Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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enlightened in British life.17 The poisoned phrase that drew the ire
of the criticsMunich was a triumphwas a homage to H.N.
Brailsford, one of the leading lights of the Union of Democratic Con-
trol, organized shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914. The UDC,
led by such pro-Labour and Liberal intellectuals as E. D. Morel,
G. Lowes Dickinson, G. P. Gooch, and Bertrand Russell, included
such politicians as Ramsay MacDonald, Arthur Ponsonby, and
Philip Snowden and took its cue from theories of Imperialism, partic-
ularly those J.A. Hobson had elaborated at the turn of the century.
Imperialism was held to have developed out of protectionist and
militarist tendencies in capitalism. Morel argued that the imperial-
ism of the great powers directly caused the war by promoting their
secret alliances and notions of the balance of power, and he con-
centrated fire on Greys pre-war policy for creating an unwritten
bond to France and Russia for support in an aggressive land war
against Germany.18 The Germans, said Morel, had not previously
been trying to dominate Europe. German complaints about encir-
clement were certainly as plausible as British complaints about the
violation of Belgium, which was simply, for the British leaders, a
means to an end in a general European war. The real fault lay with
the vicious philosophy at the root of European statecraft.19
Brailsfords War of Steel and Gold, for the most part an eloquent
update of the arguments of Hobson with an anti-entente twist, was
the most widely read of the UDC tracts. Taylor later remarked that
many a professor of history had the works of Gooch and Fay atop
his desk and Brailsfords volume in his first drawer. The British
anointed their victory with the holy water of the balance of power,
said Brailsford, but it was a metaphor of venerable hypocrisy
which serves only to disguise the perennial struggle for power and
predominance.20 British support for the Franco-Russian alliance
was a way of seeking to break up Austria-Hungary and striking a
blow to the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway scheme. By these means Grey
succeeded in crushing the German idea of Mitteleuropa.21 Brailsford
traveled in Russia in the spring of 1919. He condemned the French
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for their activities against the Bolsheviks and deplored their influ-
ence over the British and the United States. France in 1919, he
thought, was immensely more preponderant than was the German
military machine at the height of its power. All Europe now groaned
under the military hegemony of France.22 The whole critique of
the New Imperialism, gathering force since the Boer war, was em-
ployed to explain the Great War: France was the great beneficiary
of imperialism, and Germany was its victim.
In the thirties, Brailsford argued that the rise of Hitler would
have been impossible without the injustices of Versailles. So the
first element of a cure, he said, is to remove Germanys wrongs.
It was necessary, said Brailsford, to disarm to Germanys level and
then to give Hitler what we refused to Rathenau, Stresemann, and
Bruning.23 Coercing Germany in an attempt to defend Versailles
was unthinkable. It would not be a socialist position; even if one ac-
tually succeeded in bringing Hitler down, the spirit of outraged na-
tionalism influenced by fresh wrongs and new humiliations, would
remain. Brailsford changed course by 1940, however. In a pamphlet
designed for a broad audience in America, he appealed for British
support in the war and called the British navy Americas defense
against Hitler, and even joined FDR in invoking a Latin American
threat.24 Hitlers New Order, Brailsford wrote, has turned out
to be merely an inflated and reckless version of Mitteleuropa.25
The Brailsford line on the causes of the Great War remained rather
close to the Communist International, or Comintern, line.26 The
Bolsheviks had started the controversy over the causes of the war by
publishing the secret treaties and a stream of documents on Tsarist
foreign policy. The 1919 Manifesto of the Comintern charged that
the British and Entente imperialists were most guilty of bringing war
to Europe: In London they wanted war. That is why they conducted
themselves in such a way as to raise hopes in Berlin and Vienna that
England would remain neutral, while Paris and Petrograd firmly
counted on Englands intervention.27 The Manifesto first stated
the charge, later debated by scholars in a more genteel form, that
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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History
Lord Acton once said, than those which expose the pedigree of
ideas.
