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Hitler seemed still to have the collapse of Italy in mind when he emerged from his headquarters on November 8 to spend a few hours with the ‘Old Comrades’ of the National-Socialist Party at Munich. He spoke deliberately and forcefully. He was loudly cheered when he declared that the hour of retaliation would come. He said that everything was possible in the war but that he should lose his nerve, and he assured his audience that however long the war lasted Germany would never capitulate. She would not give in at the eleventh hour; she would go on fighting past 12 o’clock. At the beginning of his twelfth year in power – on January 20 – Hitler spoke of the danger from Russia. ‘There will be only one victor in this war, and that will be either Germany or Soviet Russia.’
In the late afternoon of July 20 it was announced that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life. The attempt was a deep and well-laid plan by a group of generals and officers to end Hitler’s regime and the military command. General Beck, who was Chief of the General Staff until November, 1938, when he was dismissed, was declared to have been the chief conspirator. It was added that he was ‘no longer among the living’. On August 5 a purge of the Army was announced from Hitler’s headquarters. ‘At the request of the Army,’ the announcement said, Hitler had set up a court of honour to inquire into the antecedents of field marshals and generals and to find out who took part in the attempt on his life. It was disclosed that several officers had already been executed. Further executions were announced on August 8.
In a proclamation issued on November 12 as part of the annual commemoration of the Nazis who fell in the Putsch of 1923, Hitler declared that Germany was fighting for her life. Throughout the proclamation there were references to his own life and to its unimportance compared with the achievement of German aims. ‘If, in these days,’ Hitler said, ‘I have but few and rare words for you, the German people, that is only because I am working unremittingly towards the fulfilment of the tasks imposed upon me, tasks which must be fulfilled if we are to overcome fate.’ In the spring the gravity of Germany’s crisis became clear. The Russians reached the Oder; the British and Americans crossed the Rhine. On April 23 Marshal Stalin confirmed that the Russians had broken through the defences covering Berlin from the east. The battle for Berlin had begun, and Hitler, the man who brought ruin to so many of Europe’s cities, was, according to Hamburg radio, facing the enemy in his own capital, and there he came to his end.
General G. S. Patton
Brilliant American war leader
21 December 1945
General George S. Patton Junior, commander of the United States Fifteenth Army, whose death is announced on another page, was one of the most brilliant and successful leaders whom the war produced. It was he who led the American attack on Casablanca, forged his way through to effect a juncture with the Eighth Army near Gafsa, commanded the Seventh Army in Sicily, and then swept at the head of the Third from Brittany to Metz and onwards.
George Smith Patton, a cavalryman by training and instinct, became a tank expert. Brave, thrustful, and determined in action, he was a remarkable personality, who taught his men both to fear and to admire him. At the same time he was a serious and thoughtful soldier. He was an early advocate of the employment of armour in swiftly moving masses to exploit the break-through, and was finally able, with the help of American methods of mass-production, to realize his theories in practice. A great athlete in his earlier days, he had also a taste for philosophy, literature, and poetry. He was the son of a California pioneer, and was born at San Gabriel, in that State, on November 11, 1885. Soldiering was in his blood for he was the great-grandson of General Hugh Mercer, who served under Washington, and his grandfather died in the Civil War. It was natural, therefore, that he should find his way to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1909. After great achievements on the track at West Point he was to be placed fifth in the cross-country run of the Modern Pentathlon (in the main a military event) at the Olympic Games of 1912. He was also to be known as a fine horseman and show rider and a crack pistol shot. He developed a flamboyant and emotional character for which his men found expression in the sobriquet ‘Old Blood-and-Guts’, but he was a born military leader.
Commissioned in the cavalry, Patton served first at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. A little later he went to France to study the sabre there and after his return served as Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1916 he was aide-de-camp to General Pershing on the punitive expedition into Mexico. Then, when America entered the 1914–18 war he, by that time a captain, went on Pershing’s staff to France, where, in November, 1917, he was detailed to the Tank Corps and attended a course at the French Tank School and he was present when the British tanks were launched at Cambrai. After this he organized the American Tank Centre at Langres and later the 304th Brigade of the Tank Corps, which he commanded with much distinction in the St Mihiel offensive of September, 1918. Having been transferred with his brigade to the Meuse-Argonne sector he was wounded on the first day of the offensive; for his services he was awarded the dsc and dsm and at the time of the Armistice was a temporary colonel.
Returning to the United States in early 1919, Patton in 1920 was given command as a permanent captain of a squadron of the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer. Then he was detailed to the general staff corps and served for four years at the headquarters of the First Corps area at Boston and in the Hawaiian Islands. After four more years at Washington he was ordered to Fort Myer, where, as a permanent lieutenant-colonel, he remained on duty with the 3rd Cavalry until 1935.
Patton received command of the 2nd Armoured Division in October, 1940, with the temporary rank of brigadier-general, becoming in the next year commanding general of the First Armoured Corps. While he was thus employed Patton learned that they might be required in North Africa. He therefore set up a large training centre in California, where he built up a coordinated striking force. At last his opportunity came and as commander of the Western Task Force he and his men succeeded in their swift descent in occupying Casablanca. He himself had a narrow escape, for the landing craft which was to take him ashore was shattered. Later, when the American Second Corps were in difficulties at Kasserine Pass, Patton was sent to retrieve the situation and, with timely British aid, not only did so but carried it on to Gafsa, near which it made contact with the Eighth Army. Thus it was that he was chosen to command the Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily. It was while he was visiting a field hospital in that island that, suspecting a soldier of being a malingerer, he struck him. The incident was reported and General Eisenhower made it clear that such conduct could not be tolerated; but Patton, who made generous apology, was far too valuable a man to lose when hard fighting lay ahead, and a little later he was nominated to the permanent rank of major-general.
In April, 1944, he arrived in the European theatre of operations, and he took command of the Third Army, which went into action in France on August 1. With it he cut off the Brittany peninsula, played his part in the trapping of the Germans and drove on to Paris. In October he had another of his narrow escapes when a heavy shell landed near him but failed to explode. Driving on relentlessly towards the German frontier, it fell to Patton to reconquer Metz, and in recognition of this victory he received the Bronze Star. His next outstanding performance was in late December when the Third Army drove in to relieve the First and helped to hold Bastogne. He was famous for the speed of his operations, but surpassing himself on this occasion, he surprised the Germans, and slowed down and eventually checked the advance of Rundstedt’s southern column. One of his most striking feats was when in the advance to the Rhine, he moved towards that river with his right flank on the Moselle. The Germans were apparently expecting him to force a crossing of the Rhine, but instead he suddenly crossed the Moselle near the confluence, taking the enemy ‘on the wrong foot’ and completely smashing up his array. In Germany his armoured divisions made the deepest advances of all, penetrating in the end into Czechoslovakia. A German staff officer, captured in the final stages, reported that his general had asked him each morning as a first question what was the latest news about Patton.
