What Ifs? of American History

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Thought-provoking - Rated
This volume concentrates on US history, and is generally pretty good - the one real dud is an essay on "What if Pearl Harbour hadn't happened?" which concludes that nothing would have been very different except that the Pacific War would have been six months late. The other Second World War essay is a bit more exciting but also concludes that it wouldn't have made much difference if Eisenhower had gone for Berlin.

There are no less than four essays on the Civil War, one of which is James McPherson's reprint from the first volume on "What if the South had won?", but the other three taking interesting tacks: one (by the dubious Victor Davis Hanson) credits Lew Wallace's personal disgrace at the battle of Shiloh with his later creation of the popular epic novel in Ben-Hur; one looking at the potential for insurrection against the Lincoln administration in what we now call the Mid-West, and one speculating (a bit chaotically) about the possibilities for continued insurgency in the context of Andrew Johnson as well as Abraham Lincoln being assassinated.

Two of the pieces are written from the counterfactual perspective first used, I think, by Winston Churchill in his 1931 essay "If Lee had not Won the Battle of Gettysburg". The one on how the Cuban missile crisis turned into a global nuclear war is rather conventional stuff; but Andrew Roberts' piece explaining the origins and course of the 1896 war between the USA and Britain is the pick of the book for me, although I don't quite agree on the likelihood of the US being given Quebec in a peace settlement; much more likely what happened in the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War, both sides being returned to the status quo ante.

The other piece that particularly caught my eye was on John Tyler, the first Vice-President to succeed to the Presidency after the death of his running-mate. Tom Wicker points out that Tyler's accession was far from assured by a strict reading of the constitution, and that the policies he pursued in office, in particular on the annexation of Texas, were crucial in their importance to the future of the country and not likely to have been pursued as successfully by any other potential president of the day. Tyler is much more interesting than I had realised, and the story has an exploding cannon as well, which in February 1844 killed numerous senior officials, one of whose grieving daughters found comfort in the arms of the recently widowed President Tyler, who married her four months later. (One of their grandsons is still alive.)

Anyway, a good collection for the history buff.

The Road Not Taken - Rated
History is often written as if outcomes were inevitable, as if the 13 Colonies were ordained to win the American Revolution or the Union to prevail in the Civil War. But history is contingent, and the only way to fully appreciate the significance of a given event is to think about what might have happened if things had turned out differently.

At first, I was a little put off by the "What If?" series of books, thinking the essays were probably more like works of science fiction than reliable articles about history. For the most part, I was mistaken, and I recommend this book and its prequels ("What If?" and "What If2?") to anyone seeking a better understanding of some of history's conspicuous turning points.

The essays generally fall into three categories. The first, which I enjoy the most, explain the historical context of a given occurrence and then engage in limited (but very illuminating) speculation about what might have happened if that event hadn't turned out the way it did. Examples of this type include Theodore Rabb's "Might the Mayflower Not Have Sailed" and John Lukac's "No Pearl Harbor?: FDR Delays the War."

Other essays also offer up the historical context but move on to engage in much bolder speculation. An example is Caleb Carr's "William Pitt the Elder and the Avoidance of the American Revolution," which explores a cascade of assumptions about how the 19th and 20th centuries would have been different if Britain had kept the 13 Colonies (the intriguing conclusion being that the world might have been better off). The problem with this approach is that it assumes that events in the rest of the world would have stayed on more or less the same path notwithstanding a dramatic change in the outcome of the American Revolution. This enables Carr to speculate, for example, on a 19th century summit between Disraeli and Bismarck, but I wonder if either of those two persons would have played the same role in history had the events of the late 18th century been much different than what they actually were.

The final type of essay dives right into the counterfactual world without clearly setting out the historical context. Examples are Andrew Roberts "The Whale and the Wolf, " which immediately launches into a history of a hypothetical Anglo-American War of 1896 and Ted Morgan's "Joe McCarthy's Secret Life," a tongue-in-cheek speculation that McCarthy was really a Soviet spy. For my tastes, the problem with these essays is that they do not distinguish carefully between what did and didn't actually happen, which means that the reader is less likely to learn about history than about the author's speculations.

On the whole, "What Ifs? of American History" is a very entertaining and readable book. If you enjoy it, consider getting the other two "What If" books, as well as Victor David Hanson's recent "Ripples of Battle" (which shares many features with the "What If?" series).