US President Joe Biden brands Republican backers of his predecessor as ‘semi-fascists’; his Brazilian counterpart lambasts as ‘vandals and fascists’ the pro-Bolsonaro mobs who invaded the Congress in Brasilia on 8 January 2022; the mayor of Tel Aviv warns that Israel is sliding into a ‘fascist theocracy’; Modi’s Hindu-supremacist citizenship legislation is deemed the offspring of a ‘fascist vision’; while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – grotesquely advertised as a ‘denazification’ programme – is seen to signal the regime’s accelerating fascisation.

Faced with the worldwide proliferation, consolidation and ascendancy of far-right political movements, regimes and mindsets, many leftists, liberals and even some conservatives have reached for the fascist label. The term is now bandied around with ease verging on abandon, particularly in the United States, but its resurfacing does speak to the urgent challenge of diagnosing the morbid symptoms that populate our present. My book, Late Fascism, is an attempt to contribute to a collective discussion about our reactionary political cycle. To write it, I turned to the archive composed by the theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity to shed light on our moment. What I found challenges many of the ruts, reflexes and commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged notion can and does devolve into.

The principal temptation for any contemporary thought on fascism is historical analogy. Faced with a toxic brew of social crisis, political violence and authoritarian ideology, the common sense reflex is to identify similarities between our present and the European catastrophe of the 1930s and 1940s, so as better to prevent its repetition (usually by reanimating liberalism as the sole antidote to illiberalism). Fascism is indeed a matter of returns and repetitions, but it is not best approached in terms of steps and checklists dictated by a selective reading of the Italian ventennio or the Third Reich.

Rather than treating fascism as a singular event or identifying it with a particular configuration of European parties, regimes and ideologies, for the purposes of thinking in and against our own day we need ‘to see fascism within the totality of its “process”’ This also entails approaching fascism in the longue durée, to perceive it as a dynamic that precedes its naming. It means understanding fascism as intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination – which, albeit mutable and sometimes contradictory, have a certain consistency at their core. W. E. B. Du Bois gave this core a name, still usable today: ‘the counter-revolution of property’. For all their deep differences and dissimilarities, the Ku Klux Klan terrorism against Black Reconstruction, the rise of squadrismo against labour organising in Italy, or the murderous codification of neoliberalism in Chile’s constitution can all be understood under that heading.

I do not intend ‘late fascism’ to operate like an academic brand, in competition with other names for our dire present. It is there to name a problem. At its most basic, like ‘late capitalism’ or ‘late Marxism’, it gestures toward the fact that fascism, like other political phenomena, varies according to its socioeconomic context. More provocatively, perhaps, it underscores how ‘classical’ fascist fixes – so intimately bound to the capitalist crises of their time, but also to an era of mass manual labour, universal male conscription for total warfare and racial imperialist projects – are ‘out of time.’ Ironically, many intellectuals and agitators leaning toward fascism today are actually profoundly invested in fantasies of a white, industrial, patriarchal modernity that have the post-fascist, post-war period as their seedbed. To recognize fascism’s anachronism is cold comfort, especially when liberal and neoliberal fixes to planetary crises – especially to disastrous anthropogenic climate change – are themselves criminally late and inadequate, leaving much room for manoeuvre to the radical right, which is able to reinvent its fantasies of domination directed at ‘women, nature and colonies’ in profoundly destructive ways.

An unreflexive struggle against fascism runs the risk of becoming sclerotic, self-indulgent or complicit with the very processes that body forth reaction, the lesser evil lending a hand to the greater one. When it does not question its own theoretical frameworks, its own habits of naming or indeed the pleasures of innocence, heroism and righteousness that may arise from these, anti-fascism can be its own lure.

Fiercely, viciously identitarian, fascism evades exhaustive identification. It repeats, but with differences, scavenging the ideological terrain for usable materials – not uncommonly from its antagonists on the left. It can flaunt its relativism while trading in absolutes. And for all its Cold War association with the hyper-statist logic of totalitarianism, it breeds its own forms of pluralism and its own visions of freedom. My wager has been that it is possible to think cogently about the elements of fascism as an anti-emancipatory politics of crisis without equating theory and definition, avoiding the checklist of tell-tale features or the streamlined schedule of the steps to fascist victory. A critical theory of fascism need not take the form of a diagnostic and statistical manual of political disorders. The radical theorists of racial and colonial fascism that have anchored my own reflections, as well as my criticisms of historical analogy, can attune us to four interlocking dimensions of the history and experience of fascism.

The first is that the practices and ideologies that crystallised, more or less laboriously, into Italian fascism, German Nazism and their European kin were presaged and prepared by the dispossession and exploitation of ‘lesser breeds without the Law’ wrought by settler-colonialism, chattel slavery and intra-European racial capitalism (or internal colonialism). I believe that our ‘late ’ fascism cannot be understood without the ‘fascisms before fascism’ that accompanied the imperialist consolidation of a capitalist world-system.

Second, fascism has been differentially applied, experienced and named across axes of race, gender and sexuality. As we learn from the writings of incarcerated revolutionaries of color in the United States, political orders widely deemed liberal-democratic can harbor institutions that operate as regimes of domination and terror for ample sectors of their population, in something like a racial dual state. This means that both in their political origins and their strategic imperatives, abolitionism and contemporary anti-fascism cannot be disjoined.

Third, fascism is grounded in a modality of preventive counter-violence, its desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilisational, demographic and existential. The epochal panic about the ‘rising tide of color’ and the ‘colored world revolution’ that seeded the rise of fascism after the First World War has morphed (barely) into narratives of replacement, substitution or cultural suicide shared by mass shooters and European prime ministers alike.

Fourth, fascism required the production of identifications and subjectivities, desires and forms of life, which do not simply demand obedience to despotic state power but draw on a sui generis idea of freedom. Whether in the guise of decentralized and deputized power or psychological wages, the fascist – as the phantasmatic synthesis of the settler and the soldier (or the cop) – needs to imagine him or herself as an active shareholder in the monopoly of violence as well as an enterprising petty sovereign, with race and nation serving as the affective and ideological vectors of identification with power.

If we keep these dimensions in mind – the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism, the differential experience of domination, political violence pre-empting an imagined existential threat, the subject as deputy of sovereign violence – we can begin to comprehend how contemporary fascist potentials converge and crystallize into forms of ‘border fascism.’ Whether that border be a physical demarcation to be walled and patrolled, or a set of fractal fault lines running through the body politic and multiply marked and policed, there is no circumventing the fact that, as ‘the cycles of capitalism driving both mass migration and repression converge with the climate crisis’ and a racial-civilizational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse, the extreme and authoritarian right will map its politics of time – and especially its obsession with epochal loss of privilege and purity – onto the space of territory. It will also, like its twentieth-century forebears, seek to gain control over the borders of the body, to patrol the demarcations between genders and sexes.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore has encapsulated the idea of racial capitalism in the formula ‘capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.’ Fascism, we could add, strives violently to enshrine inequality under conditions of crisis by creating simulacra of equality for some – it is a politics and a culture of national-social entrenchment, nourished by racism, in a situation of real or anticipated social catastrophe. As a politics of crisis, it is a limit case of ‘capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism’ (sometimes even creating the mirage of a capitalism without capitalism). Countering the fascist potentials and processes that traverse the global present therefore cannot mean subordinating the practical critique of capitalism to watered-down (un)popular fronts with liberals or conservatives. A ‘progressive’ neoliberalism – the one that lies in the back of most mainstream denunciations of fascism – is defined by the production and reproduction of inequalities and exclusions inconsistently accompanied by formalistic and formulaic commitments to rights, diversity and difference. Those who make common cause with it will have to do so in the awareness that they are ‘manning the imperial gates,’ allying with the cause to ward off its effects. Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism. The latter, capaciously understood, is not just a matter of resisting the worst, but will always be inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo the lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with such grim regularity.

 ____________________________

Excerpted from Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis by Alberto Toscano. Copyright (c) 2023 Alberto Toscano. Used by arrangement with the Publisher, Verso Books. All rights reserved.

Commercial book publishing was (and is) unbearably white. In 1971, when Toni Morrison became a trade editor, about 95 percent of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number dropped only to 89 percent. One of the only other black women working as an editor, Marie Brown, started the same year at Doubleday. Black women faced bias along axes of race and gender, making Morrison’s extraordinary accomplish­ments all the more astonishing. She began her career in publishing as a textbook editor for L. W. Singer in Syracuse, a Random House subsidiary. On a visit a couple years later, Bob Bernstein—observing that “African Americans were not just underrepresented in the business; they were practically nonexistent”—promoted Morrison first to the scholastic division then to trade editor for Ran­dom House at the New York City headquarters.

She pointedly acquired black writers for what was an extremely white list. “I wasn’t marching,” she told Hilton Als. “I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything. But I could make sure there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line.” She was unsentimental and unsparing. For an internal report on a manu­script from Black Panther Huey Newton, she recommended that Random House “delete some of the truly weak essays, edit all” and argued that “the Pan­thers and their prose should be given the benefit of editing and thus be shown in their best light.” Along with Newton, she published nonfiction by Muham­mad Ali and Angela Davis; in terms of fiction and poetry, she published Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Leon Forrest, June Jordan, and Gayl Jones. She managed to make a little headway against the whiteness of the house’s list.

