David Reynolds - Slow Road to Brownsville

One day, while in Swan River, Manitoba, Canada, David Reynolds learns that road 83, "goes to Mexico". On enquiring further he learns that this is actually true, the road eventually leaves Canada and becomes Route 83, which makes its way south through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and Texas, before arriving in Mexico at the US town of Brownsville on the Rio Grande. Reynolds is in Swan River because his grandfather ended up there - an immigrant from the UK looking for work, and he has written an autobiography about the man he never knew.

But Route 83 gives him another idea. How about driving the whole length of it and writing about what he sees and who he meets. He isn't the first. It turns out that lots of people have made the journey, and indeed many Canadians made a habit of travelling south for holidays, and the people they befriended down in Texas used to come north for meet ups. Along the route he finds plenty of people who have travelled some of 83. But he also meets many people who haven't, and sometimes they haven't really left the immediate area they were born in.

North-South roads in the US are not quite the same as the East-West ones. Those, Reynolds points out, are routes to carry lots of travellers long distance. The vertical routes don't have the same need, and thus aren't quite as well supplied in terms of rest stops. Much of 83 is actually two lane road, and it makes for a quiet, if slightly cliched, road trip. For this is small town America, but it is a trip through a small town rural coutnryside filled with history. Reynolds muses on the colonial expansion of the US, racism and the treatment of indigenous people and the nature of rural America itself.

Reynolds is a classic English liberal. He shys away from confrontational politics, but he does meet plenty of people prepared to talk about the things you might expect. Racism, Indians, Guns, Democrats and liberal themselves. Everyone who has been to middle America, or its adjacent states will know that they are friendly and welcoming. Interested and suprised to receive visitors from far away, and proud of their areas. Reynolds however was travelling in what feels like a different time - Obama was just into his second term - and to Reynolds at least, the right feels isolated and on the retreat. Reynolds finds plenty to shock and worry him - not least the open racism he experiences in several places. But his diary of the trip feels a very different place to the United States in the first year of Trump's second presidency.

Like all road trip books, readers will find themselves wishing that the author didnt have to move on quite so fast. There's plenty of stories that we only scratch the surface of, and it feeds this readers on desire to return to this part of the world. But Reynolds is an honest enough writer and observer of people to give his readers a real feeling of the places he travels through. The book is also filled with references and quotes to the books that Reynolds reads about the places - a goldmine for future travellers. One this did irk though. Reynolds is unnevering in his physical descriptions of the people he meets. I'm not sure there is any real need, even when discussing the obesity epidemic, to talk quite so much about how people (and if we're honest it's mostly the women) look.

That said, this is an enjoyable read that has a lot to say about America before Trump.

Related Reads

Estes - Our History is the Future
Zinn - A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present

Michael Christie - Greenwood

In 2038 the last forest survives on a remote island off British Columbia. The world's woodlands have been destroyed by a cataclysmic disease, that has destroyed huge swathes of humanity and undermined the global economy. The forest, private land, is tended by scientists and forest guides who maintain it for the wealthy tourists to visit to be "regenerated in the humbling loom" of the last trees. Jake Greenwood shares her name with the billionaire owner of the island, a timber tycoon whose wealth was based on the ravaging of North America's woodland. Now Jake is heavily in debt and desperate to cling on to her job.

The Greenwood island is at the epicentre of this multigenerational story. Jake is the latest of a long line of people, who have an association with the land and the forests, and after the opening chapters that detail her place on Earth, the story skips back 150 years to tell how the rich got rich and destroyed the land, woods and people along the way. Its an epic tale, much of which centres on an itinerant veteran of World War One who makes his living tapping maple trees for syrup, and comes across an abandoned baby. Persuded by the powerful and wealthy agents of the millionaire father, Everett carries the baby through a North America wracked by economic depression. This story forms the centre piece for the remaining links to Jake, and the modern world - the story of an abandoned baby and a world gone chaotic around her.

Its an amazing tale, and Michael Christie has done wonders to weave countless threads together. From the 1930s depression era railroad cars to Earth First style direct actions against logging equipment, the book is filled with fully drawn characters, who constantly force the reader to ask themselves why we live in a world with so much beauty at the same time as hunger and destruction surround us. But this is no crude political tract, its a story that links future dystopia to a chain of events - both human and economic. The powers unleashed by a handful of billionaires in search of yet more wealth, draw countless others into the swirling maw. The trees that are stripped and destroyed and burnt along the way, merely fuel for the accumulation of wealth, yet poignant reminders of what we stand to loose. Great novel.