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supported Barnes against Hazen. Langer called the war guilt clause
the most stupendous hoax in history.56
Many critics toasted Barness The Genesis of the World War,
but not all the hostile reviewers claimed that Barnes was wrong.57
Charles Beard, Ferdinand Schevill, and Langer all expressed ap-
proval. Barnes even won a partial victory in the eyes of the most
influential critic, Bernadotte Schmitt, who accepted the case against
Germanys sole war guilt but rejected Barness claims about the guilt
of France and Russia. Schmitt complained that Barnes relied too
much on secondary sources, which shifted the whole discussion onto
a different plane. The last round of the controversy would be fought
on the ground of narratives that pretended to be grounded only in
diplomatic documentsa departure for diplomatic historians, who
were now assuming that they could write, definitively and with ab-
solute detachment, on contemporary events entirely from foreign
office archives.58
Fay and Schmitt soon geared up for their definitive retelling using
the full-scale scholarly apparatus. In 1928 Fay published Origins of
the World War in two volumesthe first on deep origins, 1870
1914, and the second on the immediate crisis of 1914. He built
upon his original argument that, based upon the Kautsky docu-
ments and the Austrian Red Book, one must conclude that the War
Guilt Clause was without foundation.59 In the new volumes, Fay
claimed that Poincare was the real culprit. His reckless behavior
had spurred the Russians into action, and the Russian mobilization
in effect meant war; the subsequent German attack on Belgium
and France must be seen as an unavoidable response.60 Imperialism,
doctrines of preventive war, or military timetables were not impor-
tant.61 Fay returned to the responsibility of Lord Greyno one
wanted war, and British policy could have prevented it, either by
warning France and Russia that Britain was not on board, or by
warning Germany that she was.62
Schmitt answered in 1930 with The Coming of the War, which
earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1916, prior to the release of the ocean
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278
The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History
Conclusion
In the years immediately following the Second World War, it seemed
that revisionism could not stick. On the German side, it still has
not. Few historians say today that Hitler stumbled into war. On
the British side, however, Appeasement is no longer a motherless
child, and even accounts that are not particularly revisionist echo
the description of a British Empire embattled on many sides and
with no alternative but to attempt to buy off its enemies one by
one.88 The revisionist case has gathered steam with the appearance
of new material, Cabinet papers and other sources released after
relaxation in 1967 of the fifty-year restrictions on access to British
public records. But in 1965, before new sources emerged, Donald
Cameron Watt already finely argued the case. Chamberlain is now
usually considered to have been dealt a bad hand to play, and his
actions are regarded as reasonable, often realistic, and even shrewd.
Revisionist historians added greatly to knowledge of the climate
and background of British decision making. As Fay and the mod-
erate revisionists of the twenties showed, one could be educated by
revisionism even if one was not entirely convinced. Revisionism also
opened the flood gates before a greater torrentonce the nuances
of Chamberlains position were reconsidered, the next question to
ask was whether he, as opposed to Churchill, had not been right
all along. Perhaps it would have been prudent to seek a greater
Germany as a barrier against Soviet Russia; perhaps Churchill and
Eden had erred by their enthusiasm for a Grand Alliance.89 One
revisionist adds, if Chamberlain should have let Hitler pursue a
Teutonic crusade against the Slavs in 19389, then Stalin should
have been permitted his sphere of influence in East Central Europe
in 19457.90 Les revisionismes se touchent.
Is it fair, then, to say that revisionism has been the dominant
intellectual trend in European diplomatic history? Has the cause of
those who took us into the two world wars and the Cold War not
proved in the end to be meritorious in the eyes of the historians?
279
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NOTES
My thanks to Jon Jacobson and Marc Trachtenberg for useful comments, and
especially to Gerhard Weinberg for our valuable exchanges and the suggestion that
I visit the Revisionist Archives at the American Heritage Center at the University
of Wyoming. The Sontag papers are at the library of the University of California,
Berkeley.