Her situation as a black woman at a very white press, though, was fraught. It was fraught within the house, where she had to contest entrenched white supremacy. It was also fraught outside the house, where her black peers might see her as a sellout. Some did. Morrison published poetry and fiction by Henry Dumas, a black writer who had been murdered by the police in 1968. His poems had circulated in the black press, including Black World, before Morrison published his collection Play Ebony, Play Ivory. Her edition didn’t acknowledge the prior publications. Editors at Black World were displeased. The executive editor wrote to Morrison to say that he was “more than a little offended.” A week later, Morrison received a letter from her friend Carole Parks, a Black World editor. She wrote, “it’s not just that you have given people absolutely no inkling that a Black publication gave Dumas his first national exposure. It’s that you have at the same time added to the myth that Black genius would languish unappreciated were it not for some white liberal or far-sighted individual like yourself.” Parks accused Morrison of being interested in herself and her “already prestigious career.” Morrison responded that she had been deeply hurt. She asked, “Perhaps I should leave white publishers to their own devices?” She said she would miss her friendship with Parks.

In the meantime, Morrison became a star novelist. She published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, with Holt, Rinehart in 1970. When Robert Gottlieb, Knopf editor, learned that the author of The Bluest Eye worked in the same building, he brought her in house and became her editor for the rest of her life. She dedicated her late masterpiece, A Mercy (2008), to him. She published her second novel, Sula, in 1973, writing to her friend James Baldwin for a blurb, which he gave. “I love the quote just as you wrote it,” she replied. “Perfect and unad-copyish.” In the same letter, she lamented that she couldn’t be the one to publish his latest novel, If Beale Street Could Talk. “It is so beautiful that I wanted to cover it, touch it, promote it, be knowledgeable about it—you know become an If Beale Street Could Talk groupie.” After publishing her third novel, Song of Solomon, in 1977, she felt she needed more time to focus on her writing. She began coming into the office one day per week and doing the rest of her work from home.

In her last years as an editor, Morrison helped lead the chorus of those calling to take up arms against conglomeration. In 1981, Morrison delivered the keynote address at the American Writers Congress to an overflow crowd of three thousand. Writers today, she said, “are held in contempt—to be played with when our masters are pleased, to be dismissed when they are not.” She argued that the pomp of the 1970s, the big auctions and the author tours, masked the damage conglomeration had done: “the vitality in the arts which promoters like to talk about is false. Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs, something is terribly wrong.” She preached, she declaimed. The audience erupted frequently in cheers and applause. “The life of the writing community is under attack,” she said, sounding not unlike Stephen King in The Dark Tower. “Editors,” she said, turning to her day job, “are now judged by the profitability of what they acquire rather than by what they acquire, or the way they acquire it. Acceptance of the givenness of the marketplace keeps us in ignorance.” She closed with revolutionary rhetoric. “We are already at the barricades, and if there is one resolution that emerges from this congress, it is that we choose to remain at the barricades.”

She resigned from Random House in 1983. “Leaving was a good idea,” she wrote in the preface to her next novel, Beloved (1987), “The books I had edited were not earning scads of money.” She quietly blamed colleagues who were less than supportive of her list. “My enthusiasm,” she wrote, “shared by some, was muted by others, reflecting the indifferent sales figures.”

She threw herself into Beloved, which would become her greatest success. It was based on a news clipping she’d included in The Black Book (1974), a work of experimental collage. Margaret Garner escaped slavery in 1856 by crossing from Kentucky to Ohio with her four children. When slave catchers caught them, Garner killed her two-year-old and tried to kill the others rather than have them returned to slavery. Morrison transposes Garner’s story onto Sethe, her protagonist, and sets Sethe’s story after emancipation in Sethe’s house, which is haunted by the dead child, known as Beloved. It is a novel about the haunting afterlives of slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, helped Morrison win the Nobel Prize in 1993, and has become the most widely held U.S. novel in libraries and one of the most written-about U.S. novels in scholarly journals. It influenced the priorities of African American literary studies for the coming decades.

By Morrison’s account, Beloved is also about publishing. This is, on its face, a ludicrous claim. The novel is about chain gangs and slave catchers and trauma. It features no editors, no publishing houses. Yet Morrison confesses that publishing is at its center. In the novel’s preface, she writes:

“A few days after my last day of work, sitting in front of my house on the pier jutting out into the Hudson River, I began to feel an edginess instead of the calm I had expected. I ran through my index of problem areas and found nothing new or pressing. I couldn’t fathom what was so unexpectedly troubling on a day that was perfect, watching a river that serene. I had no agenda and couldn’t hear the telephone if it rang. I heard my heart, though, stomping away in my chest like a colt. . . . Then it slapped me: I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a sur­feit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty. Enter Beloved.”

“I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what ‘free’ could mean,” she adds. Morrison is saying that leaving Random House enabled her to feel, in her body, a freedom that she could project back onto emancipation from slavery. She describes the first moment of freedom for Sethe’s mother, Baby Suggs, in much the same way. “Something’s the matter,” Baby Suggs thinks. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” She sees her hands as her hands. And she feels “a knocking in her chest, and discover[s] something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing?” It was the odd­est sensation.

Acknowledging the possibility of exaggeration, let’s follow Morrison’s thought. Beloved describes the thrill of freedom, but also insists that freedom is contaminated by the haunting of slavery. Among the degradations that haunt Sethe, she was coerced into complicity with racist writings. A villain named schoolteacher—uncapitalized—dehumanizes Sethe by forcing her to submit to his pupils’ scrutiny as they write down, in parallel, her “human” and “animal” characteristics. Sethe returns to this traumatic event, remembering the observation. She also remembers, and is haunted by, the fact that she made the ink that schoolteacher and his pupils used. “I made the ink,” she says, toward the end of the novel, “He couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made the ink.”

Beloved is an exquisite work of art, terrifying and beautiful. It does everything. One of the things it does is allegorize the publishing industry for a black woman who worked as an editor at a major house for sixteen years, who fought for black writers in a sea of whiteness, who was more or less accused by other black editors of being a race traitor. Morrison, defending herself to Carole Parks, wrote that she didn’t have a career, she just had work. It is a story of coercion into white supremacy. I made the ink. But it is also a story about the exhilara­tion of freedom. Morrison ended her preface to Beloved by emphasizing the con­nection, making sure readers feel the sensation of a heartbeat that is hers and Baby Suggs’s both: “I husband that moment on the pier, the deceptive river, the instant awareness of possibility, the loud heart kicking, the solitude, the danger.”

 __________________________________

Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature is available from Columbia University Press.

Shortly after dawn on Friday 19 May 1536, Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower of London, left his quarters near the eastern perimeter of the fortress and set out around the west side of the White Tower. Passing through the Coldharbour Gate, the great tower and gateway built by Henry III in around 1240 to guard the entrance to the royal apartments, he gained admission to the innermost ward. Arriving at the queen’s lodgings, he mounted the stairs at the south end of the building, and then passed through the recently rebuilt Presence Chamber. After he reached the door of the more intimate privy chamber, he gently knocked.

A lady-in-waiting opened it, and beyond was a slim, thirty-five- or thirty-six-year-old woman of average height with dark, flashing eyes and a long, slender neck—Queen Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII. This was not the first time that Kingston had visited her at this hour. She had sent for him early in the morning on Thursday, after keeping an anxious vigil since 2 a.m., kneeling in prayer with John Skip, her trusted almoner. Under sentence of death, she had summoned Kingston while she received the holy sacrament of the Mass and protested her innocence of the heinous crimes of which she was accused: incest, quadruple adultery and plotting to kill her husband. Swearing twice on the sacrament that she spoke God’s truth, she declared that she was “a good woman” and had never been unfaithful. Her belief was that she would die shortly after 8 a.m., the customary hour for such executions. Steeling herself to walk to the scaffold, she had spent many long hours of waiting that night, reconciling herself to what was to come.

She so readied herself, because one of the four former ladies- in-waiting whom her husband had redesignated as her custodians and whom she detested—possibly her aunt, Lady Elizabeth Boleyn—had informed her that she would die that day. It was a cruel misunderstanding. The date and time of execution had not yet been fixed. When nothing happened, she became sorely distressed. Sending for the Constable again, she said: “Master Kingston, I hear say I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought then to be dead and past my pain.” Unbeknown to her, Henry would not approve her death-warrant until later that same Thursday. When the writ was finally sealed, it instructed Kingston that “immediately on receipt of these presents, you bring the said Anne upon the Green within our Tower of London, and cut off the head of the said Anne, and in this omit nothing.”

There were other reasons for a delay. During daylight hours, the gates of the Tower were left open to permit visitors to access the outer ward. Not wishing to arouse suspicions, but keen to restrict independent reports of the manner of Anne’s death from traveling abroad, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s principal secretary and chief enforcer, had ordered Kingston to expel some thirty foreigners from the Tower precincts before the execution could begin. Cromwell appointed his staunch ally, the merchant-banker Richard Gresham, soon to be Lord Mayor of London although he was one of the most hated men in the city, to take charge of security and make sure only those whom the king wished to see his wife die should be allowed to enter “because of [the] wondering of the people.” Equally, Henry, who was planning everything from afar in the minutest detail, intended everyone who mattered to be there. Given the initial uncertainty as to the date and time, Kingston worried that “if we have not an hour certain [as it may] be known in London, I think here will be but few and I think a reasonable number were best.” On that score, he need not have feared.

A man not without some human sympathy, Kingston tried to divert Anne’s attention from the muddle over the timetable. “It should be no pain,” he answered, “it is so subtle.”

“I heard say,” she replied, “the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.” At this, she “put her hand about it, laughing heartily.” All through her life, she had never lacked courage and it did not fail her now. “I have seen many men and also women executed,” Kingston informed Cromwell, “and all they [i.e. all of them] have been in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death.” With her marriage and her reputation destroyed, Anne had put her faith in a redeeming Christ.