In April this year President Truman nominated Patton to be a full general. The Third Army occupied Bavaria last July, and in September Patton was ordered to appear before General Eisenhower to report on his stewardship of Bavaria. The summons was a result of Patton’s statements to a Press conference that Nazi politics are just like a Republican and Democratic election in the United States, and that he saw no need for the de-Nazification programme in the occupation of Germany. In October General Eisenhower announced that General Patton had been removed from the command of the Third Army and had been transferred to the command of the Fifteenth Army, a skeleton force.
Patton, in spite of many idiosyncrasies, which included the free use of a cavalryman’s tongue – ‘You have never lived until you have been bawled out by General Patton’ his men used to say – was a fundamentally serious soldier, offensively minded and bent on the single object of defeating his enemy. He affected a smart and sometimes striking turnout, and was insistent that those under him should also maintain a smart and soldierly appearance.
John Maynard Keynes
A great economist
21 April 1946
Lord Keynes, the great economist, died at Tilton, Firle, Sussex, yesterday from a heart attack.
By his death the country has lost a very great Englishman. He was a man of genius, who as a political economist had a worldwide influence on the thinking both of specialists and of the general public, and he was also master of a variety of other subjects which he pursued through life. He was a man of action, as well as of thought, who intervened on occasion with critical effect in the great affairs of state, and carried on efficiently a number of practical business activities which would have filled the life of an ordinary man. And he was not merely a prodigy of intellect; he had civic virtues – courage, steadfastness, and a humane outlook; he had private virtues –he was a good son, a devoted member of his college, a loyal and affectionate friend, and a lavish and unwearying helper of young men of promise.
The Right Hon. John Maynard Keynes, cb, Baron Keynes, of Tilton, Sussex, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born on June 5, 1883, son of Dr John Neville Keynes, for many years Registrary of Cambridge University. His mother was Mayor of Cambridge as lately as 1932. He was brought up in the most intellectual society of Cambridge. He was in college at Eton, which he dearly loved, and he was proud of being nominated by the masters to be their representative governor later in life. He won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, in mathematics and classics, writing his essay on Héloïse and Abelard. He was President of the Cambridge Union, won the Members’ English Essay Prize for an essay on the political opinions of Burke, and was twelfth wrangler in the mathematical tripos. Although he did not take another tripos, he studied deeply in philosophy and economics and was influenced by such men as Sidgwick, Whitehead, W. E. Johnson, G. E. Moore, and, of course, Alfred Marshall.
In 1906 he passed second into the Civil Service, getting his worst mark in economics – ‘the examiners presumably knew less than I did’ – and chose the India Office, partly out of regard for John Morley and partly because in those days of a smooth working gold standard, the Indian currency was the livest monetary issue and had been the subject of Royal Commissions and classic controversies. During his two years there he was working on his fellowship dissertation on ‘Probability’ which gained him a prize fellowship at King’s. This did not oblige him to resign from the Civil Service, but Marshall was anxious to get him to Cambridge, and, as token, paid him £100 a year out of his private pocket to supplement the exiguous fellowship dividend – those were before the days of his bursarship of the college. Anyhow, his real heart lay in Cambridge. He lectured on money. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance (1913–14). He served in the Treasury (1915–19), went with the first Lord Reading’s mission to the United States, and was principal representative of the Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference and deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. After his resignation he returned to teaching and to his bursar’s duties at King’s, but he always spent part of his time in London. He was a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, and parts of its classic report bear the stamp of his mind.
In 1940 he was made a member of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Consultative Council and played an important part in Treasury business. He was appointed a director of the Bank of England. In 1942 he was created Lord Keynes, of Tilton, and made some valuable contributions to debate in the Upper House. He became High Steward of Cambridge (Borough) in 1943. His continued interest in the arts was marked by his trusteeship of the National Gallery and chairmanship of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (cema). In 1925 he married Lydia Lopokova, renowned star of the Russian Imperial Ballet – ‘the best thing Maynard ever did’, according to the aged Mrs Alfred Marshall. She made a delightful home for him, and in the years after his serious heart attack in 1937 was a tireless nurse and vigilant guardian against the pressures of the outside world.
Lord Keynes’s genius was expressed in his important contributions to the fundamentals of economic science; in his power of winning public interest in the practical application of economics on critical occasions; in his English prose style – his description of the protagonists at the Versailles Conference, first fully published in his Essays in Biography (1933), is likely long to remain a classic – and, perhaps it should be added, in the brilliant wit, the wisdom, and the range of his private conversation, which would have made him a valued member of any intellectual salon or coterie in the great ages of polished discussion.
In practical affairs his activities in addition to his important public services were legion. As bursar of King’s he administered the college finances with unflagging attention to detail. By segregating a fund which could be invested outside trustee securities he greatly enlarged the resources of the college, and, unlike most college bursars, he was continually urging the college to spend more money on current needs. From 1912 he was editor of the Economic Journal, which grew and flourished under his guidance, and from 1921 to 1938 he was chairman of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society. He ran an investment company. He organised the Camargo Ballet. He built and opened the Arts Theatre at Cambridge and, having himself supervised and financed it during its period of teething troubles, he handed it over, when it was established as a paying concern, as a gift to ex-officio trustees drawn from the university and city. He became chairman of cema in 1942 and of the Arts Council in 1945. He was chairman of the Nation, and later, when the merger took place, of the New Statesman; but he had too scrupulous a regard for editorial freedom for that paper to be in any sense a reflection of his own opinions. He also did duty as a teacher of undergraduates at King’s College and played an important and inspiring part in the development of the Economics faculty at Cambridge. The better students saw him at his most brilliant in his Political Economy Club. He was interested in university business and his evidence before the Royal Commission (1919–22) was an important influence in causing it to recommend that the financial powers of the university should give it greater influence over the colleges.
To find an economist of comparable influence one would have to go back to Adam Smith. His early interest was primarily in money and foreign exchange, and there is an austere school of thought which regards his Indian Currency and Finance (1912) as his best book. After the 1914–18 war his interest in the relation between monetary deflation and trade depression led him on to reconsider the traditional theory about the broad economic forces which govern the total level of employment and activity in a society. He concluded that, to make a free system work at optimum capacity – and so provide ‘full employment’ – it would be necessary to have deliberate central control of the rate of interest and also, in certain cases, to stimulate capital development. These conclusions rest on a very subtle and intricate analysis of the working of the whole system, which is still being debated wherever economics is seriously studied.
Popularly he was supposed to have the vice of inconsistency. Serious students of his work are not inclined to endorse this estimate. His views changed in the sense that they developed. He would perceive that some particular theory had a wider application. He was always feeling his way to the larger synthesis. The new generalization grew out of the old. But he regarded words as private property which he would define and redefine. Unlike most professional theorists, he was very quick to adapt the application of theory to changes in the circumstances. Speed of thought was his characteristic in all things. In general conversation he loved to disturb complacency, and when, as so often, there were two sides to a question he would emphasize the one more disturbing to the company present.
His Treatise on Probability is a notable work of philosophy. Although using mathematical symbols freely, it does not seek to add to the mathematical theory of probability, but rather to explore the philosophical foundations on which that theory rests. Written clearly and without pedantry, it displays a vast erudition in the history of the subject which was reinforced by and reinforced his activities as a bibliophile.
