Past Imperfect; 1

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . between Trotsky and Stalin was the question of whether the Communist Party of the Soviet Union should support in a militant way revolutionary movements in other countries.

The first one which would have come up had Trotsky taken over after the death of Lenin, as I suppose, the Chinese matter in 1927, when Stalin, in effect, sold the Chinese Communist Party down the river and allowed it to be slaughtered by many of the militants, to be slaughtered by Cheyenne Kayshek and the Goldmantham. Would Trotsky have, did he have a different policy? If Trotsky had carried out the implications of the argument he was making, he would presume we would have supported the Chinese Communist Party, which raises the interesting speculation that China might have gone coming to say in 1929 rather than in 1949 that the Soviet Chinese split might have taken place in the late 1930s rather than in the 1960s, and that many interesting developments of that order might have followed in train. You see this in a similar way in the surprise show, Steve?

I was just wondering, it seems to me that the great trouble about a Sisyp Trotsky is that he has such enormous charm. I'm sure that like a lot of murderers, he was awful in murder on a little big scale, and his charm must have been one of the things that made it possible for him to carry out the excesses which he did. All three of each of them would be wanted to have Trotsky in charge of Russia, that's what I was thinking, and I was concluding that it might have been a much more dangerous Russia, actually, then to think in the 1920s and 30s on Trotsky and under Stalin. Do you feel this form because he was a better writer or is it? Much better writer, and a much more gravel man too. I mean, I think one would be the fascinating electric, wonderful person to hear speak, I think. Or to read. Great writer, but not an agreeable man, I would have thought. I don't really think that Trotsky could have been called a great murderer. I mean, he was a military leader, and as the chief military leader in that period, he was responsible for putting down the uprising and crunsthat and so forth. But I really don't, I mean, unless you can call every military leader, particularly in a revolutionary situation or murder, I think that's too strong a word.

And you don't see him. I would stand up for Trotsky. For example, you don't see him behaving as Stalin did to the Kulaks, to the… I'd rather doubt it, but I think his instincts were considerably more humane, really not old to be classed with Stalin. I think you must not generalize from Trotsky and exile. When Trotsky was in power, the crunsthat thing, I think the Kulaks would have been liquidated just as effectively. After all, I was Trotsky, remember, who said that we, as he put it, we were never concerned with the Kantian priestly and vegetarian Quaker Prattle about the sacredness of human life. He wrote this in 1920. And when he had power, he used it ruthlessly because he was in his way as fanatically devoted to the doctrine of the revolution and convinced that the revolution justified everything as Stalin. But where would this higher intelligence have made a stronger Russia in the 20s and early 30s?

Would he have been able to solve the economic problem as Stalin would brutally enforce it? Well, because it would have been Stalin adopted Trotsky's internal program. Yes, that's true. And the program of forced industrialization, the fourth compulsory starvation, the liquidation of the Kulaks, forcing this through, was a program which Stalin had opposed when that one's Trotsky proposed it, but which Stalin then took over. I think that there would have been the same history within the Soviet Union of terror, I think the purges and so on, where things that Trotsky would have carried out just as much as Stalin. But one other internationalist issue that I think is very interesting. You mentioned China as being the first place where the question of whether the revolution was to be exported or not would have come up. I think Germany is equally important. The German Communist Party could have benefited enormously by more active support from Russia during the 20s.

And if the German Communist Party had come to power, the Eastern Communist Party would have had... Well, particularly in Germany. I think that's so, but I was thinking that by 1924, the first revolutionary situation was really in China, in 27, at the end of the decade, when the Nazis were coming. And another revolution. Because the first wave of Germany had already been crushed. Yeah. He would have been a much more attractive revolutionary leader than to think of Stalin. I mean, for the point of the brilliant man of international politics, I think German Communist Party, Chinese Communist Party, any Communist Party, anywhere would have been attracted to him, and he would have used that fact, ruthlessly, I think. Stalin sort of retired, didn't he, behind the walls of the Kremlin, to say his terms? I'm still a little suspicious of three writers describing another writer as attracted. It seems to me a quality and a little too inevitable. If we may pass on, our next subject is an American, and in contrast to Trotsky, he succeeded in achieving his goal.