By Friday morning, everything was ready. Anne had spent a second night with Skip, kneeling in prayer, too exhausted to sleep. As dawn broke, Kingston reappeared to tell her she would die that day and to give her a purse containing £20 which she was to distribute, according to tradition, as alms before her death. Sometime after 8 a.m., he returned: the moment was approaching. Anne dressed herself with the greatest care for her final appearance on a public stage. As a teenager at the court of Queen Claude of France, she had learnt about the power and symbolism of beautiful clothes. The occasion demanded sobriety, not flamboyance, and so today she chose a gown of grey damask lined with fur, over which she wore an ermine mantle. Her choice is telling, because dark or neutral shades of silk or satin rarely found a place in her wardrobe. She had never worn grey or black: colors too closely associated with her predecessor as queen, Katherine of Aragon. She then tied up her still lustrous dark brown hair, over which she wore an English gable headdress, another unusual choice for her as she tended to prefer the more fashionable and flattering French hoods. We should not overlook the significance of her hood. Anne had been a Francophile from a young age: her tastes and values were radically different to those of previous royal consorts—but this was an occasion to protest her loyal Englishness.

Attended by Lady Boleyn and the three other ladies, she left her privy chamber for the last time and went downstairs into the open air. Crossing the inner courtyard of the palace area out of the queen’s lodgings, she passed through the Coldharbour gate and around the White Tower to arrive at the Green before the “House of Ordnance.” This was the place where the king’s soldiers often practiced archery and shooting, and where a “new scaffold” had been hastily erected—for today the killing would be real.

No more than three feet high, the scaffold was mounted by four or five steps. It ought to have been draped in black canvas, but whether the Tower officials had managed to do this in time is uncertain. Around it ranged rows of hastily constructed seating for the more important spectators, notably Anne’s stepson, the seventeen-year-old Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s illegitimate son, perhaps there to represent his father. Anne had treated Fitzroy badly, and he was going to enjoy seeing her die. Close by sat the Duke of Suffolk, Sir Thomas Audley (the Lord Chancellor), Cromwell and most of the king’s privy councillors, supported by members of the House of Lords. Behind them sat the Mayor and Aldermen of London, with the leaders of the city’s livery companies, headed by the Master and Wardens of the Mercers’ Company, further back craning for a view. A Tower official noted that many of the London contingent brought their wives and that, despite the strict prohibition, some “strangers” (i.e. foreigners) had managed to slip through the cordon. One of Cromwell’s future servants said, with pardonable exaggeration, that a crowd of a thousand had gained entry. More likely it was around half that number.

Once Anne reached the foot of the scaffold, Kingston led her up the steps. By now it was almost 9 a.m., and as was the usual protocol, he gave her permission to speak briefly. Audiences had fixed opinions as to what condemned prisoners should say. They were to make peace with their accusers and the world by confessing their faults, trusting in the mercy of God, asking the crowd to pray for them and then dying bravely. Obedience to the king’s will and submission to his justice was expected. No one was allowed to question the justice of their sentence or impugn the king—indeed, it was customary to praise him as a just and gracious lord. Above all, they should acknowledge that they were sinners, as all mortals were in the sight of God, and that they deserved to die.

Anne was not someone to conform blindly to the rules if she did not feel they were right. Barely three weeks before, she had been the most influential woman in the country. Advancing to the edge of the scaffold “with a goodly smiling countenance” to address the crowd, she unburdened herself of the lines she had carefully prepared:

Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus, I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord, have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.

What stunned the crowd into silence was not what she said, but what she failed to say. She offered no public admission of sin, no confession that she had wronged her husband, not even a hint that she was guilty of the crimes against God and nature of which royal justice had convicted her. One seventeenth-century reader, after transcribing her words in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, annotated them as “The queen’s oracular and ambiguous speech.”

The speech over, Anne’s ladies removed her mantle but left her wearing her gown. This was possible because the fashionable low square neckline would not have impeded access to her neck. Taking off her gable headdress herself, she tucked her hair into a coif. She next fastened “her clothes about her feet,” ensuring that if her skirts moved, her legs were not visible. She then “knelt down upon her knees.” Her only visible sign of emotion was to glance over her shoulder several times. Was this an understandable moment of fear, perhaps that the headsman would strike before she was ready? Or was it more poignant? She had previously told Kingston that though she had been harshly treated at the time of her arrest: “I think the king does it to prove me.”

Did she hope against hope for a last-minute reprieve? Was she looking over her shoulder for a messenger? Henry had the power to spare her—if he chose to. Although she had been in France at the time, she cannot but have heard of the king pardoning some 400 prisoners taken after the so-called “Evil May Day” uprising in London in 1517, when the houses of Italian and other foreign merchants were looted and burned. While twenty men were sent to the gallows, the rest, dressed only in their shirts and with halters already around their necks, knelt before the king in his full majesty in Westminster Hall. When they begged for mercy, Henry allowed himself to be persuaded into granting it. He waited until the last possible moment and would do the same a mere six days after Anne mounted the scaffold in the case of a friar known as “Peretrie.” It had already been decided to pardon him, but, theatrically, Henry ordered that “the law should proceed upon him even till the last point of execution.” Only as the hangman was about to kick the ladder away from the gallows would a messenger arrive with the letters of pardon. But if Anne dreamed that her former lover would save her, she barely knew him.

There was no need for a block since Anne was to be killed not with an axe, but with a two-handed sword in the French manner. For a beheading to go smoothly, it needed someone skilled enough to sever the head with a single blow. In Henry’s England, unlike in France, the common hangman wielded the axe. Because such men had more experience with the grislier tasks of hanging and “drawing” (i.e. disembowelling) their prisoners before cutting off the head and quartering the corpse, they often bungled beheadings, leaving dying victims in agony until a final stroke killed them. Commonly the hangman used his axe as a meat-cleaver to hack through the more obstinate sinews.

Anne did not have to face these horrors. Possibly as a last concession to the woman he had once called his “own sweetheart,” or perhaps as a sardonic reminder of her love of France, Henry had sent to Calais for a specialist headsman said to be an expert with a two-handed sword. At a price of 100 gold crowns of the sun (over £23,000 in modern values), the man would not come cheaply.

While one of her ladies placed a blindfold over her eyes, Anne said repeatedly, “To Christ I commend my soul; Jesu, receive my soul.” Those words were the executioner’s cue. On hearing them, his sword hissed through the air and he sliced off her head with a single blow. Sir John Spelman, one of the royal justices present, who confided his impressions to his private notebook, says, “He did his office very well…the head fell to the ground with her lips moving and her eyes moving.” A French report adds the blow came “before you could say a paternoster [Lord’s Prayer].” Nothing is said about the crowd’s reaction beyond that she died “boldly,” but it is hard to believe they did not gasp. Anyone who harbored doubts had to mask them. No one dared grieve openly for the dead queen lest they share her fate. Henry’s conscience was clear: she had paid, quite rightly, for her wickedness and treachery.

As soon as her head was off, one of the women threw a linen cloth over it, while the others wrapped the body in a bedsheet. They then carried the body with the head some seventy or so yards along the path to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the north-west corner of the site. Inside the chapel, Anne’s clothing was stripped off—the Tower officials claimed her valuable fabrics as perquisites—before the women laid the corpse in an elm chest which had once contained bow staves destined for Ireland. Someone had perhaps forgotten, or more likely not dared, to attempt to measure Anne for a coffin, so the elm chest became a substitute.

At noon, the coffin was buried without ceremony under the floor of the chancel in the chapel beside the high altar. There she lay undisturbed until 1876 when, during restoration work, human remains said to be hers were exhumed at the request of Prince Albert, who ordered the bodies buried there to be properly identified and reinterred with name plaques. At a depth of two feet, bones were uncovered, said to belong to a woman in the prime of life, and of moderate height. The forehead and lower jaw were small and well formed. The skeletal vertebrae were unusually petite, especially one joint (the atlas) next to the skull, which the onlookers said was testimony to Anne’s “little neck.”

Henry famously had six wives: “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived’ is a jingle that schoolchildren learning about them chant around the world. Why, of all these relationships, does this one bear fresh scrutiny? Part of the answer is personal and political: with none of his other wives would Henry rekindle the intense passion, and genuine respect, he felt for this one woman. For the love of Anne, he alienated his family, many of his courtiers and his subjects; for her he destroyed and even killed men whom he had once regarded as his supporters and friends; for her he broke with the pope, used Parliament to enact matters that affected people’s faith, ended centuries of tradition and risked war in Europe.

The other part of the answer is cultural and psychological: none of Henry’s queens is etched into the popular imagination so deeply as is Anne. Her story exerts a perennial fascination and is the inspiration for countless biographies and works of fiction, for plays, poems, films and websites, even for a Donizetti opera. Anne Boleyn costumes, dolls, necklaces and rings are sold online. Hever Castle’s shop offers an Anne Boleyn rubber bath duck in a French hood. Hers is a story that everyone thinks they know; and yet, do we fully comprehend who she was and what she stood for, and if so, how do we set about understanding why a man who was so besotted that he could hardly bear to be away from her for more than an hour could calmly summon a swordsman to strike off her head and believe himself to be in the right?

____________________________

Excerpted from Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox. Copyright © 2023. Available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

One summer morning in 1883, Alexander John Ellis sat at his desk in front of three large bay windows, opened wide to catch any breeze that London’s Kensington had to give. From his chair, he could hear the birds in the plane trees and see right down Argyll Road, its five-story white stucco Georgian houses resembling layers of an expensive wedding cake. By the time everyone else was rising, Ellis had generally already been up for several hours. Early morning was his favorite time of day. Ellis loved the notion of getting ahead while others were sleeping, and getting work done before his neighbor, a master singer, started his scales and taught his students by the open window. “The nuisance is awful at times,” he wrote to Murray. Ellis always ate the same light breakfast of a French roll with butter, and drank his signature beverage: a cup of warm water with a little milk.