Keynes had on certain occasions an appreciable influence on the course of history. His resignation from the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and his publication a few months later of The Economic Consequences of the Peace had immediate and lasting effects on world opinion about the peace treaty. The propriety of his action became a matter of controversy. Opinions still differ on the merits of the treaty, but about the point with which he was particularly concerned, reparations, there is now general agreement with his view that the settlement – or lack of settlement – was ill-conceived and likely to do injury to the fabric of the world economy. His subsequent polemic against the gold standard did not prevent a return to it in 1925, but largely added to the ill repute of that system in wide circles since. It was mainly through his personal influence some years later that the Liberal Party adopted as their platform in the election of 1929 the proposal to conquer unemployment by a policy of public works and monetary expansion.
In two wars he had a footing in the British Treasury. The idea of deferred credits was contained in the pamphlet entitled ‘How to Pay for the War’, which he published in 1940. From 1943 he played a principal part in the discussions and negotiations with the United States to effect a transition from war to peace conditions of trade and finance which avoided the errors of the last peace, and to establish international organization which would avoid both the disastrous fluctuations and the restrictions which characterized the inter-war period. He was the leader of the British experts in the preparatory discussions of 1943 and gave his name to the first British contribution – ‘the Keynes Plan’ – to the proposals for establishing an international monetary authority. In July, 1944, he led the British delegation at the Monetary Conference of the United and Associated Nations at Bretton Woods, where an agreed plan was worked out. He was the dominant figure in the British delegation which for three months, from September to December, 1945, hammered out the terms of the American Loan Agreement, which he defended brilliantly in the House of Lords. He was appointed in February Governor of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and in these capacities had just paid a further visit to the United States, whence he returned only two weeks ago. These continuous exertions to advance the cause of liberality and freedom in commercial and financial policies as a means to expand world trade and employment imposed an exceptionally heavy and prolonged strain which, in view of his severe illness just before the war, Lord Keynes was physically ill-fitted to bear.
His life-long activities as a book-collector were not interrupted, even by war. His great haul of unpublished Newton manuscripts on alchemy calls for mention. He identified an anonymous pamphlet entitled ‘An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature’, acquired by his brother, Mr Geoffrey Keynes, as being the authentic work of David Hume himself. He had it reprinted in 1938, and it will no doubt hereafter be eagerly studied by generations of philosophers. During the second war his hobby was to buy and then, unlike many bibliophiles, to read rare Elizabethan works. His interest in and encouragement of the arts meant much to him. From undergraduate days he had great friendships with writers and painters and, while his activities brought him in touch with many distinguished people of the academic world and public life, he was probably happiest with artistic people. At one period he was at the centre of the literary circle which used to be known as ‘Bloomsbury’ – Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and their intimate friends. More than fame and worldly honours he valued the good esteem of this very cultivated and fastidious society.
And finally there was the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes. His entry into the room invariably raised the spirits of the company. He always seemed cheerful; his interests and projects were so many and his knowledge so deep that he gave the feeling that the world could not get seriously out of joint in the end while he was busy in it. He did not suffer fools gladly; he often put eminent persons to shame by making a devastating retort which left no loophole for face-saving. He could be rude. He did not expect others to bear malice and bore none himself in the little or great affairs of life. He had many rebuffs but did not recriminate. When his projects were rejected, often by mere obstructionists, he went straight ahead and produced some more projects. He was a shrewd judge of men and often plumbed the depths in his psychology. He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good.
Henry Ford
Motor manufacturer and idealist
7 April 1947
Mr Henry Ford, the motor-car manufacturer, who died suddenly at his home, Dearborn, near Detroit, on Monday night at the age of 83, was for many years one of the world’s outstanding individuals.
In his own sphere as a maker of machines Ford effected the greatest revolution of his day. It was due largely to him that the motor-car, instead of continuing for years to be a luxury for the rich, was brought speedily within the reach of comparatively humble folk. In the course of this accomplishment the process of mass production was carried to new and unheard-of lengths and a novel conception of its possibilities was created. The industrial empire which Ford’s imagination and drive established was in due course to yield him an immense fortune; but wealth was at no period his goal. He was in fact an emotional visionary, ignorant of much that quite ordinary people know, but with real good will for all and a power of handling the practical things of life which has never been surpassed. Thus for many years he was a continuing astonishment to his contemporaries, who, marvelling one day at his new designs for motor-cars or his new schemes for still vaster factories, would find him on the next with startling proposals for higher wages, shorter hours, or better methods of salesmanship, or, just as likely, attacking the bankers or preaching pacifism, bickering with his own Government, or at issue with organized labour. In all that he did or said moreover, he remained his independent and opinionative self, satisfied, as was indeed quite often true, that he was serving his age as successfully as he was supplying it with tractors, motor-cars, and aeroplanes.
Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, the son of William Ford, a prosperous farmer, who was of Irish stock. His mother was of mixed Dutch and Scandinavian origin and had been adopted by one Patrick O’Hearn. He went to the local school, where he seemed a normal boy, good but not exceptionally brilliant at his studies. At an early age, however, he disclosed a remarkable mechanical bent and an eager curiosity in regard to the working of machines. At 17 he became an apprentice in a machine shop in Detroit, but after nine months he felt he had learned all he could there and went on to another firm. After a time his employment failed to satisfy him and he returned to Dearborn, reconciled to it by the fact that Clara Bryant, whom he married in 1888, was a neighbour. Years of happiness followed: but he nevertheless continued to be haunted by an early ideal of a machine which would do the heavy work of a farm. In the country he kept a machine shop of his own and worked in summer for a harvester company by repairing their portable farm engines. However, the promptings of his genius became too strong for him and eventually he decided to go back to Detroit where in 1890 he secured a post with the Detroit Edison Electric Company.
Ford had realized in his earlier Detroit days that the public were more interested in road vehicles than in tractors; but scheme as he would the weight of a steam engine had thwarted him. Then in an English paper, the World of Science, he had read of a ‘silent gas engine’ which used gas for fuel. A little later he had been asked to repair one of these Otto engines. Convinced by his study of it that its principles were sound, he had in 1887 built his first gas engine, and had kept on building more. After he returned to Detroit, however, he worked in his spare time on his first ‘gasoline buggy’, and in 1893 it was ready for public trial, at which it attained a speed of 25 miles an hour. In 1896 he began work on a second car. In 1899 he resigned his position and organized a local company in which, holding one sixth of the stock, he became chief engineer. The company made cars on the model of his first one. Ford, whose governing idea was to provide automobiles for the masses, was soon in disagreement with his associates, who thought chiefly of profits, and in 1902 he resigned, ‘determined never again to put myself under orders’. At that time the public interest was centred on racing cars and Ford determined to enter the racing field. He proved astonishingly successful with some racing machines of his design and thus drew attention to his own car. In 1903, therefore, he was able to found the Ford Motor Company with 12 shareholders and a capital of $100,000, of which $20,000 was put into the company, the only cash investment in its long career which did not come from earnings. In 1908 Ford himself became the controlling owner and president, and in 1924 he and his son, Edsel, were to acquire all the stock. Ford had long had his own ideas about quantity production, and with control in his own hands was able to put them into effect. Sales began to rise and his products to enter foreign markets. His success in the Scottish Reliability Trials of 1905 had already helped him considerably in establishing himself in Great Britain. He also developed a new agency policy which included an agreement to maintain service stations. The car itself had, moreover, been steadily improving, and in 1908 and 1909 his famous model ‘T’ was put on sale. Standardization became thenceforward his settled policy, and the ‘assembly line’ was devised; but in this, as in all else, his ruling notion was service to the ordinary man.