Matthew Perry, however, had a far different mission. Washington, 1853. Commodore Matthew Perry sent by President Phil Moore to open the unknown country of Japan to Western trade, still has not returned to America. Reports drifting in from Tokyo are alarming. The Japanese, noted for their cleveness at imitation, are apparently holding Commodore Perry prisoner while they copied the design of his four warships. President Phil Moore, who had sent the Japanese Empress on tokens of friendship, today received the following gifts in return. A sharp edge sword, which the Japanese use in a sport called Harry Carrey, an antique lacquered pillbox, filled with strange looking tablets, and a silk scroll, inscribed in ancient Japanese characters, which linguists have translated to mean Yankee Gohong. President Phil Moore said today he was sorry to lose Commodore Perry, but that he had no intention of going near Japan for the next 100 years. But in fact, Perry did return from Japan only one year after his visit, and he signed

a treaty with the emperor opening Japan up to trade with the West, trade that until then had been virtually non-existent. But suppose Japan had refused to open its doors and had remained in its splendid isolation for several more decades. Mr. Price Jones, I hate to ask you to speculate on the subject involving Americans on the one hand of Japanese on the other, but would you care to do so? But I'm in a specially weak position because I just got back from Japan, but I also have done more homework than I did on Japanese history. And I would think that the essential point was, wasn't it, that the shoguns in Japan in the 19th century in the Emperor were more or less at loggerheads that are all the weak Emperor was in, at the mercy of his great nobleman, wasn't that more or less the historic fact about the Japanese Emperor, and presumably therefore the Japanese Emperor welcomed someone coming in to make him slightly important by giving him the chance of opening up his own country to fall in trade. I would have thought that you couldn't seal off a country that easily, even if it was

a competitively affected, the sealed off of Japan was in the 19th century. And supposing Commodore Perry had failed, especially if he'd come back empty-handed in the United States. I can't think that, say, China, I would think China would have probably opened it up. Opened it up. But I really wasn't a China, with the will and nationality. It's a strength to do very much, China also was in a stage. It was in the state of self about a confusion, but China, historically, has always been the country in the long ago past, which brought whatever Japan needed to Japan. Wasn't it? I mean, like us? Yes, of course. Of course. Yes. But the crucial fact was that it wasn't Western influence, the United States, and Western Europe. Well, there had been, had there not, there had been, Westerners getting in, so I didn't before. There were a few Dutch. And of course, the Jesuits, a long time ago, went, there were a lot of Jesuits and Mutses. But this is all very carefully controlled. There was a place where they could come, and the Japanese would come, and they'd exchange spices or something.

I think that if the Japan had been able to turn back a pair, it would have been, as Alan Price-John suggests, because of the power of the Shogunate, which means, really, essentially, the feudal structure of Japan was still solid enough, so that they could get away with it, which would have meant the postponement of the modernization of Japan, it would have meant there would have been no interlude like the Meiji restoration in the last part of the century. And it would have meant that Japan would have gone into the 20th century, conceivably, in a country like, I say, Japan would have gone into the 20th century, conceivably, in a country like Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Thailand. It would be a wonderful place for the Germans to come in, wouldn't it? They're the Germans. In the 1850s and 60s and 70s, it would be very grateful to find a holy area of the world where they could start building up some kind of power for themselves. But presumably, they would have resisted the Germans, too, and in that sense, you would have had rather different history of the Pacific, because, presumably, there wouldn't have been Japanese participation in the First World War.

There wouldn't have been Pearl Harbor, and Japan might be some vast, stagnant, hopeless place, which would now be receiving assistance under the aid program. It still was so incredible, when you think of 1853, it's just the 110 years ago that Japan has been in the forefront of industrialization, modernization, and Asia for a couple of generations now. And things are so different there from everywhere else in Asia. I wonder if it was because they held off for so long. They didn't tell them so much. They had the impulse to go ahead for the later for the major restoration, for the forced drag deserts. Oh, it's great help. You can say that those in the countries had an advantage, which industrialized later, because they could have so many experiments have been undertaken by the countries that they could, other countries that they could avoid the mistakes. It was a British expedition. I think the British have been covered with elderly coal mines, elderly railways, elderly factories, and elderly cities. The credit you get for having done it for. And to extent.

Well, I think I have the feeling you must have done your homework extremely well in Japan restaurants. If we may do so, we're going now to move forward a century, though the subject is still American. Our next hero never existed, a space capsule that might have been, but never was. Cape Canaveral 1957, the United States of America today launched the world's first satellite into outer space. President Eisenhower, in a special press conference, announced that the vehicle was traveling at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour in an orbit 1,000 miles from the Earth. According to the National Space Agency, future satellites will contain dogs, men, monkeys, and women. It was not yet revealed how they would be divided in any one capsule. In the Pentagon tonight, observers felt that they had witnessed the beginning of American preeminence in a new dimension, where they were certain that democracy and free enterprise would flourish.

From Moscow, Premier Khrushchev, wired his congratulations, he pointed out that Earth satellites, which he called Sputniks, were an old Russian idea from the time of the Mongols. In recent years, the Premier acknowledged, there have been a few snacks getting the Mongols idea off the ground, but Russia soon hoped to overtake America in this field. Official Washington feels that day will be a long time coming. As we know, the first Sputnik was Russian, not American. The world was electrified by the news of it, and many Americans took the occasion to ask how and why we had fallen behind. What might the reaction have been if the roles had been reversed? I think that this event is important mainly for its symbolic importance. I think that most people think of it as ending a certain era in the Cold War and inaugurating another one in which American hegemony ceased to exist and which was realized now we would have to share the world with the Russians or something of that sort.

I believe that this is really a public myth that I speak out of ignorance as a newspaper reader only. I believe this is a myth, a fiction. I don't think things really change that much. In reality, I think that the popular opinion, public opinion, changed at that point. Certain cockiness, apparently, went out of the American temper and maybe that's important in the long run, but I don't really believe it is. Well, I think the global economic and political situation, which was no longer that of the early 50s, had changed, and it wouldn't really have mattered, I think, if it's what Nick had gone up for. There are those who share your view that it's a myth almost to the extent of believing that we could have indeed sent up an object of this kind. Had we not taken the political decision not to for reasons to come out of it? Well, undoubtedly the most spectacular single piece of propaganda in the history of recent times. It has meant to people as a symbol of the race between what's rather, to me, farcically called the free world versus the other world.

Well, the difficulty we got into, in that sense, was not realizing how important it was as a symbol. But often we'd be profoundly grateful for the fact that the Russians got the sputnik up first, because traditionally all of us in the West believe that no Russian railway train works, that all Russian cigarette lighters were always unfuelled, that the whole of the Russian economy is geared to total failure all the time, and we've been traditionally told that now for about a century. But to find that something actually works as sensational as this surely puts us all on our toes is rather good for us, I think, it gives us a kind of challenge, something to respond to. There's no particular physical advantage in getting a sputnik off the ground as such. It's always going to be sort of a moral challenge to somebody else, and we receive the challenge. I think it's a very good phrase. It has an impact on education. That was the sort of key slogan for all kinds of proposals for reform, more teaching of science in high school, and that sort of thing. Without any particular relevant connection, it was made into a reason for examining the teaching of science in high school. Is it good to do a good thing for a wrong reason, Mr. Schussinger?

It's better to do it for a good reason, but it's better to do it if it's a good thing. It's better to do it for a wrong reason than not at all. I agree with everything that both Susan Sontag-Gnell and Bryce Jones have said, I think the effect of the thing was, in a sense, transcend. You can argue, perhaps, that the Russians were emboldened, re-opened, the Berlin crisis, the Berlin affair, which they did in 1958 because of this, but they might have done it anyway. And by 1959, Khrushchev was coming to the United States, and we were having the spirit of Camp David, so it's hard to trace any sustained departure. Soviet policy to this. And I think the major effect as Alan Price Jones suggests was probably in the blow this doubt to the self-righteousness and complacency of the West. A blow approach, perhaps, was not deeper enduring enough at its momentary effect. I was going to ask you what to do.

It's a time made, I remark about the free world. Let me also make one about the West, because we were talking about Japan before. And whenever people say the West, I wonder how the Japanese feel of being called part of the West. It's short of being a member of NATO. I'm at the West. I'm at Western Europe. Yes. Well, I was wondering as you were speaking of these educational reforms, whether you think they were reasonable and realistic and necessary? Well, I think anything which improves the quality of American public education, which seems deplorably low, is fine. And science is one of the things that needed improving. It's certainly not the only thing, but one should be glad for that. I agree. I think on the whole of the effect is beneficial. I have a particular resentment of it myself, because I had a bet with a friend at extremely favorable odds that the Russians would send Sputnik up in September, and they missed it by what, two or four days, which I thought was cutting it much too close for my particular comfort. And today there's a space baby launched. Our last situation, ladies and gentlemen, has not this mechanical gadget, but both a hero and a heroine.

Well, the hero isn't particularly handsome. His lady is one of the beauties and one of the least popular ones of history. Vienna 1791. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette arrived here yesterday after a narrow escape from revolutionary mobs in Paris. Although obviously tired from their trip, the royal couple graciously met with reporters. According to King Louis, he didn't mind when they seized his palace, or even when they took his personal ballot. But when the mob demanded his ship, he said that was too much. When the cuisine goes, Louis observed, all goes. Marie Antoinette added, Paris wasn't fun anymore, all the best people have left, and I was so bored. Asked what she had done to occupy herself, the queen said that she had taken up knitting. She showed reporters a scarf in which she had affectionately incorporated the names of certain French acquaintances. The queen treasures it as a souvenir of her Paris day, and feels it may come in handy in the future. With the armed assistance of the Austrian government, Marie Antoinette and her husband

planned to march back to France soon, and as she puts it, make Paris gay again. Unfortunately, for them, the king and queen didn't get to Vienna, though they did try to escape from the revolution that was sweeping their country. Either they were guillotine, of course, by the very people whose demands they had ignored, and in Dickens' tale of two cities, it is the vengeful Madame de Farge who had been doing the knitting. But had they escaped, could they ever again have regained the confidence of their people? Do you believe so, Mr. Schlesinger? I do not think so. I think that had they escaped, they might have tried to organize an intervention. You remember that following the execution of Louis in 1793, the first coalition was formed of various European countries. It's conceivable that that first coalition might have come a little earlier, might have had a greater air of legitimacy with Louis at the head of it, might have been more effective, but the notion that this could have reversed the pressures which caused the French revolution

are seen to be insubstantial. What might have happened, I suppose, is that in the fighting, which might have taken place, like the emergence of Napoleon Bonaparte might not have occurred, because he rose as you remember in the Revolutionary Army and the Italian campaign, and that might have had a consequence of history, but I do not think for a moment that if Louis had succeeded in escaping, he could have reversed the revolution. It wasn't Napoleon actually engaged in the battle against the first coalition, as I remember, he was fighting in too long, trying to get too long back from the English, it was one of two generals in the campaign, I mean, it wasn't very important to them. But I was thinking that if this had taken place in 1792, rather than 1793, the campaign might have moved in a different direction, and Bonaparte might not have emerged or might

have been killed, there's something like that. I was just talking with the idea of President Metaniech of France, because actually they would have got the King Louis and Queen Mary Ampholite, but it actually welcomed Indiana, I think, if they'd gone there, because the Viennese, as I remember, had a lot of troubles on their own hands in that minute, Queen Mary Ampholite's nephew, wasn't it, had just become Emperor, Emperor Francis, and his father and his uncle had died in the two years beforehand, both of them being Empress II, and they'd tried to liberalize Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and the country's run, but they'd not succeeded all that well, and they had played obstructive full of troubles, and they have Uncle Louis and Aunt Mary Ampholite, a right in the middle demanding help, but I think it'd been the last straw. Quite a part of the fact that you're quite right, and that in addition, Louis himself, when he was returned to Paris from Varan, his passion for devotion to Austria was so limited that he was rather in favor of a war against Austria, in the theory that that might rally support behind the monarchy and save the monarchy.

Maybe the first coalition only got going because I didn't have a kind of a queen that they wanted to raise. I only had a republic anyway, but it's just conceivable, and you're saying that Austria might have paid a part in all this, and after President Tellera, you might have been President Messin, and I mean, that's just how you were getting there. That's a nice thought. Well, I'm rather taken with Mr. Schlesinger's thought of a 19th century Europe without Napoleon, this opens up many vistas now to be written on historical blank. You need to be the small Corsican land there, and that's what I said to the end of the return general, finally his vines, and what if he would do the vines in Corsican? Well, what sort of a France would you have expected to come out of a non-Napoleonic France at that particular juncture, a non-imperial non-Napole? That's very hard, because there would have been some, there would have been the Termidor, there would have been some revulsion, I think, against the revolution. But I don't think that their individuals do make differences to history, and the fact that the beneficiary of the Termidor was eventually Napoleon gave the character of the first two decades of the 19th century, gave it a very different character from what it conceivably

would have had otherwise. One could say that precisely because Napoleon was a military genius among other things, he diverted so much of French energy outward to conquest and foreign adventure, that maybe some of the tensions of the revolution were dissipated just by being ignored, whereas if hadn't been the leader of the French hadn't been so involved in foreign adventure, these tensions would have mounted, even further, might have been even a greater reaction against what had been accomplished under the revolution and took place under Napoleon, who certainly retracted a great deal of it anyway. I think we should have had Louis XVIII on the third match earlier, wouldn't you, in France? That's what I thought it would come back to the rear. Everything would have shifted back in history a little bit, I think, and apparently the third wouldn't have existed, I suppose. We miss a rather good period for cafes and boulevards, but... Yes, we do. But it certainly must be said of Napoleon if of anybody that history is also made by individuals.

And the European literature would be very different, we wouldn't have crime and punishment and the red and the black. No romantic... Surely there would have been romanticism, even without its chief hero, though you were... I suppose. There would have been romanticism, but the image of the romanticism would be different. No child, no hero, no knight. Before Waterloo. The quality that he gave to the French that Hassontag was speaking of is also one of him body-ing a particular dream of theirs, in a way which certainly still reflects itself in some of their present figures. And also, I wondered if perhaps the king himself having been killed had added something to that bitterness. So perhaps the French had not killed their king, if they might have been less bitter than they would otherwise be. I'm sorry to have to, and when I myself am talking, but I'm afraid I've used up our time. I want to thank you very much, Miss Sontag, Mr. Schlazinger, Mr. Price Jones, for helping us to remake history and want also to thank you ladies and gentlemen for joining us in

our effort to make the past a little more imperfect. Thank you very much, Mr. Schlazinger, for helping us to make the past a little more imperfect. This is NET, National Educational Television.