milieu of the early twentieth century.

What Imy captures particularly well is the way lines of influence
moved back and forth in the engagements between soldiers and martial
communities and the colonial state. Neither is without agency in her
narrative, and she demonstrates the ways both poles were constantly
adjusting and evolving to the rhetoric generated by the imaginations
that came into play with colonial martial policies. She demonstrates
how the British imperial state projected its frequently imperfect
imaginations of loyalty, martial character, and religious and
communal customs onto the martial communities from which the soldiers
were recruited. These imaginations, and the colonial intervention,
actively shaped the communities in question.

Until this point, Imy's arguments tread relatively familiar ground.
She however paints a compelling picture of the various communities
projecting their own ideations onto the colonial state, which in turn
forced it to react and adapt. The martial policies of the British
Empire are thus a window into which she invites the reader to gaze,
beyond which she paints a picture of a continuously evolving pattern
of relations moving back and forth between the state and the
communities it recruited from.

These ping-pong relations traverse the entire book. An early example
of this in the book is the evolving place of the _kirpan_ in Sikh
imagination. She describes how the imperial intervention helped
solidify the presence of the carrying of the sword among Sikhs, with
the British state conceiving the ones who carried the sword and other
overt markers of the Sikh identity as being "true" Sikhs (p. 20). The
chapter then goes on to describe how the overt carrying of the sword
was then absorbed and often refashioned as a symbol by Sikh
communities, in turn forcing the colonial state to engage in a
perpetually shifting landscape as the symbols of martial status also
became symbols of anti-colonial resistance. This regulation was
constantly under scrutiny as the British state was forced to balance
its own competing interests in curbing the widespread carrying of the
_kirpan_ and keeping the _kirpan-_carrying communities quiescent so
as to not disrupt recruitment.

The primary sources that _Faithful Fighters_ mines comprise an
interesting array of official documents, read against private memoirs
of officials and soldiers. The book seeks to "interrogate how
soldiers actually experienced and responded to British efforts to
categorize and control their identities" in both war and peace and
does an admirable job of this (pp. 9-10). Imy's book for the most
part locates most of the focus of these experiences in the
subcontinent and only occasionally ventures into the broader
interactions between the Indian soldiers and their non-Indian
counterparts during foreign deployments. The reader interested in
future research would do well to note Imy's archives, since they
could doubtless be used to expand her work past the premises her book
establishes to also explore these wider questions in greater detail.
All in all, _Faithful Fighters_ should prove to be an engaging and
interesting read for anyone interested in Indian military history in
the twentieth century.

Citation: Thirumalai Achintya. Review of Imy, Kate, _Faithful
Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army_. H-War,
H-Net Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55125

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 10, 2020 at 9:52:39 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Vovchenko on Clark, 'Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Roland Clark.  Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar
Romania.  Ithaca  Cornell University Press, 2015.  Illustrations. 288
pp.  $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-5368-7.

Reviewed by Denis Vovchenko (Northeastern State University)
Published on H-War (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

As a product of the First World War, fascism developed differently in
various countries. In interwar Romania, it went through all the
growth stages and eventually, albeit briefly, came to power in
1941--only the third such movement to do so without foreign support.
Its militant core consisted not of war veterans, the usual suspects
one would expect, but of first-generation university students and
college dropouts--the focus of this meticulously researched book by
Roland Clark.

To me, this is where the puzzle is. During the occupation of the
country by the Central Powers in 1916-18, the Jewish population was
widely seen as collaborating with the enemy. Plus, the servicemen
must have been exposed more than any other social group to the
official propaganda equating the Jews with the Bolsheviks during the
victorious Romanian crusade against the Hungarian Soviet Republic in
1919. As Clark points out, Romanian soldiers were not as bitter as
their counterparts in the defeated countries with lost territories.
Their state added huge areas like Transylvania, Bucovina, and
Bessarabia, so "instead of facing a large group of disappointed
veterans, Romanians had to contend with large minority populations
who had previously dominated the occupied regions both economically
and culturally" (p. 18). Although not the largest such group, Jews
appeared to exert enormous influence in both new and old lands. They
also seemed to enjoy foreign protection, especially after the Entente
powers imposed the unwelcome Minorities Treaty--as a result, the
Constitution of 1923 granted them citizenship rights. In addition to
these political and social effects, the Great War also helped create
"a new ultranationalist idiom" based on "fraternity, militarism, and
religious ideas" (p. 21). Instead of using the notoriously slippery
term "fascism," Clark prefers "ultranationalism," whose main
ingredient is intense antisemitism (p. 23).

The ultranationalist student movement started at the University of
Bucharest in December 1922 to demand improvements in the dormitories
and cafeteria as well as the admission minority students only
relative to their percentage of the overall population. Although
initially relying on "anarchic violence" in the manner of Italian
fascist gangs (p. 38), the movement moderated over time. In 1927, it
was organized by Corneliu Codreanu into "The Legion of the Archangel
Michael" that aimed at entering and dominating the Romanian
parliament. In some ways, it was less extreme than more established
far-right parties like the Christian Defense League (LANC) that
accused the Romanian Church of being "Judaized" because it used the
Old Testament. Pro-Legion publications more sensibly connected Jews
to atheism and socialism to attract clergy.

As fascists elsewhere, the Legion was able to appeal to any social
group although students supplied most leaders and activists. The
Great Depression helped politicize increasingly destitute peasants,
workers, and tradesmen, many of whom appreciated the message of
blaming "parasitic" bankers and industrialists as well as the corrupt
government officials who bailed them out. Even already organized
workers could be won over, although ex-communists had to spend a
period in "special indoctrination groups." With membership dues and
donations from sympathetic entrepreneurs and aristocrats, the Legion
set up work camps in the countryside, built its offices ("nests"),
and subsidized co-ops and restaurants in an effort to create its
networks and to amass social capital. The Legionaries also incited
peasant attacks on Jewish homes and threatened and boycotted
businesses that employed minority employees.

As in other fascist movements, violence and assassinations also
played a symbolic role highlighting strength, decisiveness, and
masculinity. Legionary imagery, rallies, and marches heavily borrowed
from the Romanian Orthodox tradition, complete with priests, public
prayers, and church liturgies. The latter also lent color to the
typically fascist cult of the dead. Whereas the Nazis focused on the
fallen heroes of the First World War, the Legionaries appeared to
privilege medieval kings and saints.

To document all those formative activities, Clark unearthed a wealth
of diverse sources ranging from police archives and ultranationalist
publications to personal memoirs, letters, diaries, rare photos, and
oral histories. Methodologically, the author relies on the history of
everyday life (_Alltagsgeschichte_) to reconstruct the experience of
fascist socialization, but he is also an intellectual historian,
albeit a skeptical one. He carefully examined highbrow Legionary
periodicals only to conclude that their typically fascist antimodern
views had little impact on the decisions and actions of the
ultranationalist leaders and followers.

The author clearly prefers to focus on "how" rather than "why" (p.
245), but it would have helped to spell out the reasons why college
students figured so much more prominently than war veterans in the
development of Romanian ultranationalism. Is there data on how many
former servicemen enrolled in universities to move up in the world,
like the _Great Gatsby_ character? I wonder if the author agrees with
Eugen Weber that in rural countries with few genuine political
parties, civic associations, or working-class organizations,
university students were uniquely positioned to discuss and react to
burning issues of the day. Their idealism also meant that they were
more serious about them than adults.[1]

It might have been a good idea to contextualize their antisemitism by
relating it to other ethnic phobias. The book does have occasional
references to attacks not only on Jews but also against Bulgarian
students in 1923 (p. 33). The same year, the very first
ultranationalist student congress resolved not only to continue the
struggle against Jewish influence but also to support the "Romanian
population in Macedonia and the Serbian Banat" (p. 39). Was
Russophobia on the rise at the same time as Jews were identified with
communism? For some reason, secondary sources are not included in the
bibliography. Most chapters are thematic and tied back to the
chronological narrative concentrating on the rise and fall of the
fascist youth movement between 1922 and 1941. Overall, this is a
landmark book of interest not only to Romanian studies specialists
but to all interwar historians.

Note

[1]. Eugen Weber, "The Men of the Archangel," _Journal of
Contemporary History_ 1, no. 1 (1966): 101-26; 106.

Citation: Denis Vovchenko. Review of Clark, Roland, _Holy Legionary
Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania_. H-War, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55567

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

10 sep. 2020 kl. 17:20 skrev Louis Proyect <lnp3@...>:

On 9/10/20 11:07 AM, Daniel Lindvall wrote:

If anyone has access to a digital copy of this paper I’d very much like to read it.

It's attached.

<David Abraham chapter 3 of book.pdf>

The links given above go into the details of this sordid battle against left-wing interpretations of the collapse of Weimar. And for those of you who have access to jstor, Abraham’s brilliant paper in Past & Present 1980 (a summary of the argument of his book which is called “Conflicts within German Industry and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic”) is accessible there.

_._,_._,_