280
The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History
1. Arthur Marwick, All Quiet on the Postmodern Front, Times Literary Supplement
(23 February 2001).
2. Donald Cameron Watt, Could Anyone Have Deterred Him? Times Literary
Supplement (22 December 2000), 9.
3. Peter Bell is representative in calling Appeasement an intelligent response to in-
superable difficulties. Chamberlain, Germany, and Japan, 19331934 (London
and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), ix.
4. The pillars of the new history were Fritz Fischers Griff nach der Weltmacht and
A.J.P. Taylors Origins of the Second World War. One might also include George
Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Boston and Toronto: Little
Brown, 1961); and E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961.)
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1960) sold perhaps ten million copies and was translated into eight lan-
guages. It reinforced the current orthodoxyits success showed that the revival
of revisionism was confined to the historical profession. Geoffrey Baraclough said
that people like Shirer and himself were the club bores of the sixties: No one
wants to listen to us, and people whisper that we are obsessed, hysterical and
neurotically anti-German. See Gavriel Rosenfeld, The Reception of William L.
Shirers The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Ger-
many, Journal of Contemporary History (January 1994), 121. R.J.B. Bosworth,
Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), on pp. 1956, considering the effu-
sion of influential books from this time, cites E.P. Thompsons The Making of the
British Working Class of 1961 as a pivotal force linked to the rise of a new social
history.
5. C.E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), 191.
6. John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, 1940). See also
Cato, (Michael Foot, Frank Owen) Guilty Men (New York: Frederick Stokes,
1940).
7. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Dell, 1962); The Proud Tower
(London: Macmillan, 1966), xvi.
8. Arno Mayer, Domestic Causes of the First World War, in Leonard Krieger and
Fritz Stern (eds.) The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo
Holborn (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967), ch.15; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The
German Empire, 18711918, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, Dover, NH:
Berg, 1985); Fritz Fisher, World Power or Decline: The Controversy Over German
War Aims in the First World War, trans. Lancelot Farrar, Robert and Rita Kimber
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); D.C.B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of War
in 1914 (New York: St. Martins, 1983); Volker Rolf Berghahn, German and the
Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martins, 1973).
9. The older generation of historians had already been turning toward the idea.
William L. Langers Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1940, The Conflagration of
Ideas in Pre-War Europe, focused on the growth of a new revolutionary spirit,
integral nationalism, anti-Semitism, and cultural despair, developments arising ul-
timately from the conflict between science and religion. William L. Langer, In
and Out of the Ivory Tower (New York: Neale Watson, 1977), 1789. Raymond
Sontag had ended his Germany and England: Background of Conflict, 18481894
(New York: Appleton Century, 1938), with the thought that Greater Britain, like
Weltpolitik, was in part an escape or, as men thought, an answer to domestic dis-
content. (3412). We must turn, wrote A.J.P. Taylor, from the foreign offices
to the more profound forces which shape the destinies of men. The Rise and
Fall of Diplomatic History, Englishmen and Others (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1956), 84.
10. Lewis Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, 19381939 (London: Macmillan, 1948); In the
Nazi Era (London: Macmillan, 1952); Europe in Decay: A Study in Disintegration,
19361940 (London: Macmillan, 1961); John Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue
281
Th e J ou r na l
to Tragedy (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pierce, 1948); Elizabeth Wiskemann,
The Rome-Berlin Axis: A History of Relations Between Hitler and Mussolini (New
York and London: Oxford, 1949); Maurice Baumont, La faillite de la paix, 1918
1939 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946).
11. A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 1701.
12. A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (New York: Capricorn, 1961, first
ed. 1946).
13. Taylor, Personal History, 172. Eckhart Kehr, Battleship Building and Party Politics
in Germany, 18941901, trans. Pauline and Eugene Anderson (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975); Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic,
18711918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). George Hallgarten, Imperi-
alismus vor 1914, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1963); Hans Gatzke, Germanys Drive
to the West: A Study of Germanys Western War Aims During the First World War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1950). The same view pervades Barrington Moores
classic analysis of paths to democracy, Social Origins of Democracy and Dicta-
torship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon,
1993). Adam Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 31213.
14. Taylor, Personal History, 172.
15. Quoted in Ved Mehta, The Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intel-
lectuals (New York: Columbia University Press), 1963, 171.
16. Trevor-Roper, Rowse, Wiskemann, Hudson, Craig in Roger Louis (ed.), The
Origins of the Second World War: A.J.P. Taylor and His Critics (New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1972), 4, 41, 11416; T.W. Mason, Some Origins of the Sec-
ond World War, Past and Present 29 (1964), 6787. See also Esmonde Robert-
son, The Origins of the Second World War: Historical Interpretations (London:
Macmillan, 1971); Esmonde Robertson and Robert Boyce (eds.) Paths to War:
New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martins,
1989); Gordon Martel (ed.) The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered:
The A.J.P. Taylor Thesis After Twenty-five Years (Boston and London, 1986), and a
second edition with some different contributors, The Origins of the Second World
War Reconsidered: A.J.P. and the Historians (London and New York: Routledge,
1990).
17. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Atheneum, 1961),
184. Taylor also wrote, When I say that Munich was a triumph for all that was best
in British life I mean that . . . enlightened people, men of the leftwhom perhaps I
equate too easily with all that was bestthat they had said that the inclusion of the
Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia was, in the words of one of them, Brailsford,
was the worst crime of the peace settlement of 1919. . . I mean by that a triumph for
all who had preached enlightenment, international conciliation, revision of treaties,
the liberation of nationalities from foreign rule, and so on. Quoted in Mehta, Fly
and the Fly Bottle, 1212.
18. E.D. Morel, Truth and the War (London: National Labour Press, 1916), xxiii,
1635. George Bernard Shaw argued that This hideous war of 191418 was at
bottom a fight between the capitalists of England, France and Italy on the one side
and of Germany on the other for the command of African markets. Quoted in
Norman Angell, After All (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1951), 141. It
was a case, wrote Shaw, of English Monroe-ism. George Bernard Shaw, What I
Really Wrote About the War (New York: Brentanos, 1932), v.
19. Morel, Truth and the War, 165. Hillaire Belloc, who regarded Morel as a Prussian
agent, countered with this couplet: Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, but
Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
20. H.N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold (London: G. Bell, 1918), 28.
21. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, 7. Friedrich Naumann, Central Europe,
trans. Christabel Meredith (London: King, 1916).
22. H.N. Brailsford, Across the Blockade (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe,
1919), 162, 165.
282
The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History
23. H.N. Brailsford, Property or Peace (New York: Covici-Friede, 1934), 299, 300.
24. H.N. Brailsford, From England to America (New York and London: Whittlesey
House, 1940), 61, 85.
25. H.N. Brailsford, Our Settlement With Germany (New York: Hammondsworth),
1944, 29.
26. Another way of saying that international Communism, not merely a spillover from
the Russian revolution, grew from the anti-war propaganda of anarchists, paci-
fists, and radical social democrats. The Comintern began at Zimmerwald. See
my Ambiguities of Trotskys Leninism, Survey (Winter 1979); and F.L. Carsten,
War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: U.C. Press, 1982).
27. Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World, in Alan
Adler (ed.) Theses, Resolutions, and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the
Communist International (London: Ink Links, 1980), 28.
28. At first the Hobson-Brailsford-Lenin interpretation of imperialism had heavily in-
fluenced Taylor. He was to return to it in the fifties, when he wrote a sympa-
thetic and yet sharply critical re-consideration of British foreign policy dissent, The
Troublemakers. See A.J.P. Taylor, The Troublemakers: Dissent over Foreign Pol-
icy, 17921939 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957). Despite shortcomings, Taylor
concluded, Hobson and Brailsford are our sortthey had caused him to appre-
ciate the German position and the moral illegitimacy of the peace of Versailles.
Taylor studied further with Alfred Pribram in Vienna. He read Friedjung, von
Srbik, and Oncken on Bismarcks diplomacy in war and peace. See Alfred Pribram,
Austrian Foreign Policy, 19081918, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923); England
and the International Policy of the Great Powers, 18711914 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1931); Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Metternich (Munich: Bruckmann, 1925);
H. Friedjung, The Struggle for Supremacy in Germany, 18591866, trans. A.J.P.
Taylor and W.L. McElwee (London: Macmillan, 1934); Hermann Oncken, Das
deutsche Reich und die Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Barth,
1933); See John Boyer, A.J.P. Taylor and the Art of Modern History, Journal of
Modern History 49 (March 1977), 4072.
29. Frank Eyck, G.P. Gooch: A Study in History and Politics (London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1982) 339; G.P. Gooch, Recent Revelations of European Diplomacy
(London: British Institute of International Affairs, 1923); A History of Modern
Europe, 18781919 (London and New York: Cassel, 1923); Franco-German Rela-
tions (London and New York: Longmans, 1923); Germany (London: Benn, 1925).
His memoirs are Under Six Reigns (London and New York: Longmans, 1959).
30. G.P. Gooch, British Diplomacy Before 1914 in the Light of the Archives, in
Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft (New York: Russell and Russell, 1942),
103.
31. John Fair, Harold Temperley (London and Toronto, Associated Universities Press),
192.
32. Gooch, British Diplomacy, 90. Goochs friend Hermann Lutz had used this
phrase in a pamphlet. See also T.G. Otte, Eyre Crowe and British Foreign Policy: A
Cognitive Map, in T.G. Otte and A. Pagedas, Personalities, War, and Diplomacy
(London: Frank Cass, 1997), 1437.
33. For example, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Taylor-Made History, National Interest
(Summer 1994); and Robert Cole, A.J.P. Taylor: The Enemy Within the Gates
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
34. Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor, 117.
35. E.L. Woodward, Short Journey (New York: Oxford, 1942), passim, for criticism of
various shortcomings of the Grosse Politik; Great Britain and the German Navy
(London: Oxford, 1935), 40, 287 for accord with Crowe as against Sanderson.
36. William L. Langer, The Franco-Russian Alliance (Cambridge, MA, Harvard, 1929);
European Alliances and Alignments, 18711890 (New York: Knopf, 1931); The
Diplomacy of Imperialism, 18901902 (New York: Knopf, 1935).
283
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284
The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History
Wegerer, Brandenburg, Montelgas, Stieve, and Lutz in Germany; Fay and Langer
in the United States. See E. D. Morel, Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy: Fresh
Revelations (London: ILP, 1919); Lord Robert Loreborn, How the War Came
(London: Methuen, 1919); G. Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy, 1904
1914 (New York and London: Century, 1926); R. Beazley, Lord Greys Account of
Things, Foreign Affairs (December 1925); Alfred Fabre-Luce, La Victoire (Paris:
Nouvelle Revue Francais, 1924); Georges Demartial, La guerre de 1914: la mobi-
lization des consciences (Paris: Rieder, 1922); Alfred von Wegerer, Der Beginn des
Krieges (Berlin, 1924). Erich Brandenburg, Von Bismarck zum Weltkriege (Berlin:
Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft fur Politik und Geschichte, 1925); Max Montelgas,
British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey (New York: Knopf, 1928); Friedrich
Stieve, Isvolsky and the World War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1926); Hermann
Lutz, Lord Grey and the World War (New York: Knopf, 1928). A subsection of
the Weimar Foreign Ministry, the Kriegsschuldreferat, directed and financed an
array of publication efforts, including the periodical Kriegsschuldfrage and its suc-
cessor, Berliner Monatschefte (both edited by Von Wegerer), and Grosse Politik.
Von Wegerer and Lutz were on the Foreign Ministry payroll, and much of the
work on German innocence was left to them and to foreigners such as Barnes
and Fay. Imanuel Geiss, The Outbreak of the First World War and German War
Aims, Journal of Contemporary History (July 1966), 7578; Holger Herwig,
Of Men and Myths: The Use and Abuse of History and the Great War, in Jay
Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary Habeck (eds.) The Great War and the Twentieth
Century (New Haven and London: Yale, 2000), 3013.
55. William L. Langer, Izvolski and Poincare, The New Republic (15 April 1925);
Barnes, Genesis, 99100.
56. Langers letter to The New Republic (30 April 1924), 260. Langer praised Barnes as
one who has long taken his place among the leading writers on (diplomacy before
1914) and waged a courageous fight against staggering odds in this country. He has
reduced many of his opponents ad absurdem and the process is highly illuminating
and instructive. The Nation (5 December 1928), 264.
57. Barness book was called an intolerant plea for tolerance and Menckenized
history. The Barnes Papers contain a lengthy and warm correspondence between
H. L. Mencken and Barnes over 25 years. Menckens encouragement of Barness Re-
visionist efforts, particularly against that idiot Hazen, are coupled with his praise
of Genesis and his pro-German and occasionally anti-Semitic remarks. Barnes col-
lected all the commentary on his book, with full citations, in In Quest of Truth
and Justice: Debunking the War Guilt Myth (Chicago: National Historical Society,
1928). See also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (New York and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 207215.
58. Taylor, Rise and Fall of Diplomatic History, 81.
59. Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (New York: Macmillan, 1929), vol. 1,
14, citing for support Kautsky, Montelgas, and Gooch.
60. Fay, The Origins of the World War, vol. 1, 25; vol. 2, 479.
61. Fays dissuasion has failed to stick; instead, its opposite has held sway. Some
milestones of the preventive war thesis are Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan
(London: 1958); A.J.P. Taylor, War By Timetable: How the First World War Began
(London: Macdonald, 1969); L.L. Farrar, The Short War Illusion (Santa Barbara
and Oxford, Clio, 1973); and a considerable political science literature. See the
essays by Steven Van Evera and Jack Snyder in Steven Miller, Military Strategy
and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1985); but see
also the critique by Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1991), ch. 2. David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War in
Europe, 19041914, 13, casts doubt on the thesis of the land arms race leading to
war.
62. Origins of the World War, vol. 2, 556. See the discussion of the Comintern line,
above.
285
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63. Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, 2 vols. (New York and London:
Scribners, 1930), vol. 1, 147.
64. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, vol 2, 409.
65. Quoted in Michael Cochran, Germany: Not Guilty in 1914, Boston, Stratford,
1931, 4.
66. Yet Fay noted the disadvantages of permanent foreign office secretaries determin-
ing policy. Some, like Sir Eyre Crowe, said Edward Mead Earle, had preju-
dices which distorted their judgements. Earles lesson was that bureaucracy in the
American Department of State was a danger. A Wise and Upright Story of War
and Responsibility, The New Republic (5 December 1928), 735.
67. Michael Cochran, Germany Not Guilty in 1914; Charles Seymour, The Diplomatic
Background of the War, 18701914 (New Haven: Yale, 1916); Preston Slosson,
review of Barnes, Genesis in American Historical Review (January 1927), 319
20. Seymours volume was considered to have popularized the allied case, going
through ten printings by October 1918.
68. Raymond Sontag, European Diplomatic History, 18711932 (New York: Appleton
Century Crofts, 1933).
69. Barnes to Sontag, 6 February 1933, Sontag Papers. Sontag must have wondered at
this and other expressions of praise for Diplomatic History. A. Whitney Griswold
sent his encomia, with the added thought: I wish every one who shudders at the
name of Hitler could read it. Griswold to Sontag, 9 April 1935, Sontag Papers.
70. Sontag to Temperley, 17 December 1936, Sontag Papers. Salisburys biographer
and daughter Lady Gwendolyn Cecil sent Sontag a copy of Salisburys famous
memorandum on relations with Germany, dated 29 May 1901, in which Salisbury
casts doubt on the perils of British isolation. This is the last document in Harold
Temperley (ed.) Foundations of British Foreign Policy, 17921902 (Cambridge,
1938), 518520.
71. England and Germany: Background of Conflict, 18481894 (New York: Appleton
Century Crofts, 1938), xii. Hans Kohn, scholar of European nationalisms, objected
that the statement gave too much credit to German nationalism. Kohn to Sontag,
17 January 1939, Sontag Papers.
72. Sontag review of Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, Journal of Modern History
(June 1936), 229.
73. Linglebach to Sontag, 28 October 1938, Sontag Papers.
74. Walter Millis, The Road to War: America, 19141917 (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1935); Viewed Without Alarm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937); Charles
Callen Tansill, America Goes to War (Boston: Little Brown, 1938); C. Hartley
Grattan, Why We Fought (New York: Vanguard, 1929).
75. Bundy to Sontag, 15 February 1955, Sontag Papers. Sontag called Milliss Road
to War a too well disguised pacifist tract. American Historical Review (January
1936), 363. I am grateful to Marc Trachtenberg for calling my attention to this
review.
76. William L. Langer, In and Out of the Ivory Tower (New York: Neale Watson,
1977), 1689.
77. Langer review of Germany and England, New York Herald Tribune, 15 January
1939; Schmitts review, in American Historical Review (July 1939), compared the
talent for dissimulation of Bismarck and Hitler.
78. Sontag review of H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, a book he judged to be a
product of the school of Grattan, Millis, and Tansill, Saturday Review (3 June
1939), 1617.
79. O.J. Hale, Publicity and Diplomacy (New York and London: A.C. Crofts, 1940).
80. Barnes ms, August 1933, box 20, Barnes Papers.
81. William Robinson to Barnes, 20 September 1933, Barnes Papers.
82. Barnes to Alfred Baker Lewis, 26 February 1941, Barnes Papers.
83. Harry Elmer Barnes (ed.) Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace (Cantwell, ID:
Caxton, 1953).
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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History
84. Harry Elmer Barnes, Revisionism and Brainwashing: A Survey of the War-Guilt
Question in Germany After Two World Wars, Selected Revisionist Pamphlets
(New York: Arno, 1972), 12. On Bardeche and Rassinier, see Deborah Lipstadt,
Denying the Holocaust (New York: Plume, 1994), 5065. Barnes also expressed
admiration for the work of William Appleman Williams on the non-interventionist
tradition.
85. Taylor usually referred to the work of the American revisionists as interesting in its
way, but not much as scholarship, and in his bibliography for War By Timetable
he called Fay the most adroit defender of Germany and Barnes the most pre-
posterous. Nevertheless, Taylor, after publishing Origins in 1961, occasionally
acknowledged something of a debt to the revisionists, as when he referred to col-
lective security in the thirties as perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace.
A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 286.
86. Porter Sargent, Getting US Into War (Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1941).
87. David Hoggan, The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, CA,
Institute for Historical Review, 1989 (first ed. 1961). Alfred von Wegerer, The
Origins of World War Two (New York: R.R. Smith, 1941). See the review of Der
erzwungene Krieg by Gerhard Weinberg in American Historical Review (October
1962), 1045.
88. Among many possible examples, the superb text for sixth form students preparing
A levels, Andrew Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War (Oxford and
Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1997).
89. David Carlton, Anthony Eden (London: A. Lane, 1981), 4802.
90. John Charmley, Churchills Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relation-
ship, 19401957 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1601). See the review
by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Visions and Revisions, New Leader (18 December
1995).
91. Donald Cameron Watt, Appeasement: The Rise of a Revisionist School, Political
Quarterly (April-June, 1965), 207.
92. H. W. Koch, introduction to The Origins of the Great War: Great Power Rivalry
and German War Aims (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1984), 6.
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