In 1915 Ford was able to turn his attention to his first love, the farm tractor. The European war seemed to him to impose a delay in placing it on the market: but victory depended upon British agriculture making good the food shortage which the German submarines were causing, and Ford sent his Fordson tractor to the rescue. He also rendered notable service by fulfilling his undertaking to build Eagle submarine chasers by the same methods he employed in regard to his cars. From war, however, he refused to profit. At this period indeed the magician in production stood in strange contrast to the unrealistic pacifist who as leader of a group of cranks went in the Peace Ship to Scandinavia in order to have the ‘boys out of the trenches by Christmas, never to return’. It was the foolishness of a child, but the intention was entirely sincere. Ford had his difficulties and in the slump of 1920 faced a serious financial situation: but he found his own way out and his vast undertaking went on from strength to strength. In 1924 its annual production reached the towering peak of 2,000,000 cars, trucks, and tractors. His achievements were, moreover, by no means in the material sphere alone. Of humble origin himself he had a deep feeling for his employees, and worked out rough and ready principles in regard to labour which he consistently applied. One was to pay the highest possible wages, and in this he was a true reformer; another to accept applicants for work without questions or references. Ex-prisoners were welcomed: but once a would-be employee was accepted he came under a rigid discipline which followed him even into his home. For years Ford would have nothing to do with unions. His passion for the perfect organization of production led him indeed into an effort to mechanize the human material he employed. It was, however, a deterrent to many independent-minded Americans and numbers of his workers were drawn from recent emigrants to the United States.
In 1918 Ford, who was a supporter of President Wilson, had run unsuccessfully for the Senate and in 1923 there was some talk – it caused alarm among the professional politicians – that he would run for the Presidency, and a movement to support him was started; but before long he himself announced his refusal to stand against Mr Coolidge. In the next year his acquisition of the Dagenham site in addition to his Trafford Park and Cork works was announced. It was part of a post-war policy of expansion, and between 1931 and 1946 over 1,000,000 vehicles were manufactured at the Dagenham factory alone. He then went into civil aviation, opened his company’s private air service, and soon afterwards his all-metal monoplanes were on sale. It was the beginning of great developments. At this period the Press published many stories of his fabulous wealth, and his spectacular successes and good treatment of his workers were widely discussed, and Ford himself wrote three books concerning his own life’s work and ideals – My Life and Work, Today and Tomorrow, and Moving Forward. In 1927 ‘Model T’ was superseded and over 350,000 advance orders were received for his new car. In April, 1931, his 20,000,000th car came off the assembly line, but in that year also the company, suffering like all others from the depression, lost £10,000,000.
The years immediately before the 1939–45 war saw a revival in the Ford fortunes and fresh expansions of plant, and as the war developed his company did excellent work; but the production of his great plant at Willow Run scarcely lived up to his earlier estimates of his own capacity as a producer. In 1943 Ford lost his only child and close associate, Edsel Bryant Ford, who for many years had played a leading part in all his undertakings, and, although nearly 80, himself resumed the presidency of his company. He resigned, for the second time, in 1945, and on his nomination his grandson, Henry Ford ii, was elected in his place. Henry Ford ii, who was born in September, 1917, had been released from the United States Navy in 1943 to direct war production at the Ford Motor Company, of which he was appointed executive vice-president in 1944.
Mahatma Gandhi
Apostle of independence
30 January 1948
Mr Gandhi, who was assassinated in Delhi yesterday afternoon, was the most influential figure India has produced for generations. He set out to promote national consciousness, and to defend the ancient Indian ideals of poverty and simplicity against the inroads of modern industrialism, though this part of his teaching was seldom heard in his later years. He judged all activities, whether of the State or of the individual, by their conformity to the doctrine of non-violence, which he held to be the panacea of all human ills, political, social, and economic. His day of triumph when British authority was voluntarily withdrawn was turned to profound sorrow, for communal strife and bloodshed, instead of ending as he had confidently hoped, were greatly intensified, and the two new Dominions of India and Pakistan were brought to the verge of war. To efforts to replace this fratricidal strife by Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh harmony and good will he devoted the last months of his long life.
In all parts of the world many regarded the ‘Mahatma’ (‘great soul’) as both a great moral teacher and a great Indian patriot. Others held him to be the victim of a naive self-delusion which blinded him to the race-hatred, disorder, and bloodshed which his ‘non-violent’ campaigns against British authority invariably provoked. But few critics have questioned the sincerity of his repudiation of force. A whole-hearted pacifist, he believed he had a mission not to India only but to all the world. To his own co-religionists he was certainly a ‘saint’. His increasing asceticism, finally marked by a complete indifference to the comforts of life (though these were showered upon him by wealthy supporters), won him a reverence that bordered upon adoration; the popular mind long credited him with powers little short of miraculous; his gospel of the liberation of India from British rule early won the enthusiastic support of most of the younger school of Hindu politicians, and did much to wean them from the cult of anarchy; his defence of Hindu faith and culture against western ‘materialism’ gave him the adhesion of multitudes of the orthodox.
A convinced Hindu, but widely read in other faiths and a great admirer of the Christian ideal, he was a powerful advocate of social reform. The poverty of the masses and his desire for India to return to the simplicities of the past led him to proclaim the need for the people, rich and poor alike, to spin by hand their own cotton thread and to weave and wear their own hand-made cotton cloth. Wherever he went his charka (spinning wheel) went with him, and as he talked to those who sought him daily he spun his cloth.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, the capital of a small State in Kathiawar, Western India, where his father, though belonging only to the socially obscure Bania (moneylending) section of Hindus, was the Dewan. He was married when only 13 to a child of the same age, but from 1906 was a Brahmacharya – that is, a celibate within the marriage state for the purpose of realizing God. In early life he admired Western ways, and in this period he read law at the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar. He was meticulous in wearing the top hat and frock coat of the ‘town kit’ of the period. Some years later on, after conviction in India, he was disbarred. All his life he remained a strict vegetarian and total abstainer. In 1893 he went from Bombay to South Africa in connection with an Indian legal case of some complexity, and remained to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, and his stay lasted for 21 years. Gandhi was admitted an advocate of the Supreme Court. When the South African war broke out he organized an Indian Ambulance Corps, 1,000 strong, which often worked under heavy fire. Again, in 1906, on the outbreak of the Zulu rebellion, he formed a stretcher-bearer corps.