This day, as every day, his first act on waking was to weigh himself naked, before dressing for the day. Always the same boots and coat, affectionately named Barges and Dreadnought, before heading straight to his desk on the second floor. He needed to weigh himself before putting on his clothes for one main reason: Dreadnought was heavy. Dreadnought had twenty-eight pockets, each one stuffed full with eccentric items. Ellis made a noise like a kitchen drawer as he walked. When he sat down, eyewitnesses said that his pockets “stood upright like sentinels.” They were variously full of letters, nail clippers, string, a knife sharpener, a book and philological papers in case of emergency, and two things that a teetotaller and someone who watched his weight rarely needed: a corkscrew and a scone, just in case friends were in want of either. These last two items sum up Ellis; he was kind-hearted and always thought of his friends before himself.

On his desk, there were signs of everything that he held dear: a draft of the fifth and final volume of his monumental book, On Early English Pronunciation, daguerreotypes of Venice and his three children, a tuning fork, and a favorite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism, “Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servant of the heart, and should never be its slave.”

This morning held a special excitement: also spread out in front of him were Murray’s proof sheets for the first section of the Dictionary (words A to Ant)—all 362 pages of them. Murray had sent them to Ellis for his comment. As Ellis’s eyes skimmed the proofs, he could not help looking for his own name in the Introduction. He felt a sense of profound satisfaction to see “A. J. Ellis, Esq, FRS (Phonology)” listed between Prof. Frederick Pollock (Legal terms) and Dr P. H. Pye-Smith (Medical and Biological words).

Ellis’s passions were pronunciation, music, and mathematics, and his expertise in all of these areas had been sought by Murray who had had difficulty finding British academics to help him (by contrast, American scholars were eager to be involved). He had helped Murray with the very first entry in the Dictionary—A: not only the sound A, “the low-back-wide vowel formed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips,” but also the musical sense of A, “the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major,” and finally the algebraic sense of A, “as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used to express known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown.” Ellis was happy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, including the words air, alert, algebra.

Many people, not only in Britain but around the world, were eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first part of the Dictionary, and Murray particularly wanted Ellis’s opinion on the draft Introduction, which he knew he had to get just right. It all read perfectly to Ellis except for one section. “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive,” Murray had written. “Not everyone who consults it will require all the information supplied; everyone, it is hoped, will find what he actually wants.”

Is it really exhaustive? Ellis wondered. What about slang and coarse words? He scribbled to Murray in the margin (and the page with the scribble still survives today in the archives), “You omit slang & perhaps obscenities, thus are by no means exhaustive. Though disagreeable, obscene words are part of the life of a language.” Feeling satisfied with his contribution to Murray’s landmark first part of the Dictionary, and admiring of the project as a whole, Ellis placed the corrected draft into an envelope and placed it by his front door, ready for the morning post.

Ellis had raised an important question about inclusion, but he was not quite right about the boundaries of the Dictionary. Murray had included slang but it was true that, so far, he had left out obscenities. We can only imagine the uproar in Victorian society had he not. Murray would agonize over his decision to leave them out, but also had to be mindful of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 which made it illegal to expose the public to any content judged to be grossly indecent.

Murray’s caution proved wise when, a few years later, a fellow lexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, had his own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with William Henley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing the letters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took his publisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jury that writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personally guilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs. Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Act by arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, not the public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henley was published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck and many other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and the public outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.

By the time that section of the letter C was published for the Oxford English Dictionary the only cunt that was listed by Murray was cunt– , a cross- reference to the prefixes cont– , count- with no mention whatsoever of the female body part. Fuck was also left out. Although these old words had been in use since the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, they would have to wait until the 1970s to be included in the OED. Murray did, however, include pudendum, a word derived from Latin for “that of which one ought to be ashamed,” which he defined as “the privy parts, the external genital organs” with no reference to a woman or—God forbid—her vulva.

Each of Murray’s advisers had different notions of what was offensively salacious. His adviser on medical terms, James Dixon, who was a retired surgeon living in Dorking, Surrey, had been all right with including cunt, but absolutely drew the line with a word which he considered so obscene it had to be sent to Murray in a small envelope marked PRIVATE, sealed within a larger envelope. Inside the intriguing packaging was a message advising him not to include the word condom. “I am writing on a very obscene subject. There is an article called Cundum…a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well- deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoy copulation without the possibility of impregnation,” he wrote to Murray. “Everything obscene comes from France, and I had supposed this affair was named after the city of Condom, which gives title to a Bishop.” But he had found a quotation from 1705 referring to a “Quondam” which made him rethink his assumption that it was named after the town in France. “I suppose Cundom or Quondam will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary,” he concluded. Murray left it out.

Dixon was the man who unwisely advised Murray to delete the entry for appendicitis because it was, according to Dixon, just another itis-word. “Surely you will not attempt to enter all the crack-jaw medical and surgical words. What do you think of ‘Dacryocystosyringoketokleitis’? You know doctors think the way to indicate any inflammation is to tack on ‘itis’ to a word.” The word’s deletion turned out to be an embarrassment to Murray and Oxford University Press when, in 1902, the coronation of Edward VII was postponed because of the King’s attack of appendicitis. Suddenly everyone was using the word, but no one could find it in the Dictionary, and since the letter A was already published it could not be added until the Supplement volume in 1933.

But back to the summer of 1883. Murray received the corrected proofs from Ellis. He not only appreciated Ellis’s feedback but also trusted his judgement: he promptly deleted all claims to exhaustiveness and wrote, “The aim of this Dictionary is to furnish an adequate account of the meaning, origin, and history of English words now in general use, or known to be in use.”

*

I had been wondering how Ellis got to be such a word nerd? I was fascinated by what I discovered. To begin with, something very unusual happened when he was eleven years old. His mother’s cousin, a schoolmaster called William Ellis, offered to give the young boy a substantial inheritance if he would change his surname from Sharpe to Ellis. Mr and Mrs Sharpe agreed, and from then on “Alexander John Sharpe” became “Alexander John Ellis.” The young boy was enrolled at Shrewsbury School and Eton, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and never had to earn money for the rest of his life.

Ellis’s wealth enabled him to be the quintessential “gentleman scholar,” an expert in almost everything he did, be it music, mathematics, languages, phonetics, travel, or daguerreotype photography. He was a polymath for whom life was more a science than an art. He published over 300 articles and books, and his works are quoted in the OED 200 times.

His interest in accent and pronunciation was inspired by the fact that he was born to a middle-class family in Hoxton, east London, where he was exposed to working-class cockney speakers, followed by schooling at Shrewsbury with its Welsh and English accents, and then exposed to the Received Pronunciation of the upper and upper-middle classes at Eton and Cambridge.

Words were like children to Ellis. He loved them equally, regardless of whether they were common, technical, scientific, slang, or foreign. He read the Dictionary as though it were a novel. Some words gave him pure delight in both their sound and meaning such as absquatulate, to abscond or decamp, with a quotation from Haliburton’s Clockmaker. “Absquotilate [sic] it in style, you old skunk…and show the gentlemen what you can do.” But it was their sounds that captured his imagination most. The quality of a whisper or a creak; the stress of a syllable; high pitch or low pitch.

Most people hear sounds, but Ellis saw them. He saw the air move in the mouth, the way the tip of the tongue touched the ridge of the teeth for a t; the vibration of vocal cords to change it to a d; and how the base of the tongue moved back in the mouth to block the flow of air for a g. Every sound was a picture for Ellis. He devoted his life to painting these pictures, describing their systematic order so the world might better understand the fundamentals of language.

His book On Early English Pronunciation, published in five volumes between 1869 and 1889, traced the pronunciation of English from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century and established him as a world authority on English phonology, a pioneer in the field of speech-sound studies. For the nineteenth-century section of the book, Ellis enlisted the help of hundreds of informants across Britain and a small group of experts, including Murray and others within the OED network. The result was the first major study of British dialects.

No language yet existed for the patterns Ellis was identifying, so he often had to invent the words, which subsequently made it into the Dictionary: palatalized, to make a palatal sound (by moving the point of contact between tongue and palate further forward in the mouth); labialization, the action of making a speech sound labial (articulated with both lips); and labiopalatalized, a sound made into a labiopalatal (articulated with the front of the tongue against the hard palate and the lips). He also invented the words septendecimal, relating to a seventeenth (in music); and phonetician, which originally referred to an advocate of phonetic spelling, rather than its current meaning of “an expert of phonetics.” Quite a few of his inventions have since fallen out of use and appear in the Dictionary with a dagger sign (which indicates obsolescence) beside them, such as vocalistic, of or relating to vowels, and phonotyper, an advocate of phonotypy (another term which Ellis invented, meaning “a system of phonetic printing”).

Ellis was one of the phoneticians on whom George Bernard Shaw modeled the character of Henry Higgins, that master of pronunciation, in his play Pygmalion, later turned into the musical My Fair Lady. Higgins (as a bet with his gentlemen friends) teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak “proper” English; but Ellis had none of Henry Higgins’s snobbery or arrogance. He was a generous, down-to-earth man, a frequent correspondent with friends, happy to offer advice when asked, and always working to bring people together and support them.

