'The Will Not to Believe'
GRAUBARD, STEPHEN R.
'The Will Not to Believe' APPEASEMENT: A STUDY IN POLITICAL DECLINE By A. L. Rowse Norton. 124 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD Department of History, Harvard...
...The disturbing thing about the '30s is that such widespread ignorance existed about so obviously transparent and wicked a phenomenon as Nazism...
...it comprised men of very different ages, political affiliations and social status...
...second, a concern to castigate not only those in the highest governing positions —Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax—but also those immediately below them, and others who stood outside urging them on...
...The "will not to believe" took many forms...
...First, an acute sense of moral outrage about appeasement which the passage of time seems scarcely to have attenuated...
...But its object is not simply to keep the record straight...
...These were the men who consorted with the great, providing fuel for what Rowse regards as their unpardonable folly...
...Rowse suggests that they were ignorant of Europe and of European history, and too much concerned with the Empire...
...Rowse has not forgiven Geoffrey Dawson, John Simon, Philip Kerr, Thomas Jones, and others whose names will be even less familiar to the American reader...
...The Fellows were men of intelligence—honorable, proud and independent...
...That these people made so small an impact on their society is therefore not surprising...
...But the other forms were no less debilitating...
...Finally, according to the author, the Fellows were hopelessly middle-class, even when, as with Halifax, they belonged by birth to the aristocracy...
...Some are scholars resident in Oxford throughout the year...
...Winston Churchill was equally as much a stranger to Labor party opinion as he was to the councils of Neville Chamberlain or Lord Halifax...
...Labor's duty was to oppose the Government...
...others are men of the world, frequently in high political office, who return to All Souls more or less regularly to enjoy the society of the College...
...In the late 1930s, newspapers frequently mentioned the so-called "Cliveden Set," but rarely referred to All Souls, the Oxford College where many of the same people congregated and where appeasement was much favored...
...Although they imagined themselves empiricists, in fact they paid all too little heed to evidence...
...Yet many of them were grossly mistaken about the character of Nazi Germany...
...All Souls is an institution quite different from any in the United States...
...the All Souls variety is fairly easy to explain...
...As for the notion that young people saw the situation more accurately than men born into the quiet comfort of late-Victorian England, again the evidence does not bear it out...
...Rowse refers to their "lofty smugness" and "superficiality of mind...
...Having no students, all its activity revolves around its Fellows, who form a varied and heterogeneous community...
...But this raises expectations which are probably too grandiose...
...Reviewed by STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD Department of History, Harvard University...
...its performance was not what it should have been...
...There is nothing personal or vindictive in Rowse's attack...
...As a Fellow, Rowse moved freely in this world in the '30s and came to know it intimately...
...The indictment is severe, and a great part of it is certainly justified...
...How could so many have been so wrong...
...there are no "revelations" here about British politics in the 1930s...
...The author suggests that it be viewed as "evidence to the historians...
...While not sharing the opinions of many of his older colleagues, he is concerned that the reader should know their views and estimate how they came to be held...
...As the intellectual heirs of Cecil Rhodes, they tended to be pro-German, with a highly romantic view of the German character...
...Editor, "Daedalus" This little book by A. L. Rowse, the distinguished Oxford historian, defies description: It is insufficiently candid to qualify as autobiography and insufficiently objective to rank as history...
...The story Rowse tells, of the shortsightedness of successive Conservative governments in handling Nazi Germany, of the powerful men and institutions who supported appeasement and of the difficulties encountered by those who opposed the policy, is known to all...
...Two things, perhaps, are novel in the book...
...And nothing is gained by saying, as Rowse does, that the Conservatives were in office throughout the period and therefore must be accounted solely responsible...
...His book is really a homily, as well as a contribution to history, and needs to be read as such...
...High-mindedness and humbug," mixed with "disingenuousness and cant," prevented them from seeing the situation as it really was...
...The Labor party record on appeasement is different from that of the Conservative party, but it is not significantly better...
...How, then, is it to be regarded...
...But Rowse absolutely refuses to admit that the mistakes of many of his All Souls colleagues were, in analogous and varied forms, the mistakes also of the nation...
...The company of those who believed Churchill right from 1935-39 was select and by no means homogeneous...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 9