After the passage of an Act in 1913 restricting Indian migration between the different Provinces of the Union, some 3,000 Indians with Gandhi at their head, crossed the border from Natal into the Transvaal in order to court arrest. Many, including the leader, his wife, and one of his sons, were imprisoned. In 1914 Gandhi returned to India by way of London, and he landed here a few days before the outbreak of the 1914–18 War. He was instrumental in organizing from among the Indian students a volunteer ambulance corps, which rendered good service. In Western India he rapidly became the champion of all whom he regarded as weak and oppressed, and was associated with the whirlwind movement for Home Rule resulting from the activities of Annie Besant, but at the War Conference convened by the Viceroy at Delhi in the spring of 1918 he supported ‘with all his heart’ a resolution of support of the war effort.
In 1919, in pursuance of what he called satyagraha, or ‘truth-seeking’, he issued a pledge of refusal to obey the Rowlatt Acts, ‘and such other laws as the committee to be hereafter appointed may think fit’. There followed the serious disturbances of April, 1919, both at Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s home, and in the Punjab, notably at Amritsar. The loss of life thus caused led Gandhi to admit that he had made a blunder of ‘Himalayan’ dimensions. But from this time began his unquestioned mastery over the Congress Party organization. To him that party was India; and as its spokesman he was India’s chosen mouthpiece.
In the spring of 1920 Gandhi considered that India was spiritually prepared to undertake a further campaign of passive resistance without risk of lapse into violence. He started a movement of ‘non-violent non-cooperation’, declaring it would be maintained until the claims of the Khilafat movement – started by Indian Muslims to obtain alleviation of the harsh peace terms imposed on Turkey after the 1914–18 war – were conceded, and until public servants alleged to be guilty of ‘martial law excesses’ in the Punjab were adequately punished. He promised swaraj, meaning complete self-government without the aid of the British, within a year. On paper at least he collected within a few months a crore of rupees (£750,000) for swaraj. Gandhi’s open letter to the Viceroy (the first Lord Reading) dated February 9, 1922, giving him seven days in which to announce a change of policy, had scarcely been dispatched when at Chauri-Chaura, in the Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, a number of constables were attacked in their thana and burnt to death. He called a halt to the civil disobedience movement and imposed upon himself a five days’ fast. On March 10, 1922, he was arrested, and was later tried for conspiracy. Gandhi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years’ simple imprisonment, but was released in January, 1924, after an operation in gaol for appendicitis.
Early in 1929 Gandhi shared responsibility for a resolution of conditional acceptance of the proposed Round Table Conference passed at a meeting of political leaders. But on March 12, 1930, Gandhi, with 80 volunteers, began a march of 200 miles on foot from his ashram, near Ahmedabad, to Dandi, a village on the sea coast in the Surat district, for the purpose of collecting salt, and thereby defying the law. On May 5 he was arrested and interned at Yeravda Gaol, near Poona, under a Bombay Regulation of 1827. The economic effects of the second era of civil disobedience were much more serious than those of the first, owing in large measure to the intensity of the boycott.
The Round Table Conference met in London in the autumn of 1930. Lord Irwin (now Lord Halifax) released the Congress leaders to facilitate discussions and had a number of interviews with Gandhi. These led in March, 1931, to the signature of the famous Irwin-Gandhi Pact.
Gandhi came to London in the late summer as the sole delegate of the Congress at the Round Table Conference. The expectation formed in many quarters here of seeing a man of commanding gifts was not fulfilled. He had no mastery of detail: constitutional problems did not interest him. He was no orator; his speeches were made seated and delivered slowly in low, level tones, which did not vary whatever his theme might be. His interventions in discussion were mainly propagandist, and often had little real connection with the matter in hand. He made no real constructive contribution to the work of the Conference. Meantime the pact was breaking down, and on Gandhi’s return to Bombay a renewed campaign of civil disobedience was initiated by the Congress under his chairmanship. Once more he was arrested, on January 4, 1932, and detained in Yeravda Gaol.
When the British Government’s communal award was published he intimated to the Prime Minister (Mr Ramsay MacDonald) that he would starve himself to death unless the part of the award giving separate seats to the depressed classes (which in his view cut them off from the Hindu community) were withdrawn or suspended. The fast began on September 20, 1932, but some political leaders of the two communities negotiated a compromise, approved by the Mahatma and accepted by Government. Gandhi accordingly broke his fast on the seventh day. There was great diversity of opinion, in Hindu ranks particularly, on Gandhi’s advocacy of legislation to secure admission of the depressed classes to the temples of higher caste folk. At the end of April, 1933, he announced his intention in this connection to fast for 21 days, and when the ordeal began on May 8 he was unconditionally released. Soon after Gandhi arranged to lead another civil disobedience ‘march’. On the eve of the march, July 31, he was arrested, and a few days later was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.
Dissatisfied with the facilities given to him in prison to work for the Harijans (his name for the depressed classes), he decided once more to fast, and after a week of abstinence from food he was released purely for medical reasons on August 23. The civil disobedience movement was waning, and in April, 1934, Congress adopted his advice to suspend it. But his personal contact, and that of Congress leaders generally, with the Viceroy and the Governors was not resumed until, in the summer of 1937, the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) took the initiative in bringing the long estrangement to an end by inviting Gandhi to meet him at Delhi.
In the first general election for the Provincial Parliaments under the Act of 1935 the widespread Congress organization scored striking successes, and its candidates obtained majorities in six of the 11 Provinces of British India. When provincial autonomy was introduced in April, 1937, and the question of acceptance or non-acceptance of office by the Congress Party was under constant discussion, Gandhi casually admitted to a distinguished and sympathetic British public man that he had not read the India Act of 1935, for his entourage and advisers had assured him that it gave nothing of real worth to India. Persuaded by his visitor to repair the omission, he admitted when they next met that he had been mistaken and that the Act marked a very substantial advance. Thereupon he threw his immense weight against Pandit Nehru’s policy of abstention and of course carried the day. Congress Ministries were formed, after a few months of the familiar attempts at bargaining with Government in which the Mahatma was such an adept. Gandhi then retired with his considerable entourage to a remote village near Wardha, in the Central Provinces, and it became known as Sevagram (the village of service). Gandhi showed an unexpected gift for realism by encouraging Ministers in paths of administrative orthodoxy, while pressing forward his ideals, such as a policy of prohibition by instalments, and what is known as the Wardha plan of primary education.
Though he had upheld for years a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that the Congress would not come between the Princes and their subjects, he did intervene early in March, 1939, in Rajkote, a small Kathiawar State, on the ground that the Thakore Saheb had gone back on his word as to constitutional advances. He issued a 24 hours’ ultimatum, and as it was not accepted he began a ‘fast unto death’, but the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) suggested a solution of the immediate question, and Gandhi abandoned his fast at the beginning of the fifth day. The Mahatma’s hold on Nationalist reverence was increased, rather than diminished, by his public apology and expression of contrition for having resorted to a coercive method not consistent with his non-violent principles. Yet he was to resort to it on future occasions. He was not free from ‘the last infirmity of noble minds’, and was skilful in exhibitionism.
