That's Quite Enough, Mister Manypenny

Your Humble Narrator occasionally still publishes A Thing (other than this blog). Last fall the online journal Cosmos & Taxis included my article "Mr. Manypenny's Millions: Freedom and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth-Century Native American Annuity Conflict." "Freedom" is what Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny feared Indigenous Americans would lose if they became dependent on U.S. government annuities; "Sovereignty" is what Native American recipients believed these annuities regularly demonstrated. (Also, they were usually payments for past land cessions.) Why some Indigenous American leaders nonetheless agreed to convert their annuities to lump-sum payments forms a significant part of the story.

Behold, the very source of one's enslavement.

Treasure Type H

As befits an imperial family whose empire at one point stretched from Central Europe to the Andes, whose subject peoples bore little love for the imperator, and whose military record tended in its later centuries toward the sub-par, the Habsburgs were obsessed with their own legitimacy. A succession of emperors devoted their attention not to improving the lives of the common folk (riff-raff, all of them) but to filling them with a sense of supernatural awe and dread. To this end, they turned the Habsburg court and its adjuncts into theaters of ritual, and devoted much of their day to ceremonies, like royal banquets and receptions, designed to aggrandize the imperial person. Adorning these theaters were countless relics and cult objects chosen to demonstrate the dynasty’s age, gravitas, and close relationship with the divine or supernatural realm. The imperial wunderkammer included a mantle  that allegedly belonged to Charlemagne*; a “unicorn” horn, or rather a narwhal tusk, that Ferdinand I had decreed one of the dynasty’s “inalienable heirlooms”; an agate bowl inscribed with the letters “XRISTO,” which the Habsburgs identified as either the Holy Grail or part of the same dinnerware set; an alleged basilisk in a real bottle; an emerald bottle from South America; two bored ostriches and a live dodo; and a lustrous black sword, engraved with eldritch runes that could devour the souls of its victims. I may have made one of these artifacts up.

 

Please specify your name, quest, and favorite color.

Simon Winder, a popular historian of the dynasty, described Habsburg power as “strangely hieratic and spooky.” The adverb doesn’t necessarily apply. Early modern Europeans often ascribed priestlike powers to monarchs, as for example in the English and French royal custom of curing scrofula, the “king’s evil.” The Habsburgs stood out from their western European contemporaries, however, in their association of legitimacy with royal isolation. Queen Anne (the last English monarch to attempt the cure) and Louis XVI used the laying-on of hands to affirm their divine power, but did so, necessarily, via direct contact with the rank-scented multitude. The Austrian emperors’ treasures and rituals, by contrast, demonstrated the great distance between them and the common folk, and even the nobility. During his very long reign the penultimate emperor, Franz Joseph, believed that he could hold his fractious empire together by invoking his subject peoples’ common love for the royal person. That they all chose instead to join a different set of artificial families, offered by the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century, vexed him but remained beyond his comprehension. Why wouldn’t anyone want to remain under the rule of a family that had such wonderful toys?

 

Source: Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 85-87, 121-125, 156-57

 

* Actually it was the former possession of Roger II of Sicily. He had it embroidered with gold camels.

Any Good News in 2021?

As the days (in the Northern Hemisphere) grow shorter, coronavirus continues to ravage large parts of the world, the United States slouches toward fascism, and climate disasters grow ever more regular, it is easy to despair. The early months of winter are thus a good time to review the positive news stories of the year, via  Future Crunch. Few of these items made it to American newspapers or cable news services; all remind us that optimism is not an unrealistic outlook.

* Argentina legalized and Mexico decriminalized abortion, while Switzerland and several Mexican states legalized same-sex marriage.

* Suicide rates fell by 5 percent in the United States last year, despite the pandemic. American cancer death rates reportedly fell by 30 percent from 1990 to 2018. Europe also experienced declines. The World Health Organization approved for use the first malaria vaccine. Haiti brought its cholera epidemic under control - there have been no reported cases there since January 2019.

* New York and New Mexico legalized marijuana. Oregon decriminalized possession of all illegal drugs.

* Banks and governments pledged 14 billion dollars to fight deforestation in northern Africa. South Korea promised to plant 3 billion trees by 2050. Pakistan went ahead and planted 1.5 billion trees this year.

* Audi, Mercedes, and Volvo announced they will switch to all-electric car production by the end of the decade. Ford announced it will stop selling gas-powered cars in Europe by 2030. Barcelona began giving free three-year public-transit passes to residents who agreed to give up their cars.