Ellis spent every Sunday carrying out experiments in musical pitch at the house of musicologist Alfred Hipkins. He arrived at the Hipkinses’ by horse cab, the pockets of Dreadnought full of tuning forks, measuring rods, notes, and resonators. So as not to cause any trouble to the Hipkinses’ servants, the thoughtful Ellis even filled his experiment jars with water for refreshment before leaving home. Ellis’s work with Hipkins is preserved in the Dictionary in certain words which they alone invented and used—but as no one else did they are now obsolete, for example mesotonic, relating to the mean tone.

After a full afternoon of experiments with Alfred, Ellis would join the Hipkins family for lively conversation around the tea table, although he refrained from eating lest it interfere with his supper of warm-water-and-milk. Hipkins’s daughter Edith remembered these Sundays and commented that for someone who became famous for sound, Ellis actually had a bad ear: “Dr. Ellis was tone deaf and could not distinguish between ‘God Save the Queen’ or ‘Rule Britannia!’ Happily my father had an unusually sensitive ear and as Dr. Ellis arrived at conclusions entirely by calculations he would call upon his ‘other self’ in time of trouble with ‘Lend me your ears!'”

__________________________________

From The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie. Copyright © 2023. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

The simplest way to make a globe is to construct a sphere and paint it. The earliest globes would have been made of wood or metal, with the celestial or terrestrial map painted directly on by hand. Later, in the sixteenth century, hollow globes were made of thin sheets of metal which were then hand-painted. Mapping doesn’t lend itself to painting and lettering by hand, and cartography was in its infancy, so early painted globes were necessarily very inaccurate.

Later makers pasted blank gores onto the sphere to create a more forgiving canvas for the hand-painted map and lettering. These are called manuscript globes. The invention of the printing press meant that maps could be printed as gores. A silversmith or skilled engraver would etch a reverse map on copper plates before printing using a process known as intaglio, from the Italian word for ‘carving.’ In intaglio printing the etched plate is coated with ink, then wiped to leave ink only in the incised depressions, before being run through an etching press, in which dampened paper picks up the ink to create the printed image. Copper is a soft metal, so the plates lose their clarity relatively quickly; smaller print runs were therefore common. The effect, though, is very satisfying, with an intense character to the image. The globemaker then pasted the printed gores onto the globe and finally the painter would add color.

It was at this point that the globemaking craft became assimilated with the printing and publishing industry. Globes were after all now printed just like books, and since this time each edition has been referred to as a ‘publication.’ And as in book publishing, copying the map from a rival’s globe is plagiarism.

The golden age of the printed and then hand-painted globe coincided with the age of European expansion, reaching its peak at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In this period, as astronomical, geographical and cartographical knowledge developed apace, globemakers too were inspired to experiment and refine their art. In turn, the proliferation of printing presses made it possible over time to produce more globes at a less than exorbitant cost so they became more affordable to a greater number of people.

Nevertheless, the acquisition or commission of a globe was still the preserve of the aristocracy and the affluent merchant class. Because of the delicate and time-consuming nature of the work, a budding globemaker probably would have required considerable financial backing. Globes therefore were prized symbols of status and prestige.

Studying these venerable antique globes, it was striking to see how little the methods of manufacture had changed from the mid-sixteenth century until the twentieth century, albeit there is always a mystery about the exact construction and methods because so much is hidden under the surface – it was only in the last century that the rot set in. I knew that I had high aspirations but did not want to simply reproduce some sort of cheap faux-antique facsimile. Instead, my ambition was to produce a handmade globe that felt classic yet at the same time unusual, relevant and contemporary.

Bellerby Globes. shot by Tom Bunning for part of his ‘Crafted’ Series.

I come from a line of keen artists. My grandmother and my mother both loved painting with watercolors; my grandmother even taught it for many decades until well into her nineties. I have several of their paintings, although they are stored in my attic because, sadly, I just don’t share their enthusiasm for this medium; I don’t like the imprecision of the application, although more likely I don’t care for watercolors because I have never been very good at painting with them. However, in collaboration with the crispness of the cartography on a globe, watercolors acquire another dimension, allowing you to build up a rich color patina over many layers without obscuring the text. It really is a perfect match.

Watercolors were no doubt used on the finest old globes for this reason; indeed, I would go so far as to say they could have been invented for globemaking had they not been conceived centuries earlier than the first painted globe. Globemakers must surely always have planned to paint their globes with watercolors; they knew their creation would have pride of place in the purchaser’s house, so beauty was paramount. We might love the look of these old globes now, but when they were made, they were positively revered. Meanwhile Chiara Perano, a friend of Jade’s obsessed with astrology and mythology, had been designing a celestial globe, mapping the stars and drawing all eighty-eight constellations by hand. She also decided that my original basic cartouche was not suitable for her celestial globe, and she quickly came up with a much better design.

In the early years of Bellerby & Co., my approach to publicity and marketing was a little scattergun. Finding the correct person to contact at publications for editorial content was far from straightforward. I just fired off the odd email here and there, and occasionally the employee handling the info@ or press@ account would pass it on to the editorial team. Sometimes this miraculously resulted in some publicity for Bellerby & Co. globes, such as a tiny feature in House and Garden magazine.

Just as Chiara was finishing the first Bellerby & Co. celestial globe, the Perano Celestial model, David Balfour, the property expert on Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning movie Hugo, saw the House and Garden piece and commissioned me to make four globes for a scene in the film, one of which was to be a celestial globe in two pieces; they were going to film the scene in a clockmaker’s studio, so our globes fitted the bill.

The deadline for the Hugo globes was ridiculously tight – filming was due to start in June 2010, and I had to build in extra time for their in-house approval. And I was still learning many of the processes and practicing only on 50-centimeter globes; the commission was for a 40-centimeter celestial globe and three much smaller terrestrials. I worked into the night for weeks for next to nothing – I was just excited to be asked.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft by Peter Bellerby. Copyright (c) 2023 Bloomsbury Publishing. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Whenever I catch up with younger friends, they tell me what they’ve been up to but also what they’ve missed out on. Debilitating FOMO—the fear of missing out—is a very millennial trait, but everyone suffers with pangs of it from time to time. No matter where you are, the place where you aren’t is more fun.

Social media has given everyone the acute and painful ability to peer out to every social event their friends are enjoying that they haven’t been invited to or were not able to attend. It’s a panopticon of pain. What a cruel invention and yet somehow we are addicted; somehow we can’t look away. If you were born after 1985, it has always been this way, whereas at least people who grew up in the 1990s were able to go to parties, and not look at their phones and see other better parties going on that they were not invited to. In the past, without phones and social media, they had a better chance of enjoying themselves where they were.

The FOMO is real, and can often end up running their lives. People attend things they don’t want to because of FOMO or are eaten up with envy when they see an image of a place or party where they are not. FOMO pulls people out of the enjoyment of the present moment and places them in a state of agitation about what they should or could have been doing. Then there is social exclusion. We are pack animals; we thrive in communities and belonging is tied deeply to wellbeing. Social media and the subsequent FOMO it provokes is in part a response from being excised from the group, not included and perhaps not fitting in. The fear of being left out of the tribe or excluded from the ceremony (or depending on your period of history—excluded from the ball, or from harvest festival or from the concert) is an ancient fear. But we are now in a moveable Hall of Mirrors (thank you, Instagram) where the fear follows us, and distorts everything.

While I was tempted to place FOMO in the category of Very Modern Problems, the more Stoicism I read, the more I realized that FOMO has always been around, and that the Stoics—of course!—had methods of dealing with it. They eerily predicted and planned for an age where feeling slighted and left out would be a regular occurrence.

The main thing with the Stoic lessons around FOMO is that although some of them may seem a little artificial, they were designed to ensure that we maintain our tranquility and not get agitated when we feel FOMO coming on.

When you’re not invited

The first lesson is a bit of a hard one to pull off . . . It involves being the bigger person—and generous with others.

Summing up the essence of FOMO, Epictetus asked, ‘Is anyone preferred before you at an entertainment, or in a compliment, or in being admitted to a consultation?’ To translate: is someone at the party you’re not at, or been praised or socialised with some VIPs?

Epictetus advised: ‘If these things are good, you ought to be glad that he has gotten them; and if they are evil, don’t be grieved that you have not got them.’

Essentially, if someone has been invited to a party, and you haven’t, you should be glad for them. That’s a sign of good character that you can be pleased for others, even while missing out yourself.

The second part of this is: if the things you want but have been excluded from are not good for you (another bottle of wine, the admission into the bathroom stall to partake in a line of cocaine) then you should be glad that you are missing out. This is because the thing you are missing out on could harm your character—the big no-no for the Stoics.

The Trade-Off

When it comes to FOMO, the Stoics also raised the spectre of the trade-off. One of your friends may have gone to the music festival, and you have FOMO looking at their pictures on social media—but look at what you have: an extra 200 dollars in your pocket by not buying a ticket, the chance to have a good night’s sleep and the next morning without a hangover.

When talking of trade-offs, Epictetus (in this translation) used the example of lettuce—but just substitute ‘lettuce’ for something more fun: a party, a holiday, a festival, a concert . . . ‘For how much is lettuce sold? Fifty cents, for instance. If another, then, paying fifty cents, takes the lettuce, and you, not paying it, go without them, don’t imagine that he has gained any advantage over you. For as he has the lettuce, so you have the fifty cents which you did not give.’

By missing out on an event, you didn’t compromise your integrity by having to suck up to the host or flatter her—and therefore diminish your character or create a social obligation. Epictetus wrote:

So, in the present case, you have not been invited to such a person’s entertainment, because you have not paid him the price for which a supper is sold. It is sold for praise; it is sold for attendance. Give him then the value, if it is for your advantage. But if you would, at the same time, not pay the one and yet receive the other, you are insatiable, and a blockhead. Have you nothing, then, instead of the supper? Yes, indeed, you have: the not praising him, whom you don’t like to praise; the not bearing with his behaviour at coming in.