When war broke out in September, 1939, it seemed for a short time that Gandhi would invite the Congress Party to give moral support to the nations seeking to prevent, though by armed force, the enslavement of the world by brutal aggressors. But he became convinced that only a ‘free India’ could give effective moral support to Britain; and his demand for ‘complete independence’ became more and more urgent. When Japan struck down Malaya and invaded Burma Gandhi became seriously perturbed at the defence measures which the Government of India initiated. In the spring of 1942, when the discussions between Sir Stafford Cripps (then Lord Privy Seal in Mr Churchill’s Government) and the party leaders had reached a hopeful stage, Gandhi advised against settlement and the negotiations with the Congress leaders broke down. The war situation was then unfavourable, and Gandhi was commonly alleged to have talked contemptuously of the draft Declaration whereby India was to secure complete self-government after the war as a ‘post-dated cheque on a crashing bank’. He demanded that the British should ‘quit India’ (a slogan which had wide currency), that the Indian Army should be disbanded, and that Japan should be free to come to the country and arrange terms with a non-resisting people.
In August, 1942, he concurred in the decision to strike the blow of mass obstruction against the war effort – ‘open rebellion’, as he calmly called it. This led to his arrest and that of other Congress leaders and to widespread disorder and bloodshed. Gandhi was interned in the Aga Khan’s palace at Poona and was barred from political contacts, though he was allowed the companionship of Mrs Gandhi, who died in February, 1944. Gandhi continued in detention until May 6, 1944, when he was released unconditionally on medical grounds. Later all the leaders were released to share in the prolonged discussions arising from attempts to bring an end to the increasing strife between Hindus and Muslims over the Pakistan issue.
A long prepared and carefully staged series of discussions between the Mahatma and Mr Jinnah, at the house of the latter in Bombay, yielded no tangible result, for Mr Gandhi stated that he spoke only for himself and had no commission from the working committee of the Congress. Indeed, for many years he had withdrawn from actual membership of the party, only to dominate it from without. The explosive possibilities of the situation developed with the end of the war. The historic Cabinet Mission, headed by Lord Pethick-Lawrence, went out in the spring of 1946 and spent three anxious months of incessant conference and negotiation in the heat at Delhi. The Mahatma took a large share in the negotiations chiefly behind the scenes, and in his inscrutable way was at times helpful and at times the reverse. When at long last and amid most serious outbreaks of communal violence the short-term and long-term plans of the Cabinet Mission led to the formation at Delhi of an interim National Government, with Mr Nehru as Vice-President of the Council, Gandhi remained outside the Cabinet, much to the relief of its members. But no major decision could be taken either at the Centre or in the Provincial Congress Governments without full consideration of the views and wishes of the Mahatma, the idol of the Hindu masses.
The announcement made by Mr Attlee in February, 1947, that complete British withdrawal would not be later than June, 1948, had the effect of accentuating the conflict between the two main parties, and the subsequent antedating of the time limit and decision to set up two Dominions, India and Pakistan, quickened savage outbreaks in the Punjab between Hindu and Sikh on the one side and Muslims on the other. Moreover, when Independence Day came the sanguinary unrest in Calcutta led to fears that the division of Bengal would have untoward consequences. ‘Bapu’, who had been travelling from place to place in Eastern Bengal and in Bihar preaching brotherhood, went to Calcutta, and at the beginning of September undertook another fast not to be ended until normal conditions were restored. The party leaders exerted themselves in exhortations to the people, and on the fourth day the Mahatma was able to end his ordeal. Thus he succeeded where armed force had failed. The miracle encouraged him to stage in Delhi early this month his fifteenth fast in the effort to bring harmony between India and Pakistan. He had shown himself acutely conscious that in the lust for communal reprisals his word did not carry the weight of former years. The fast began as the Security Council at Lake Success was considering the controversy on Kashmir and related problems between the two Dominions. One effect of the fast and leading to its cessation on the fifth day was the decision pressed on the Cabinet at New Delhi by the Mahatma no longer to withhold from the Karachi Government payment of the whole of the £41m, due from the undivided cash balances at the time of the British withdrawal.
George Orwell
Criticism and allegory
21 January 1950
Mr George Orwell, a writer of acute and penetrating temper and of conspicuous honesty of mind, died on Friday in hospital in London at the age of 46. He had been a sick man for a considerable time.
Though he made his widest appeal in the form of fiction, Orwell had a critical rather than imaginative endowment of mind and he has left a large number of finely executed essays. In a less troubled, less revolutionary period of history he might perhaps have discovered within himself a richer and more creative power of imagination, a deeper philosophy of acceptance. As it was he was essentially the analyst, by turns indignant, satirical, and prophetic, of an order of life and society in rapid dissolution. The analysis is presented, to a large extent, in autobiographical terms; Orwell, it might fairly be said, lived his convictions. Much of his early work is a direct transcription of personal experience, while the later volumes record, in expository or allegorical form, the progressive phases of his disenchantment with current social and political ideals. The death of so searching and sincere a writer is a very real loss.
George Orwell, which was the name adopted by Eric Arthur Blair, was born in India in 1903 of a Scottish family, the son of Mr R. W. Blair, who served in the opium department of the Government of Bengal. He was a King’s Scholar at Eton, which he left in 1921, and then, at the persuasion of his father, entered the Imperial Police in Burma, where he remained for five years. After that he was, by turns, dish-washer, schoolmaster, and book-seller’s assistant. The name he adopted comes from the river Orwell – his parents were settled at Southwold, in Suffolk, at the time he decided upon it. Orwell preferred to suppress his earlier novels. Down and Out in Paris and London, his first book, published in 1933, is a plain, observant and, for the most part, dispassionate piece of reporting, which achieves without faltering precisely what it sets out to do. Orwell had strived in a Paris slum and in England had tramped from one casual ward to another, and the lessons of this first-hand acquaintance with poverty and destitution were never afterwards lost on him. Although in time he grew fearful of a theoretical egalitarianism, he made no bones about the primary need of securing social justice. In The Road to Wigan Pier, which appeared in 1937, he described the lives of those on unemployment pay or public assistance and made his own contribution to Socialist propaganda.
Next year he brought out his Homage to Catalonia, an outspoken and at times impassioned account of his experience and observation as a volunteer on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He had joined not the International Brigade but the militia organized by the small Catalan party predominantly syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist in temper – known as poum. He was wounded during the fighting round Huesca. With deepening anxiety and embitterment he had noted the fanaticism and ruthlessness of Communist attempts to secure at all costs – even at the cost of probable defeat – political ascendancy over the Republican forces. It was from this point that his left-wing convictions underwent the transformation that was eventually to be projected in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
First, however, a few months before the outbreak of war in 1939, he published Coming up for Air, the book which is his nearest approach to a novel proper. It was not his first published essay in fiction. In Burmese Days, published five years earlier, he had written with notable insight and justice of the administrative problems of the British in Burma and of the conflict of the white and native peoples, though the personal story tacked onto this treatment of his subject was weak and rather lifeless. The book suggested clearly enough, indeed, that Orwell was something other than a novelist. Yet in Coming up for Air, for all that it sought to present, in a picture of the world before 1914, a warning of the totalitarian shape of things to come, he recaptures the atmosphere of childhood with a degree of truth and tenderness that is deeply affecting. Here was the creative touch one sought in vain in the later books.