* As of Fall 2021, endowment, pension, and sovereign-wealth funds worth 40 trillion dollars agreed partially or wholly to divest from fossil fuel production. China ended its funding of foreign coal-fired power plants and reduced the share of coal in its electricity budget below 50 percent. In the United States, the Biden administration ended support for the Keystone XL pipeline.

* The Canadian Mik'maq recovered their sovereign fishing rights. The Dakotas recovered sacred lands in Minneapolis; the Passamaquoddies bought back some of their ancestral land in Maine. Bison were reintroduced to the Salish-Kootenai reservation in Montana.

Even misspellings yielded some nice results this year. The image here shows what happens when you try to google "Santa hat" and instead type "Santa bat." (Image courtesy of Jo Jorgensen, via Twitter.com.)

The Blessings of Liberty: 1950s Ireland

The champions of Irish independence attained their penultimate* goal, the establishment of the Irish Republic, in 1949, nearly three decades after the end of the independence war. Political freedom rarely brings immediate material happiness, and this became obvious enough in Eire during the following decade. The 1950s, an era of rapid economic recovery and growing prosperity throughout Europe, was for Ireland a “lost decade” of stagnation and decay. The economy remained agricultural and undercapitalized. Many rural households lacked electricity and running water. Few young people received more than a grammar-school education, there being no jobs at home for the better-trained. Dispirited teachers told their students that their only employment choices were “the collar or the dollar:” taking religious orders or moving to the United States. Emigration grew to a scandalous height: one of every six Irishmen and women left the country by 1960. Of all the nations of Europe, only two suffered a net loss of population in the Fifties: Ireland and East Germany.

Irish Emigrants to Britain, ca. 1950

Those who left the German Democratic Republic did so for both economic and ideological reasons. Some of those who fled Ireland must have found their homeland nearly as oppressive as the Eastern Bloc. The Catholic Church served as an arm of the Irish state, controlling many of the nation’s schools and much of its public-school curriculum, and imprisoning thousands of unmarried mothers in the slave-labor camps known as “Magdalene Laundries.” Birth control, abortion, and divorce all remained illegal. Under the bishops' direction, the Republic comprehensively censored movies and books - Edna O’Brien, today one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors, had her first novels banned in the early Sixties. City-dwellers could perhaps afford to watch a Western movie, or catch an uncensored radio broadcast from elsewhere in Europe. Farmers and their dependents lacked even those narrow avenues of escape, so long as they remained in Eire.

John McQuaid, Prince of Ireland (1940-71)

Ireland's two principal political parties, Fine Gael (successors of Cumann na nGaedheal) and Fianna Fail, swapped control of the Dail (parliament) throughout the decade. Both remained wedded to a romantic, pre-war vision of a self-sufficient Ireland, and crafted economic policy accordingly. Both kept tariffs high and industry in the hands of licensed national monopolies. Thanks to this protectionist program and an increasingly unfavorable trade balance, the Irish endured both rising prices and rising unemployment in the first postwar decade. Credit the Irish government, at least, with discovering stagflation more than two decades before the rest of the world. 

Let us also credit one of the ruling parties, Fianna Fail, with realizing that it had to abandon its dogmas to prevent more young people from voting with their feet. Following the 1957 elections the serpentine Eamon de Valera and his chief deputy, Sean Lemass, decided their nation needed foreign capital more than "frugal comfort." The new economic program of 1958-63 lowered tariffs and provided tax credits to foreign companies (chiefly West German, at first) willing to build factories in the Republic. The Sixties was no golden age, but Ireland's economy and population did resume growing, and television helped dissolve the island's cultural conservatism and isolation.


Sources: Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future (Gill and Macmillan, 2004); idem, News from a New Republic (Gill Books, 2011).


* The ultimate goal was the reunification of the island in a 32-county republic. The IRA attempted to do just that in Operation Harvest (1956-62), which failed to do more than get most of its operatives arrested or killed.

Painting the Mailboxes Green

Cumann na nGaedheal** is the short answer to the question “What became of the Pro-Treaty faction from Michael Collins after Johnathan Rhys Meyers killed Liam Neeson?” It’s not a popular question to ask. We all like tales of war and revolution, but few of us take an interest in these upheavals’ messy aftermath. Personally I find fascinating the clearing of rubble (literal and metaphorical), the mundane but creative tasks of state building, the challenges of legitimizing the new order, and the tragic tendency of successful revolutionaries to turn authoritarian and destroy their legitimacy. Most people have rather less interest in the dreary work of reconstruction and compromise.

1923 campaign poster (historyjk.blogspot.com)

In the case of the Irish Revolution, this work fell to the members of Sinn Fein who supported the 1921 treaty with Britain, the so-called “Treatyites.” Following their brief but bloody civil war with the anti-Treaty faction, these colleagues of Michael Collins organized themselves into Cumann na nGaedheal, the ruling party of the new Irish Free State. CnG’s critics later claimed that the party merely “painted the mailboxes green” and otherwise left the old administration in place. They exaggerated, though it's certainly true that the new government retained the colonial-era British legal system and civil service, and also true that Cumann na nGaedheal sometimes seemed more interested in the symbolism than the substance of sovereignty. Officials of the new regime stamped "Irish Free State" on as many documents and as many crates of produce as they could, and organized a delegation to every international meeting and body that would have them. Britain had forced the Treatyites to swallow the indignity of a loyalty oath to the King, and accepting the status of a dominion rather than an independent nation. Cumann na nGaedheal used what one might call "counter-symbolism" to claim that they considered Ireland sovereign, despite their nigh-unacceptable concessions to the Crown.*

More substantively, the party sought to preserve the Free State's independence by digging it out from under wartime debts and keeping the peace. The latter meant demobilizing the civil-war-era army and creating a new, unarmed police force, the Garda, which remains one of CnG's most enduring achievements. The former meant raising taxes and cutting public salaries, neither of which ensured the party's long-term popularity. Debt relief also explains the concession that made William Cosgrave's government more unpopular than any other: accepting as permanent the provisional boundary between the six counties of Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. The Free State had agreed in the much-maligned Treaty to assume a share of Britain's debt payments, to the tune of fifteen or twenty million pounds sterling per year - about 60-80 percent of the Free State government's entire budget. British officials offered in 1925 to cancel this crippling debt in return for a boundary favorable to Northern Ireland, and Cosgrave and his partisans agreed. Irish Republicans never forgave them.

One is tempted to see in Cumann na nGaedheal's debt-phobia the penny-pinching of provincial peasants, but the party's fears instead grew from realism. Well-read statesmen knew that in the previous half-century a number of countries, from Egypt to Mexico, had suffered foreign invasion or lost their independence due to unpaid foreign debts. Keeping the Free State out of hock was in their view essential if the Irish were to preserve what little independence they enjoyed.

Internationalism informed not just the Treatyites' fiscal conservatism but their political conservatism. In the early 1930s Cumann na nGaedheal officials viewed with great alarm the Republican revolution in Spain, which replaced a Catholic monarchy with a left-leaning, anti-clerical republic. Fear of a similar development in Ireland contributed to the Dail's passage of the 1931 Public Safety Act, which allowed the government to outlaw communist and republican political organizations. Cosgrave and his colleagues had formerly viewed the Free State as a compromise between colonial rule and an independent republic, and many if not most saw an Irish Republic as a desirable goal. The Spanish Republic soured many on republicanism, much as the French Revolution turned many Anglo-American moderates against democracy. A true republic, CnGers feared, might fall prey to communist agitators and turn on the Church, which the Free State depended on to run its schools and orphanages. Staying within the British Empire and under its monarchy no longer looked like a bad deal.

When Collins and his colleagues brought the Free State Treaty before the Dail (the Irish Parliament) in 1922, they famously said it would give Ireland "the freedom to achieve freedom." Ten years later Collins's colleagues preferred the status quo to the freedom they had once sought. Fear, of debt and violence and evil "Reds," became their preferred means of motivating the electorate and garnering their support. By 1932, however, Irish voters had come back to the view that a new state must be built on aspirations rather than apprehensions. They gave the government to Eamon de Valera's anti-Treatyite party, Fianna Fail, and Cumann na nGaedheal fell into such deep obscurity that I haven't yet figured out how to pronounce its name.**


Sources: Donal Corcoran, The Freedom to Achieve Freedom (Gill and Company, 2013); Richard Killeen, A Short History of the Irish Revolution (Gill Books, 2007); Jason Knirck, Afterimage of the Revolution (Wisconsin, 2014); Ciara Meehan, The Cosgrave Party (Royal Irish Academy, 2010)




* The Free Staters even tried to turn dominion status against the mother country by suggesting that Ireland, Canada, and the other dominions gang up on Britain, essentially turning the Commonwealth into a collective security agreement against political aggression from London. It didn't work.

** I think it's "Cuhm an n'yell," but maybe not.