Essayist Adam Phillips, one of the top thinkers in the field of psychoanalysis, in the London Review of Books captured the Stoic mindset when he was writing about FOMO:

“Exclusion may involve the awakening of other opportunities that inclusion would make unthinkable. If I’m not invited to the party, I may have to reconsider what else I want: the risk of being invited to the party does my wanting for me, that I might delegate my desire to other people’s invitations. Already knowing or thinking we know, what we want is how we manage our fear of freedom. Wanting not to be left out may tell us very little about what we want, while telling us a lot about how we evade our wanting.”

So, in short, when you feel a pang of FOMO, remember this advice from the Ancients. Firstly, by not going to the event you are possibly missing out on things that will compromise your character, such as getting too drunk at the party and making a dick of yourself. Secondly, by missing out on one thing, you gain the time and space to occupy yourself with another thing (or at least save some money); and, thirdly, by not attending an event, you avoid having to suck up to or hang out with people you mightn’t like very much.

Avoid Making Comparisons

Closely related to FOMO is the horror of comparisons. Comparing yourself to others is a sure road to unhappiness.

Think about when you were at school, then university. At school everyone was in the same boat, wore the same uniforms, did the same classes together each day and had roughly the same sorts of lives. You might peel away from each other and go to university—but at university, you have a similar experience to your peers. The trouble starts when you graduate. Some may travel or go work in a bar for a few years, while others take high-paying corporate jobs, while others marry young and have families. Suddenly you are not on the same track as your friends. Maybe you feel like you’ve taken a wrong turn in life. You might feel like you’ve made dud choices. You get FOMO.

You begin making comparisons and it’s not healthy. It may not only damage friendships but it could ruin the enjoyment you might have been having in your own life. By deciding not to compare yourself to others, you will save yourself a lot of pain over the course of your life. This is pain you probably don’t even know you were generating because you were making comparisons unconsciously. But if you drop the comparisons, not only will you feel better about your own life, other people will feel better about being around you.

Comparing Up and Down

Making comparisons can go in two directions, neither of them good. If you compare yourself—say, your job—to a friend who might have a better paying job than you, you are going to feel worse about yourself and your job. But if you compare yourself favourably to someone—for example, a friend who recently lost their job—you are making your- self feel better on the back of someone else’s situation. This creates a separation and a division where previously there was none and means you don’t see yourself as equal with your friend, but superior (and no one wants to be friends with someone who feels superior to them).

Feeling a twinge of satisfaction when something goes wrong for a friend is not an uncommon feeling. After all, Gore Vidal famously said: ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.’ That may be because you are unconsciously in competition with your friend and believe that life is a zero–sum game. When your friend has a loss, you unconsciously feel that you are spared from loss, or that you are not as unlucky as your friend. These thoughts are not rational—but they are common.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times by Brigid Delaney. Published with permission from Dutton Books. Copyright (c) 2023 by Brigid Delaney.

In Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, the struggle over Israel and Palestine is told through heart-wrenching story of a tragic accident that killed Abed Salama’s five-year-old son, Milad. The book is granular in its recitation of the daily injustices that make up the lives of the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and even-handed in detailing the intractable narratives of the region. Hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time), Thrall offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth. Thrall was in conversation with Masha Gessen earlier this month at the Center for Brooklyn History; their conversation is condensed and shared here.

*

Masha Gessen: This book is a staggering achievement. It’s particularly staggering because it’s so short, but it’s such an extraordinary work of history, it’s an extraordinary work of prose, it’s a couple of love stories, it’s a beautiful work of nonfiction that breaks through something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is that when you talk about the occupation, when you talk about Israel/Palestine, you always come up against the question of what the audience knows and who you’re talking to, and I think this makes Israel/Palestine really peculiar in the range of contemporary topics. Pretty much everything else that I’ve had to deal with, you kind of know what people know and what they don’t know if they read the papers, if they watch some television, if they maybe come to book events, if they read books. Yet for people living in the United States, for people living in Israel, the possibilities of not knowing are boundless. This is a book that makes that impossible. And it does it in a genius way, which I’m going to try to get to in this conversation, but really, have to read the book to understand just how brilliantly structured and told it is.

To start with, can you tell me about where you live and how you came to know Abed?

Nathan Thrall: I live about two and a half miles away from Abed in a neighborhood called Musrara, which is just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Abed lives in a town called Anata that has been partially annexed, so part of it is officially part of the sovereign state of Israel as far as Israel is concerned, and part of it is considered the West Bank, the unannexed part of the West Bank. Together with a Palestinian refugee camp called Shuafat, all of it lies within a walled ghetto. It’s surrounded on three sides by a twenty-six-foot-tall concrete wall, and on the fourth side by a different kind of wall that runs down the middle of a segregated road that’s famously known as the “apartheid road.” When the accident happened, I was living in Jerusalem, and I had been driving past this walled ghetto on a weekly basis, sometimes on a daily basis, and not paying it much mind. I think most people are that way. It was very easy to ignore this place that’s part of the city that I live in but with a radically different existence on the other side of that wall.

The way that Abed and I met is that when I started to investigate the accident, a very close family friend told me that one of the parents was a distant relative. She put me in touch with a relative of Abed’s, who put me in touch with Abed, and I found myself in his home.

*

MG: There were several families whose children died in the accident. You chose Abed and his family. There are many characters in the book, but the book, of course, is called A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and it begins with an extremely close telling of Abed’s story. Why?

NT: When Abed finished the book, he asked me the same question. There are a couple of reasons. One of them is just the connection I had with him. The other is that the ambition of the book was to tell the entire story of Israel/Palestine through this single event, and I could only do that through Abed. He comes from a family that is very prominent in the town of Anata and who himself lived a life of activism in the First Intifada, who experienced imprisonment and torture. He was even forced by the system in which he lives to choose a wife at one point just to keep his freedom of movement and his job, to try and marry somebody who had the right color ID that would allow him to keep his job. So that’s why this is a day in the life of Abed Salama.

MG: What was the process like for you?

NT: A lot of the conversations felt less like interviews and more like therapy. Abed and I cried a lot together. I would come home and relay stories—Abed’s stories but also those of other characters, those of some of his relatives—and tell them to my wife, who would weep as I relayed the stories. It was a very intense process, emotionally, reporting the book. And I felt a tremendous responsibility because of the trust put in me.

MG: How many hours of interviews did you record? How long did this whole process take?

NT: Probably well over a thousand hours. It began in 2019, so we’re four years later.

MG: The writing approach, and I assume this was very much intentional, it’s what we call in the trade the “close third.” You’re always, and sometimes claustrophobically so, in the head space of the person who’s going through their life, and there isn’t a whole lot in quotations, unless we’re actually witnessing dialogue. So it’s written very much in the way a novel is written. You don’t see very much of this approach in non-fiction, although I’m partial to it. What kind of interviewing do you have to do in order to get to that? And what kind of questions do you ask? How do you get to what people smelled and what they saw?

NT: In this particular case I have to say that I don’t think it was any great virtue of mine. It was that many of these people were hungry to speak about something that nobody wanted to talk about around them. There was a cloud of silence in many of these homes around the accident. There were many times where I convened family members, and they said this was the first time they were talking about it since the weeks after the accident had happened. So in a number of cases, it just came pouring out. But it also took tremendous patience and trust and cooperation from people. Like Abed, who had me ask him things like, “what did you smell,” over and over again and come to him with very minor, specific details.

MG: Chapter 11, which describes the actual accident, comes in the middle of the book, which fascinates me as a structural decision. Can you talk about how you figured out the structure of the story?

NT: The structure of this book was the greatest challenge, and one of the reasons it was so challenging is that I was trying to balance two chronologies. The ambition of the book is to tell the whole story of Israel/Palestine; I’m also taking a character like Huda and telling the story of the Nakba. I have to tell the story of the Nakba before I tell things that follow the Nakba. On the other hand, Huda can only enter the picture when Huda actually enters the accident, and all these people came upon the scene of the accident at different times.

So this was a big puzzle. It wound up also meaning a lot of prioritizing and cutting. My temptation as a writer is always to include everything, but in order for the book to work, I really needed to keep tightly focused on the accident and not allow those historical interludes to go on for very long.

MG: We know that there’s an accident from the very beginning of the book, but by the time we get to really understanding how the accident happened, the word “accident” seems totally inappropriate. I’d love to hear you talk about that. Because to me it seems that that’s what the book is about. It’s about how it’s not an accident.

NT: Well, I’m glad that you think that’s what the book is about because that is what the book is about.

I was interviewed recently by an Israeli journalist. In Chapter 11, I mention a character named Salem, who went into the bus. He acted truly selflessly and went repeatedly on his own into this burning bus and rescued dozens of children, and afterward he had a meltdown and was screaming at everyone and anyone in his vicinity—at the emergency service personnel, both Palestinian and Israeli—he screams at them, “You killed these kids. Why didn’t you come?”

The Israeli journalist read that passage back to me and said, “So you’re saying that Israel wanted these kids to die? That Israel tried to kill these kids? That they knew that the bus was burning and they deliberately didn’t come?”

And I said, you’re reading what Salem said to these Israeli soldiers, and that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that the entire set of circumstances that happened on this day were the predictable outcome of an entire apparatus that put a wall around this community; the total neglect of the tens of thousands of people who live in it; a partition of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C not allowing the Palestinian Authority to come onto the road where the accident took place, but at the same time Israel not caring at all about what happens on this road. It’s patrolled by Israeli police but entirely neglected. And in addition, just the very fact that this enclave that Abed and his family live in has this crazy system where some of them have green IDs and some have blue IDs in the same family. The municipality doesn’t provide them with a school, forces the kids to either go through a checkpoint for hours (and the parents are frightened to have their kids interact with soldiers) or go to a dilapidated school in a former goat pen or, as these parents did, to pay to send their kids to school in the technically unannexed part of the West Bank.

So that is the real cause of all of the delayed response and everything else that transpired on that day. That’s what the book slowly unravels.

I just wanted to add one thing. There is an overriding logic driving all of those micro-decisions, which is a very simple logic, which is: to keep as many Jews in the heart of Jerusalem and as few Palestinians. That dictated the route of the wall, and it’s an explicit goal of the state, to keep as high a proportion of Jews inside Jerusalem as possible. And the lives of these people are affected in a thousand different ways by that central goal.

In many of my conversations with parents involved in the accident, there was a real focus on many, many micro, proximate causes and almost no discussion of what was prominent in my mind, which is this macro structure that made this tragedy, which would be a tragedy anywhere, so much worse because of the unique circumstances of who the victims were and where it took place. There’s this famous David Foster Wallace graduation speech where he tells the anecdote of fish—one fish says something like, “How’s the water?” and the other fish says, “What’s water?” That’s a little what it felt like talking to people about the causes of this accident, because they were all thinking about the driver, and the weather, and the materials that the bus was made of. But what about the fact that these kids had a play area just on the other side of the wall that they couldn’t go to, and instead they had to follow the snaking path of the wall to the outskirts of Ramallah in order to go on an excursion?

MG: One of the things that I love about the book is that it forces you to make that conclusion that it’s not an accident. You don’t quite spell it out.

One of the things that really struck me is that by diving deeply into Abed’s life, and Huda’s life, we see over and over again how gradual this process of restricting people’s freedom was. In addition to fish in water, there’s the boiled frog syndrome—all those horrible allegories we use for describing that thing that we do as humans, which is that we adapt. When you write about what life was like when these people were younger and how there weren’t these color-coded IDs and how there wasn’t this sense of constant terror and, most important, how slowly the fear for their children’s safety descended on them. By the time you get to the actual scene of the accident, I think you’re terrified for all of your characters’ children all the time.

Audience:  Can you imagine a future that looks different and better?

NT: One of the main goals of this book is to take us away from a conversation about hypothetical futures. Those futures may come or they may not come. They certainly look very, very far away. But there is a certain comfort that a lot of people have with having this debate: “What ought that future look like? One state, two states, confederation, let’s debate it. Of course this present situation is horrible; there’s no denying it. It’s awful. But it’s temporary. Let’s focus on how to get out of it by agreeing all together on what that future state ought to look like.”

I feel that this very conversation actually facilitates the ongoing oppression and suffering that we see. The ambition of doing narrative work like this is to force people to confront the reality that those conversations allow them to ignore. People don’t want to talk about Huda being powerless to protect her teenage boy from being arrested at one in the morning for throwing stones at an occupying soldier and being entirely powerless to do anything to even find her son over the coming days after his arrest. Instead they want to talk about one state and two states and all the rest of it.

__________________________

Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy is available now from Metropolitan Books.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Abby Smith Rumsey, author of Memory, Edited, about what we should remember and what we should forget about history.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

________________________

Abby Smith Rumsey is an intellectual and cultural historian. She focuses on the impact of information technologies on perceptions of history, time, and identity, the nature of evidence, and the changing roles of libraries and archives. Her most recent book is When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future (2016).
Rumsey served as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia; Director of Programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources; and manager of programs relating to preservation of and access to cultural heritage collections at the Library of Congress. She served on the National Science Foundation’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on the Economics of Digital Preservation and Access; the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on the Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences; and the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure Program. Board service includes: Chair, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences; the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library Advisory Council; the Stanford University Library Advisory Committee; the Society of Architectural Historians; the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia; and the Harvard Board of Overseers Committee to Visit the Harvard University Library. Rumsey received a BA from Harvard College and MA and PhD in Russian and intellectual history from Harvard University.

“Work where the work opens.”*

This was a favored phrase of Dr. Ann Preston, a physician and professor at one of the first medical schools for women, and one she often told her students.

I was doing research for my novel, a medical mystery set in 19th century Philadelphia, at Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. I would often be moved by an old photograph, a painting, or a fragment of a diary entry. The bulletin board above my desk was loaded with postcards and scraps of paper with quotes, the visual inspiration that sparked my imagination.

“Work where the work opens.” I wrote it down on a Post-It note and placed it on my computer monitor. The words became a guide for me.

Becoming an author was a daunting prospect and I was hardly an ideal candidate. I had no background in a writing career and little qualification other than being an avid reader, with a love of mystery and crime fiction. I had long dreamed of writing a mystery novel but only started writing when I was in my mid-forties, while working as a doctor.

I had lived in Philadelphia as a medical student, walking the same cobblestone streets as my characters. Yet I knew little about the history of unique institution that was “Woman’s Med.” I was fascinated to learn of Dr. Caroline Still Anderson, one of the first Black women physicians in the US and an 1878 graduate of the college. Or Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, scientist and professor, the first woman to become a member of the Academy of Medicine. I often looked at a striking studio portrait of three international students, Dr. Anandibai Joshi, Dr Keiko Okami and Dr. Sabat Islambouli, who returned to their home countries to practice medicine.

But it was Dr. Preston’s straightforward phrase, from a diary entry in October 1861, that resonated deeply with me.

Dr. Preston was a Quaker, an abolitionist and pro-temperance activist. She had been a schoolteacher and a children’s book author before entering medical school at 38. She would later become dean of the college, a vocal advocate for women’s medical education.

But the moment in 1861 was one of devastating setback, as the personal and professional collided for her. The country was on the precipice of a long and terrible war. Due to limited funds and lack of enrollment, the medical school’s board of corporators voted to suspend the 1861-2 session. The college would close its doors.

Dr. Preston wrote:

I have been sad for my country, because it is slow to learn the wisdom which would bring prosperity…sad in the prospects of the Institution to which I have given so much of my time and strength, for there now seems no possibility of success; and I fear that, after all these years of toil, we may be doomed to succumb to the weight of opposition.

But then she offers this: “Tonight the inward encouragement is do thy best; work where the work opens, applauded or condemned, speak and write thy grandest inspiration, thy noblest idea…for thy work has been no failure.”

The words were old-fashioned, weighty with religious overtones. But I was so moved by the courage she draws upon, the call to face an uncertain future and keep going, to focus on the things that you can control.

“Work where the work opens.” There was something fluid and expansive about the phrase, its meaning open-ended. And I took the words to heart: there would never be an ideal time to start writing the novel. There was only now.

My routine developed simply. I sat at the kitchen table, writing in the early morning before going to work, or late at night, after my three kids were asleep.  My initial efforts were full of starts and stops. There were many days when I felt so overwhelmed and I would put the work away, frustrated by my lack of progress.

But I kept going, and a stubborn resilience emerged. My years of medical training had given me skills that were well-suited to a writer’s life. I knew how to pivot from a challenge and to start again. I knew how to set a far-off goal and work towards it slowly, to not get discouraged easily. The long hours of reading and research were a natural extension of what I already loved to do.

And I was captivated by the lives of these pioneering doctors. There were schoolteachers, missionaries who lived and worked abroad, journalists and writers, temperance activists. Some were the product of progressive families with an activist bent, encouraged in their studies. Others had to forge their own path, funding their medical education by working other jobs. And in the midst of serious work, there was the joy of living. I was delighted by an old photograph of students dressed in full costume for Halloween. That single image inspired one of my favorite scenes in the book.

I understood firsthand the rigors of medical training, and marveled at what they had done. And though our lives were separated by more than a century, their words felt modern and relevant: the need to feel valued for their life’s work, to have the same opportunities as their male colleagues.

Many were wives and mothers, and this had resonance for me, as my oldest son was born during my second year of residency. Those days are seared into memory: I remember being pregnant, while working on call in the hospital and caring for patients. Or of being a new mother and toting my breast pump into work. I would slip into a call room or the nurses’ station, using moments on a break to pump. Or years later, studying for national board certification exam, while working full time with three young children at home. The tenuous balance of the professional and personal was woven through my career.

So the lessons from the “lady doctors” helped me write the book: a willingness to be bold and not be limited by circumstances, to try and fail, and to free myself from the outcome. And over time, the writing became a place of creative renewal. Even on the most difficult days, it never felt like an obligation. It was an expansive space, not a constricting one.

And this was never truer than during the pandemic. I would spend long days working and caring for patients, uncertainty and anxiety closing in around me. My three children were at home doing remote schooling. And it was then that the writing became a lifeline—I looked forward to the pleasure and freedom of that space, my imagination unfettered. Even when I felt tired, I would edit a paragraph, or read a few passages of poetry, or delve into an article on early autopsy science. Even a small step would keep the momentum flowing.

“Work where the work opens.” And so it was not in the grand gesture, but in the consistent small steps that the book was written. The post-It note with Dr. Preston’s phrase has curled with age, the ink faded. But the words still ring true. You never know the surprising and fulfilling places it may take you.

* Note: Dr. Ann Preston, diary excerpt, October 1861;  from Peitzman, Steven J., A New and Untried Course, p.21-22; Rutgers University Press, 2000.

______________________________

Murder by Degrees by Ritu Mukerji is available via Simon & Schuster.

In the second half of the twentieth century, it came to be widely believed that the natural way to respond to social injustice was to take to the streets and protest—the more people the better. This historical development can only be understood in the context of the emergence of mass media. In several of the world’s most advanced capitalist countries, movements seeking political change found themselves overwhelmed by the power of radio, television, and newspaper coverage. Even when explicitly seeking to avoid mass demonstrations as their preferred tactic, they were swept up by the attention granted to them. Media coverage multiplied the effects of their actions in ways the activists had never imagined; moreover, it transformed the very structure of the movements themselves.

The inventions of writing, and then printing, and then the photograph—and finally the development of the ability to reproduce sound and moving images—were all technological leaps that profoundly transformed human society. Indeed, it is likely that the idea of a “nation” itself was related to the ascendance of the printing press. It is strange to remember this now, but for the vast majority of human history, we could only see what was directly in front of our faces, and the only language we could experience had to be produced by living vocal cords within a few meters of our ears. This is, strictly speaking, how our bodies developed to experience life. It made little sense to “demonstrate” to the entire country with a protest march if only a tiny percentage of the population was going to see it, and rulers could simply choose to ignore it.

Of course, people always had ways to react against ruling elites. These interventions were sometimes violent or imposed direct costs on the targets—people got killed, property got destroyed, grain was seized by the population, and so on. The academic terminology for the wide set of practices people used in these moments, from the ancient world to the twenty-first century, is “contention” or contentious politics.

The US sociologist Charles Tilly noticed that across history, when people protested, they tended to reproduce practices that already existed around them. They drew upon an existing “repertoire” of contention. That metaphor is fittingly theatrical and musical. There are a set of instruments and routines that a community has, a selection of performances everybody knows, and they use them in an improvised way. In moments of rebellion, people turn to what is familiar, even if something unfamiliar might work much better. In sixteenth-century France, Tilly shows (through an analysis of early national media) that people would have never thought of demonstrating or organizing a rally or strike in the way we do today. They did, however, know how to run a tax collector out of town, force down the price of bread, or put on a charivari, the performance of a group belting offensive songs outside the home of a local offender, demanding retribution before they will shut up. Over time, innovation occurs, and new routines of contention emerge as cultures change, but this process is relatively autonomous from the underlying causes of the revolts.

*

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new repertoire of contention was forged through chaotic interactions with the firms that were charged with reporting the news and making profits.

In 1951, British pacifists inspired by the Indian revolutionary launched “Operation Gandhi.” They sought the removal of the US military from their country, the end of nuclear weapons, and the withdrawal of the UK from NATO. Like Black civil rights organizations in the USA, they were a highly disciplined, tightly organized group committed to nonviolence and willing to suffer personal consequences. They underwent extensive training and made concerted attempts to present themselves as upstanding citizens rather than kooky vegetarian eccentrics (in the years just after World War II, pacifists often had that reputation). And, like Gandhi himself, they learned that actions unreported by the media would often amount to nothing.

In the beginning, they considered two different approaches. The first was to launch a bold “umbrella” campaign in central London, with the umbrella symbolizing the futility and absurdity of trying to protect oneself from a nuclear explosion. They would parade with umbrellas in Grosvenor Square, suspend them from balloons over the capital, and carry them as they followed prominent figures from the US around the city. This was seen as too provocative. Instead, they chose to go out to military bases and atomic energy plants far from the city. Their activism took the form of a direct moral appeal to the people they hoped to convert. But out in the middle of nowhere, workers at the military-industrial complex simply ignored them, local farmers mocked them, and the media didn’t send anyone to cover them. The pacifists found this embarrassing and ineffective. They realized they really needed to get people’s attention. This may seem obvious to us now, but at the time they were learning by doing. One thing the pacifists figured out quickly was that they had to explain the meaning of their activities to passersby. They addressed this by making pamphlets.

Mass actions had never been on their agenda, both because they knew their causes were unpopular, and because absolute discipline was considered essential. But over the next few years, British dissidents—especially a group called the Committee of 100 led by philosopher Bertrand Russell—learned that assembling “very large numbers” in cities was the best way to make a splash. Shivering in a field somewhere was not. But the shift to mass protests created a troubling problem—how could you maintain strict discipline as numbers swelled?

In 1960 in the United States of America, a group of young men founded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a left-wing association inspired by the heroic achievements of the Black civil rights movement in their country. The largely white students admired campaigns carried out by rock-solid organizations such as CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), and they were horrified by the domestic social conditions that made them necessary. By this time, the United States—a Western European settler colony that rapidly expanded in size after its founding in 1789—had become by far the most powerful nation in the world, and it had never granted full citizenship to its nonwhite population.*

Students for a Democratic Society had its institutional roots in an old anti-Communist organization, but the members rejected anticommunism as a guiding philosophy for policy. They fiercely opposed US foreign policy during the Cold War, especially the interventions that took the side of colonialism in the Third World. SDS supported civil rights and advocated for a more socialist economy, and it also took aim at an emerging process that affected students more directly. Advanced industrial society in both the capitalist West and the socialist bloc had undergone a profound bureaucratization that pushed individuals far away from the spaces where real decisions were made, and away from each other. In their influential 1962 “Port Huron Statement,” SDS members proposed “participatory democracy,” which would mean that individuals engage directly in decision-making, and a system in which “politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community.”

Objectively speaking, these were some of the richest and most comfortable individuals that had ever lived on planet Earth. They spent their time learning so they could take important jobs in the most powerful nation in the world. But this generation of students often felt like they were little more than cogs in an educational machine that was increasingly integrated into the capitalist military-industrial complex. They were indeed important to the economy, which needed scientists and technicians, and their numbers were inflated by a demographic boom, meaning the balance of power shifted decisively to the young in the 1960s.

SDS was not focused on large demonstrations, and had rarely thought about interacting with the media. It was a small group aiming to directly organize students, without a mass communications strategy. Its members were hesitant to create rigid structures or leadership positions with clear duties, which was a radical deviation from the way older organizations like unions and political parties had always operated. In the first half of the 1960s, SDS grew slowly through face-to-face outreach and personal connections as it experimented with new forms of political organization. But in 1965, an unexpected surge of attention engulfed the organization.

That fall, even though SDS had declined to lead a set of protests against the Vietnam War, the media chose to focus on the organization. SDS already had a bit of a reputation as an anti-war outfit, so perhaps reporters, always pressed for time, had seen the name somewhere and could use it to tell the story. Writing later, SDS president Todd Gitlin recalled that this pushed “a bewildered and incoherent SDS to the center of attention; SDS was suddenly outfitted with a reputation for activity that drastically outdistanced its political reality.” The young leftists had always been skeptical of the corporate press as a matter of course, but they very quickly learned that mainstream journalism, embedded within a certain ideological framework and driven by the logic of capital accumulation, could rapidly reframe reality in deeply misleading ways. At the same time, some of them grasped the enormous power available here, if they could only counterattack in the press with an elegant set of “judo” techniques to finesse their own message into mass media channels. For example, one 1965 SDS statement pointed out that “we have seen antiwar leaflets photostated on the front page of newspapers with circulations in the millions. We could have been at the mimeograph for ten years, and not reached as many draftable young men as the press has reached for us in five days.”

All of this presented two problems. First, who was supposed to do this? SDS didn’t have a press office, and its loose, quasi-leaderless structure made it difficult to decide who was supposed to speak for the organization. Rifts emerged as the media identified arbitrary spokesmen and celebrities. And secondly—paradoxically— the popularity bestowed on the group created an even bigger issue. SDS was flooded with new members, allowing it to grow at a rate of 300 percent in a single year. But these new arrivals did not want to join SDS— they wanted to join the organization they had read about in the newspaper, which didn’t actually exist. They showed up with longer hair, less ideological commitments, and a strange set of assumptions about the organization.

But because of the loose and “participatory” nature of SDS, there was no formal process for integrating and educating new members. They had paid intentionally little attention to organizational questions. In some cases, the new recruits (who were never actually recruited) simply set up their own new chapter somewhere, without ever speaking with the old guard. Gitlin came to the conclusion that both leaderlessness and unexpected, rapid growth spelled the end of the movement. By 1967, some protesters were complaining about “structure freaks,” those who wanted to have any organization whatsoever.

Gitlin eventually came to some conclusions about the way mass media worked and what constituted a story for the modern press. To qualify, the phenomenon at hand would have to be new—it was called the “news” after all—and it would have to arrive with intensity and surprise the audience. The media would inevitably choose from a huge assortment of existing facts and illuminate just one of many truths. Furthermore, any story had to be readily comprehensible to the general public. It had to fit into preexisting categories and correspond to the range of things that people already knew about and considered possible. In other words, it must be comparable to something that has already happened. It must be “old,” at the same time.

As the decade wore on, some members of this generation got caught in a perverse feedback loop. The individuals that quite liked media attention sought more of it, consciously or unconsciously adopting tactics that would provoke more coverage. But none of that changed the simple fact that the US government wanted to continue the war in Vietnam, and could afford to treat the demonstrators like a noisy minority (with frequent help from the press). As mass protest emerged as the predominant instrument of the antiwar movement, the original SDS leadership decided to retreat from the scene and go back to their roots. They had never wanted to privilege street demonstration, nor become a single-issue anti-war shop. They committed themselves to a new initiative called the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) and moved into the inner city to organize African American communities in the United States.

*Even the limited successes of the Black civil rights movement must be understood in the context of the geopolitical situation abroad, and the putative commitment to democracy and equality at home. The Soviet Union accused the US of being a fundamentally racist society, and elites in Washington were increasingly embarrassed about proving them correct. Like the UK, the United States had some of the highest levels of media saturation in history. In a very different context, when people demonstrated in 1960 against another apartheid system in South Africa, a US Cold War ally, authorities simply gunned them down, killing or wounding 250 people in the township of Sharpeville.

__________________________________

Excerpted from If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.