George Edwards - From Crow-Scaring to Westminster

George Edwards was born in rural Norfolk in 1850, the child in a "miserable" cottage of "two bedrooms, in which had to sleep father, mother and six children." At the time his father's wage "had been reduced to 7s. per week". Such poverty, and the appalling working and living conditions that were imposed on agricultural workers at the time, shaped Edwards' life and thought. His father had been a soldier, and an agricultural worker, thgouh his exemplary service bore him no long term benefit. Having protested against unemployment with others in the parish of Marsham, George Edward's father found himself unable to get work.

The punishment for organising against unemployment, low wages and poverty were severe, and as Edwards relates throughout his autobiography the only way to successfully do this was through trade union organising. There were two great periods in Britain of agricultural trade unionism. Edwards was part of the first, which saw the leadership of Joseph Arch and a wave of strikes that shifted the bosses massively. But he was central to the second, and by then was an established trade union leader, and on occasion, paid official. 

As the title of the book demonstrates, Edwards very much saw his most important trajectory as being from the poor beginnings to Parliament. A similar path was trodden by Arch, and both of them - the first and second agricultural workers to become MPs, fell easily into the trap of finding in Parliament the establishment recognition they craved. Arch, is must be said, comes out of it far better than Edwards. Both of them however, end up blaming the workers who cheered them on for their failures. Edwards, however, is far more of a cynic than Arch, the latter of whom retained faith in workers' struggle till the end of his life.

Edwards, by contrast, despises workers' struggle. For him it was the last choice representing failure of negotiations. At one point, in describing the battles of the 1910s, Edwards rights, "I was... determined that I would do everything that was humanly possible to prevent a strike of this magnitude". He continues:

I can't explain it, but I always had, I took a leading part in the trade union movement, the greatest horror of a strike, and would go to almost any length to prevent it, so much so that many of my friends used to say that I went too far in my peace-loving methods.... I have made many mistakes, but that is not one of them.

Edwards' revulsion of strikes stems, in part, from the position he found himself in, as a local trade union leader with an economic interest in avoiding actions that challenged the union. But also from his own weak politics. Edwards' came from a Methodist background. His socialism was not that of Marx and Engels. It was that of the pulpit and Christian socialism. An avid reader, taught to read by his beloved wife, Edwards lists many of obscure books that inspired him. Few of them would be recognisable to socialists today. His politics lacked an understanding of class and power, even though he sided with the lower classes - he is clearly unable to see that struggle is the only way to challenge the entrenched reality of capitalism. Reformism for Edwards flows from his faith and his politics.

That said when battles did happen, Edwards took his side - both on the pickets and in the union. The Norfolk union was built through hundreds of meetings, arguments and discussions. Edwards' training as a Methodist preacher served him sell here. One cannot fail to recognise that it was Edwards' hard labour (and thousands of miles of cycling) that built the trade union, and it was he who was punished by the union itself when the St Faith's strike of 1911 was sold out so that there would be no struggle to distract from the General Election. Edwards' discussion of this period in his book is in part a settling of accounts. The tiresome reproduction of motions aside, it is clear that Edwards' at least held on to a principled defence of the strikers' right to continue and their democratic decisions. Edwards was right. Fifty percent of the strikers did not get taken back, despite the union leadership's compromise.

Nonetheless historian Reg Groves is no doubt right when he wrote of Edwards:

George Edwards tells the stroy from the standpoint of one who was an active worker for the Liberal Party. He saw the growth of the union rather in terms of his own development, of his own slow passage from mesmbership of the Liberal Party to membership of the Labour Party. His opinions change little, if at all: he aw things much at the end of his life as he had done in the early days, and he remained for a long time coparatively indifferent to the changing opinions of the workers themselves, who were hearing and responding to the message of socialism.

Much of the latter half of the book is taken up with somewhat tiresome anecdotes and reprints of speeches and motions that detail the struggles inside the union as the movement went into decline. Then Edwards' election campaigns see reprints and extended quotes from favourable news reports and speeches. As a result there is very little of interest to those interested in rural history or agricultural trade unionism. The book becomes more and more about Edwards, and less and less about the conditions around him. In fact, it is noticeable, that even when describing strikes and protests that he was central too, Edwards is rarely speaks about the struggles, or those struggling. Despite the huge scale of the trade union movement at times, there's little flavour here of the strikes or the movement itself. It makes for a dry read.

One other thing that comes through is how Edwards' loyalty to the British state manifests itself against his better principles. The worst example of this is how he becomes a cheerleader and recruiter for the First World War. The horrors of those battles means he becomes determined to ensure those who returned get treated decently. But he never wavers from the idea that it was right for thousands of agricultural workers' to be sacrificed in the trenches for British capitalism. No doubt this approach is why he had such a fine time in Parliament.

