Alternative History

People like alternative histories. Harry Turtledove has made a whole life from writing novels that begin with  some implausible event. For example, time travel is possible, and white supremacists go back to 1864 and give Robert E. Lee's army modern weapons. The Confederates quickly win the Civil War, with all kinds of  ramifications. Space aliens appear on earth, ready for conquest, so Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler must put aside their petty differences to battle the space invaders.

When I was teaching history, I used to challenge my students by asking what history is. For many years, historians and history books told the stories of great men - Alexander and Washington and Napoleon and so forth. Then, Lev Tolstoy said history is about ordinary people and those "great men" are incidentals. The metaphor was the monkey riding the back of the elephant. The monkey screams and chatters and pulls the elephant's ears, and thinks he's steering the elephant. Meanwhile, the elephant goes about his business, devoting his thoughts to getting something to eat, and avoiding lions, and making little elephants. The monkey represents the movers and shakers of the world, and the elephant is the rest of us.

So do the great men matter? Does it make any difference whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is president? Both would build  incrementally on the foundations already laid down by their predecessors, dating back to 1789.

To put it more drastically, would there have been National Socialism without Hitler? Would there have been a World War II? Would the Germans have lusted to conquer France and Poland and Russia without Adolf to spur them on?

I support the idea of  a kind of combo pack. The "great men" act as catalysts, but they cannot get the rest of us to do anything we didn't have some predisposition to do. There must be a period of preparation  before people are willing  to do wild crazy  things. I can't  imagine that  the German people would have supported genocide against the Jews in 1933. Hitler had to harden their hearts with incessant propaganda and more and more draconian decrees. Even then, there had to be a substantial amount of anti-Semitism among the German population prior to the coming of the Nazis.

Why do I bring all this  up? Because I've been working my way through volume three of William  Manchester's monumental biography of Winston Churchill. Last night I read the part concerning Churchill's visit to Washington in December 1941 and January 1942. Churchill stayed in the White House as a guest of President Roosevelt. War was raging, and the two men were meeting to decide  on a strategy to win the war and mull over what the post-war world would be like.

One night, Churchill woke up feeling very warm - the room was overheated -  and tried to open the window in his bedroom.  He strained himself and experienced a mild heart attack. The illness was not reported in the press, and Churchill's own doctor did not tell him the truth about what had happened.

Then, after taking a train trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, Churchill flew to - of all places - Pompano Beach Florida for a short vacation. Taking a dip in the Atlantic Ocean, Churchill noticed a large shark swimming near him. At the behest of his staff, he beat a tactical retreat and did not  venture any further into the water than the shallows.

Suppose it had been a major heart attack rather than a minor one. Or, suppose the shark had been thinking about  lunch and decided Churchill would make a good repast. How would history have been different?

Back in London, the war cabinet was headed in Churchill's absence by Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party. Bland Clement Attlee could never have rallied the British population the way Churchill had, and another defeat or two - the British had known almost nothing but defeats to that point -  might have produced political turmoil in Old Blighty, to the advantage of the Germans.

And that, it seems to me, is a much more plausible starting point for a fiction writer than time travel or space aliens.

(Here are a couple of additional metaphors for history. History is like a roller coaster, with highs of intense activity and lows of ordinary times when things go along without much happening. History is like a coiled snake, so events that might be far apart chronologically might be close together thematically. History is like a poem, that doesn't repeat itself, but does rhyme. My favorite, one I thought of myself, is that history is like a trip to the fun-house at the carnival. The mirrors will never give a true reflection of what happened in the past, no matter how hard we might try to see one.)