Rejected for the Army on medical grounds, Orwell in 1940 became a sergeant in the Home Guard. He wrote spasmodically rather than steadily during the war years. His picture of Britain at war, published in 1941 under the title The Lion and the Unicorn, was a brave attempt to determine the relationship between Socialism and the English genius. A volume consisting of three long essays, Inside the Whale, one of which was the entertaining, if occasionally somewhat wrongheaded, study of boys’ popular weeklies, preceded the appearance in 1945 of Animal Farm. In the guise of a fairy-tale Orwell here produced a blistering and most amusing satire on the totalitarian tyranny, as he saw it, that in Soviet Russia masqueraded as the classless society. The book won wide and deservedly admiring notice. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, published early last year, the premonition of the totalitarian wrath to come had developed into a sense of fatalistic horror. In Orwell’s vision of a not too remote future in Airstrip One, the new name for Britain in a wholly totalitarian world, men had been conditioned to deny the possibility of human freedom and to will their subservience to an omnipotent ruling hierarchy. The book was a brave enough performance, though it fell a good way short of the highest achievement in its kind.
Orwell married in 1933 Miss Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She died in 1945 after an operation, and last year he married Miss Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of Horizon.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy of language
29 April 1951
Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in his sixty-second year on Sunday at Cambridge, was a philosopher with a reputation as an intellectual innovator on the highest level. His earlier and later work formed the points of origin of two schools of philosophy, both of which he himself disowned.
He came from a well-known Austrian family (his ancestors included the Prince Wittgenstein who fought against Napoleon), and he was brought up in Vienna. After studying engineering at Manchester he went to Cambridge in 1912 as an ‘advanced student’ to study under Bertrand (now Lord) Russell. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he returned to Austria to serve with the Austrian Army until he was taken prisoner in 1918 in the Italian campaign. While thus serving he completed a manuscript, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which, appearing in 1921 in German in the last number of Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie and in English in book form in 1922, at once made for its author an international reputation.
Throughout his life Wittgenstein showed the characteristics of a religious contemplative of the hermit type. Thus he alternated between periods of great prominence in academic life and periods of extreme abnegation and retirement, and in 1922 he renounced his fortune and took a post as a schoolmaster in a mountain village near Wiener Neustadt. Here he stayed until 1928. He maintained, however, contacts with Vienna, where he went in the school holidays and where, through his acquaintance with the Professor of Philosophy, Moritz Schlick, he originated a school of philosophy – the famous Vienna Circle, later known as the logical positivists.
Quite apart from the intrinsic merit of his ideas, Wittgenstein’s historical importance in this period consists in the fact that through him the work of a long series of formal logicians, culminating in Russell, became known to the inheritors of an equally long tradition of philosophy of science, culminating in Mach (Schlick’s predecessor in his chair). The intellectual results of this fusion were such that, a decade later, they spread all over the philosophic world. By this time, however, Wittgenstein was reinstalled in Cambridge, having arrived there for a short visit in 1929. Trinity College elected him to a five-year research fellowship in 1930, and he also started lecturing. Apart from one paper in 1929, he published nothing in this period; but two sets of notes, dictated to groups of pupils and known respectively as The Blue Book and The Brown Book, were widely circulated, contrary to Wittgenstein’s wishes. Again, it is not too much to say that he inaugurated a new ‘school’, or perhaps rather a new method in philosophy - namely, that of which John Wisdom and Gilbert Ryle are the best known exponents, and which is often referred to as ‘the philosophy of ordinary language’. The point of view put forward in these notes diverges widely from that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it is not difficult to see how the second grew out of the first. The way had been prepared for this new philosophical departure by the emphasis placed by G. E. Moore, who was at Cambridge, on ‘the language of common sense’.
In 1936 Wittgenstein left Cambridge and went to Norway, where it is said that he lived in a mountain hut, and from which he returned in 1938, after the fall of Vienna. In 1939 he succeeded G. E. Moore in the Cambridge Chair of Philosophy, and was also naturalized as a British citizen. He continued lecturing for a time, but in 1943 he went to work, first as a porter in a London hospital and afterwards as a research assistant. In 1945 he returned, but found that his teaching duties prevented him from doing creative writing, and in 1947 he resigned from his chair. The second book, however, which he had sacrificed so much to complete and publish (in order, as he said, to show how very wrong the Tractatus was), was not destined to appear. In 1949 he became seriously ill, of a disease from which he knew there could be no great hope of recovery, and retired from active life. He formed round him a small group of philosophers who were also his friends, with whom he worked and discussed to the last.
We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work. His Tractatus is a logical poem, consisting as it does of the development of a gigantic metaphor, constructed round two senses of ‘language’. It is thus an exceptionally difficult book to interpret with any reliability. His sets of notes, and his incomplete manuscript, also show, in the opinion of all who have read them, signs of indubitable genius; but Wittgenstein himself took all the steps in his power to prevent their being circulated on the ground that, if they were, they would be bound to be misunderstood. What is beyond doubt is that, like Descartes in one way, like Locke in another, he started a worldwide philosophical trend. In so far as this can be described in one sentence, it consists in following up the idea that thinking consists in using a language. Thus thought, which it had been easy to conceive of as a private, indefinable, amorphous entity, becomes the manipulation of some symbolism; something public, something which can be ‘nailed down’ and to which the techniques of formal logic can be applied.
Arnold Schoenberg
Beyond chromaticism
13 July 1951
Professor Arnold Schoenberg, who died on Friday at his home at Los Angeles at the age of 76, was probably the most discussed musician of the twentieth century.
His system of atonality, or, as he preferred to call it, twelve-tone music, though reached by process of evolution from chromaticism, was the most revolutionary movement in musical history since Monteverde in the seventeenth century. It is so subversive of established ways of thought that its general adoption is improbable in the extreme, but it has provided a ferment of far-reaching influence on modern music. In this respect, as in some others, Schoenberg is like Stravinsky; between 1910 and 1930 these two men were the outstanding figures in the history of modern music. Curiously enough, both suffered the same fate. At the height of his fame each was forced to leave his country and to adjust himself to new conditions.
Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874. At the age of eight he learnt to play the violin and composed short violin duets for his lessons. Later on he taught himself the cello and composed a string quartet. For several years he worked without any outside help or supervision. Alexander von Zemlinsky (whose daughter he married in 1901), a composer of whom Brahms had a very high opinion, recognized his outstanding talent, gave him his first instruction in composition and brought him into the musical circles of Vienna. Schoenberg’s earliest works were written in the style of Brahms, whose technique he admired, and later set as a model to his pupils when he was teaching composition himself.
The first work which Schoenberg made known to the musical world was a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht. It was an attempt to apply the symphonic form of a tone poem to chamber music. To the same period belong the Gurrelieder, a cantata for solo voices, chorus and orchestra written in 1900, a tone poem, Pelleas and Melisande, and a string quartet in D minor. A new development began with the Chamber-Symphony in E, opus 9, in 1906. Schoenberg’s style became concise, his harmonies more daring. It was these works which first roused the opposition of conservative musicians and the admiration of a younger generation who were trying to find new ways of expression. This aim was achieved in the three piano pieces, opus 11, 1909, written in the so-called ‘atonal style’ which aroused much discussion among musicians all over the world. At this time Schoenberg left Vienna and settled in Berlin. Here he wrote Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of poems recited in a kind of song-speech accompanied by instruments. This work established Schoenberg’s fame as one of the leading modern composers. In 1913 he returned to Vienna to teach composition, and, after the end of the 1914–18 war, he founded a society for the performance of modern music. He embodied his technical principles in the Treatise on Harmony, begun in the early years of the century and since revised, but it is only recently in a volume of essays, Style and Idea, that he has discussed their aesthetic basis.
The years between 1920 and 1925 were the most prosperous in Schoenberg’s life. His works were performed regularly at the festivals of the International Music Society; his principal choral work, the Gurrelieder, aroused general admiration at a performance in his honour at the Vienna State Opera, and most conductors included his works in their programmes. He had now gained an international reputation. When Busoni died in 1924 in Berlin, Schoenberg succeeded him as a member of the Academy of the Arts, a position which should have given him financial independence for the rest of his life. After Hitler came to power, however, in 1933, he lost his position and accepted an offer from the Malkin Conservatory, Boston. He felt the change as a great shock. His health suffered from the eastern winter and he soon moved to Los Angeles, where he was appointed professor of music in the University of Southern California. Here he wrote a suite for string orchestra (1934), the fourth string quartet (1938), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and the Ode to Napoleon. Schoenberg retired from his university post in 1944 at the age of 70, to spend the rest of his life in composing and teaching. He completed the opera Moses and Aaron, on which he had been working for many years, not long before he died. He had the satisfaction of seeing a revival of his works after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the re-establishment of his fame as one of the most inspiring innovators of contemporary music. His wife died in 1923 and he is survived by a son and a daughter.
Joseph Stalin
Dictator of Russia for 29 years
5 March 1953
The death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years’ ordeal of invasion and devastation. The characters of the two men present a contrast which corresponds to the different tasks confronting them. Lenin was an original thinker, an idealist, a superb revolutionary agitator. Stalin neither possessed, nor required, these qualities. He was essentially an administrator, an organizer and a politician. Both were ruthless in the pursuit of policies which they regarded as vital to the cause they had at heart. But Stalin appeared to lack a certain element of humanity which Lenin generally maintained in personal relations, though allied statesmen who dealt with him during the war were unanimous in finding him approachable, sympathetic, and readily disposed to moderate the intransigence of his subordinates. As the war drew to its close Stalin, whether for reasons of health or for reasons of policy, became less and less accessible to representatives of the western Powers and so the rift began which was to widen in the counsels of the United Nations and in the policies towards the west of Russia’s satellites, until the open warfare broke out in Korea which still festers and poisons the whole international scene.
A Man of Authority
Public Enthusiasm
In Russia and the adjacent Communist States Marshal Stalin at the time of his death occupied a position of personal eminence almost without parallel in the history of the world. His rare public appearances provoked scenes of tremendous enthusiasm; his speeches and writings on any subject – linguistics, the art of war, biology and history, as well as on the theory of Communism – were treated as virtually inspired texts and analysed in meticulous detail by hundreds of commentators. A quotation from the works of Stalin was the irrefutable end to any argument. The mere mention of his name at a political conference in any of the satellite States was sufficient to bring all present to their feet by a prolonged ovation. The Stalin legend became an integral part of the chain which united orthodox Communists all over the world. In appearance Stalin was grey; his hair grey and stiff as a badger’s; his nostrils and lower cheeks greyish white; his moustache, too, though in youth it had been richly brown and still showed some traces of that colour, was grey. He spoke softly, moved slowly, but his expression was quizzical, like a man enjoying a hidden joke, at times softening into abroad smile. Often as he spoke his look was oddly remote and withdrawn, the look of a man thinking through two or three processes at once. His expression was above all confident, without a trace of nerves; strong, calm or suddenly watchful in an amused kind of way. Tough, yet unathletic, dignified yet self-conscious, he dominated any group of which he formed a part for all his small stature.
Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Stalin, one of his many revolutionary noms de guerre, was born at Gori, in Georgia, on December 21, 1879. His father, a cobbler of peasant origin, died when he was 11. Joseph was sent to the church school in his native town, where he remained until 1893. It was here that he learned to use Russian as an instrument of expression, since all ecclesiastical schools in Georgia at that time were the implements of the Tsarist policy of Russification. He emerged from the school at Gori sharply conscious of the suppression of Georgian nationalism and not unaware of the social inequalities and injustices prevailing in his native Georgia. Such feelings were never revealed however to the school staff, and in view of the fact that he was invariably the best pupil in his form, the head master and the local priest had no hesitation in recommending him for a scholarship at the seminary in Tiflis following upon his matriculation there in the autumn of 1894.
‘A Model Pupil’; Clandestine Socialist
In his early period at the seminary Dzhugashvili was a model pupil, able and diligent at his work, but towards the end of his first year, unbeknown to his tutors, he was already in contact with opposition groups in Tiflis and published some patriotic radical verses in the Liberal newspaper Iberya. His contact with radical groups in Tiflis, headed by former seminarists, continued to develop until finally in August, 1898, he joined the clandestine Socialist organization known as Mesamé-Dasi. Thenceforward he began to lead a kind of dual existence. His few leisure hours were spent in lecturing on Socialism to small groups of working men in Tiflis; discussion in a secret debating society, formed by himself inside the seminary, and the reading of radical books. This state of affairs eventually came to the notice of the seminary authorities and in May, 1899, the 20-year-old Dzhugashvili was expelled. He then embarked on a revolutionary career, but was faced with the immediate problem of employment. For a few months he made a little money giving lessons to the children of middle-class families and at the end of 1899 found a job as a clerk in the observatory at Tiflis – an occupation which seems to have afforded him much free time for political activity. He remained in this employment until March, 1901, when his political activities forced him to go underground completely.
In November, 1901, he was elected to membership of the Social Democratic committee of Tiflis and a few weeks later was sent to Batum, where he proceeded with the establishment of a vigorous clandestine organization and an illegal printing press. The influence of this organization, under his leadership, on the oil workers of Batum was so remarkable in its manifestations that ‘Koba’ (as Dzhugashvili was then known) was arrested, and imprisoned in the spring of 1902 as a dangerous agitator. From his exile in Siberia he escaped a few weeks later and reappeared in Tiflis to find that the great schism which divided the Social Democratic Party in 1903 had left the Mensheviks in virtual control of the Caucasian party. A few months after his return, with some hesitation, Koba took the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and proceeded to agitate energetically against the Mensheviks and other political groupings.