Tiresome and dry though this book is, it confirms on almost every page the essential limitations of socialism without class struggle. Most readers will find in it an interesting insight into the way that Methodism and reformism found in themselves appropriate partners in the British Labour movement. It helps illuminate the way that British Labourism was born tied to the coattails of Imperialism, and how it has failed ever since to break. If you can suffer through the terrible Methodist hymns you might find something of interest. 

Related Reviews

Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography
Horn - Joseph Arch
Ashby - Joseph Ashby of Tysoe: 1859-1919
McCombs - The Ascott Martyrs
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers' Union

Greg Steinmetz - The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The life and times of Jacob Fugger

In 1526, the Tyrolean radical Michael Gaismair, wrote a remarkable document known as The Landesordnung. In it, he outlined how a radicaly democratic society could function, based on social justice, religious freedom, equality and, through curbing the actions of the rich and powerful. In it, he demanded that the mines, an important part of the Austrian economy, be bought under democratic control and taken off the likes the Fugger bankers. They, and their kin, had

forfeited their right to them for they [bought] them with money acquired by unjust usury in order to shed human blood. Thus also they deceived the common man and worker by paying his wages in defective goods…raised the price of spices and other products by buying up and hoarding stocks. They are to blame for the devaluation of the coinage, and the mints have to pay their inflated price for silver. They have made the poor pay for it, their wages have been lowered in order that the smelters can make some profit after buying the ore. They have raised the prices of all consumer goods after they gained a monopoly, and thus burdened the whole world with their unchristian usury. 

Sadly this quote doesn't appear in Greg Steinmetz' account of the life and times of Jacob Fugger. But having read it, one can certainly sympathise with Gaismair and the rebellious peasants and miners who flocked to his call. Fugger was indeed one of the richest men ever to have lived, and as Steinmetz's account makes clear Fugger was uniquely for his time, adept at seeing business opportunities and using his existing wealth and power to get further wealth and power. He counted among his clients kings, monarchs and popes, and he played politics like a giant game of chess across Europe all in order to further his own ambitions.

Unfortunately Steinmetz's book suffers from superficial analysis and simplistic comment. Writing of the great German radical Thomas Müntzer, Steinmetz says that he "was the most dangerous to Fugger. It was not because he had the most guns but because his populist agenda held enormous appeal". Müntzer did indeed rail against "the profiteering evildoers", but then so did many others. Müntzer was a threat because his brand of radicalism was linking up with a mass movement - not because he was uniquely radical. The revolutionary movement of 1525 was, after all, a massive challenge to all the powerful and weathly. 

Steinmetz charts Fugger's rise to power, and in particular highlighting the way he was able to extract wealth from labourers and use that to strengthen his hand. It is notable, and Marxists might appreciate knowning it, that the world's first capitalists and bankers were as ruthless as others. Despite the lack of serious competitors, Fugger seems personally driven to accumulate wealth for the sake of it. Even Steinmetz who is clearly sympathetic to the banker's lot is forced to acknowledge that Fugger's methods were devious and nasty. In the case of the repression of the peasantry and their allies, Steinmetz notes that Fugger "sponsored" "savagery".

Despite these insights, Steinmetz tends to give Fugger far more credit than he is due. He is portrayed as the figure who personally drives forward key moments in central European history. Steinmetz doesn't appear to be engaging in hyperbole when he improbably claims, that Fugger

roused commerce from its medieval slumber by persuading the pope to life the ban on moneylending. He helped save free enterprise from an early grave by financing the army that won the German Peasants; War, the first great clash between capitalism and communism. He broke the back of the Hanseatic League... He engineered a shady financial scheme that unitnetniotnally provoked Luther to write his Ninety-Five Theses... he most likely funded Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe.

Like Brecht, we might wonder who else built Thebes of the Seven Gates? The problem is that this account fails to acknowledge the very real changes taking place within the economic base of European society in the early 16th century. The changes that were driving all sorts of economic, political and theological changes and opening up a space for others. By placing these changes in the hands of one individual (to be fair Steinmetz does say "helped") the authors is simply engaging in that favourite bourgeois fantasy of the individual discontected from society and the wider world. 

Tragically there are no modern biographies of Jacob Fugger, and Steinmetz has at least written one that covers the key moments of Fugger's life. Sadly its not without fault. It also has some annoying mistakes. Fugger claims that Müntzer was finally defeated in battle at Mühlhausen "a small city Müntzer gad seuzed and sought to run as a communist utopia". But this is wrong. The battle took place at Frankenhausen, and is today marked by a significant museum.

Greg Steinmetz's biography of Fugger will likely have a renewed readership as a result of the anniversary of the Peasants' War. It is perhaps most charitable to say that it is the sort of biography you would expect "a securities analyst for a money management firm in New York" to write, and use it as a jumping off point for more serious studies elsewhere.

Related Reviews

Klaassen - Michael Gaismair: Revolutionary and Reformer
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents
Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer