Orwell in America

By Thomas Fensch

George Orwell never came to America; he published five books before fighting in the  Spanish Civll War against Franco. Shot in the neck by a sniper, he came within a fraction of an inch of dying on the spot. Returning to England he published Homage to Catalonia, his experiences in Spain;  then Animal Farm, the

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Century Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733785228

Thomas Fensch

Thomas Fensch has published 40 books in the past 50 years--his first three were published in 1970. He has published five books about John Steinbeck; two about James Thurber; two about Dr. Seuss; the only full biography of John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, and a variety other titles.

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1

Alexis De Tocqueville in America

Alexis De Tocqueville arrived in the United States in May, 1831, and departed its shore for his native France once again in February, 1832, only nine months later. Yet for considerably more than a century and half now, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has provided its readers an unparalleled abundance of description, analysis and prophecy concerning almost every aspect of the American scene.

… Richard H. Heffner writes in his Introduction to the 2010 edition of Democracy in America. And, Heffner writes,

Born in Paris on July 29, 1805, Tocqueville was ascended from a proud old Norman family that for long generations had been considered among the petite noblesse. Thus it required no particular devotion to the villainies of the ancient regime to make Tocqueville initially suspicious of majority rule. The leveling doctrines of the French Revolution had already taken a heavy toll with his own family and circle of friends. During the revolution his parents had been jailed, his maternal grandfather, the Marquis of Rosambo, had been guillotined in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And though his Father was ultimately returned to rank and position after the fall of Napoleon, Tocqueville’s own childhood had been overshadowed by memories of these earlier popular excesses. In so many ways, then, he was both by birth and by circumstances ideally suited to the role of hostile critic of democracy in America.

In essence, De Tocqueville was a classic liberal who advocated parliamentary government, but he was skeptical of the extremes of democracy.

In 1831, he obtained a mission (grant) from the French Monarchy to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the United States and journeyed to America from France with a lifelong friend, Gustave De Beaumont. Tocqueville did visit some prisons—but also traveled widely in the United States and took extensive notes about his observations and reflections.

Instead of writing about American prisons—he changed his focus and began a quite remarkable undertaking; nothing less than a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the state of the country as he saw it.

His analysis, Democracy in America, has been widely regarded since its first publication as one of the most influential books ever written about America.

He used the term the tyranny of the majority, (as have others including John Stuart Mill). He saw that public opinion could be a powerful force; that the majority could subjugate the minority and marginalize individuals; these ideas appear remarkably modern, but were first published in 1835, 184 years ago by now.

For those not familiar with Democracy in America, it is well worth listing the chapter headings:

PART ONE

1. Origins of the Anglo-Americans

2. Democratic Social Condition of the Anglo-Americans

3. Press in the United States

4. Local Government

5. Decentralization in America—Its Effects

6. Judicial Power in the United States, and Its Influence on Political Society

7. Aspects of the Federal Constitution

8. Political Parties

9. Liberty of the Press in the United States

10. Political Association in the United States

11. Advantages of Democracy in the United States

12. Unlimited Power of the Majority in the United States

13. Causes Which Mitigate the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States

14. Causes Which Tend to Maintain Democracy

15. Future Prospects of the United States

PART TWO

BOOK 1

INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY UPON THE ACTION OF INTELLECT IN THE UNITED STATES

16. Philosophical Method of the Americans

17. Influence of Democracy on Religion

18. Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man

19. The Example of the Americans Does not Prove That a Democratic People Can Have No Appetite and no Taste for Science, Literature, or Art

20. Why the Americans Are More Addicted to Practical Than to Theoretical Science

21. In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts

22. Literary Characteristics of Democratic Times

23. Of Some Sources of Poetry Amongst Democratic Nations

24. Why American Writers and Orators Often Use an Inflated Style

25. Some Characteristics of Historians in Democratic Times

BOOK II

INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON THE FEELINGS OF THE AMERICANS

26. Why Democratic Nations Show a More Ardent and Enduring Love of Equality Than of Liberty

27. Of Individualism in Democratic Countries

28. That the Americans Combat the Effects of Individualism by Free Institutions

29. Of the Use Which Americans Make of Public Associations in Civil Life

30. Of the Relation Between Public Associations and the Newspapers

31. Relation of Civil to Political Associations

32. Of the Taste for Physical Well-Being in America

33. What Causes Almost All Americans to Follow Industrial Callings

34. How an Aristocracy May Be Created by Manufacturers

Book III

INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON MANNERS PROPERTY SO CALLED

35. How Democracy Renders the Habitual Intercourse of the Americans Simple and Easy

36. Why the Americans Show So Little Sensitiveness in Their Own Country and Are So Sensitive in Europe

37. Influence of Democracy on Wages

38. Influence of Democracy on the Family

39. Young Women in a Democracy

40. How Equality of Condition Contributes To Maintain Good Morals in America

41. How the Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes

42. How the Principle of Equality Naturally Divides the Americans into a Multitude of Small Private Circles

43. Some Reflections on American Manners

44. Why the National Vanity of the Americans Is More Restless and Captious Than That of the English

45. How the Aspect of Society in the United States Is at Once Excited and and Monotonous

46. Why So Many Ambitious Men and So Little Lofty Ambition Are to Be Found in the United States

47. The Trade of Place-Hunting in Certain Democratic Countries

48. Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare

49. Why Democratic Nations Are Naturally Desirous of Peace, and Democratic Armies of War

50. Causes Which Render Democratic Armies Weaker Than Other Armies at the Outset of a Campaign, and More Formidable in Protracted Warfare

51. Some Considerations on War in Democratic Communities

BOOK IV

INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRATIC IDEAS AND FEELINGS ON POLITICAL SOCIETY

52. Equality Naturally Gives Men a Taste for Free Institutions

53. That the Options of Democratic Nations About Government Are Naturally Favorable to the Concentration of Power

54. That the Sentiments of Democratic Nations Accord with Their Opinions in Leading Them to Concentrate Political Power

55. Of Certain Peculiar and Accidental Causes, Which Either Lead a People to Complete the Concentration of Government, or Which Divert Them from It

56. What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear

57. General Survey of the Subject

De Tocqueville was more prescient that he could have imagined. In Democracy in America he forecast the prominence of the United States and Russia as the two main global powers. He wrote:

There are now two great nations in the world, which starting from different points seem to be advancing toward the same goal: The Russians and the Anglo-Americans … Each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.

Vartan Gregorian contributed a 13-page Afterward to the 2010 Signet paperback edition of Democracy in America. He writes:

In post-9/11 America, where we may all feel equally endangered the question of how much of our freedom— enshrined in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights—we are willing to sacrifice security is still an issue that remains open for discussion.

He cites Dostoevsky, media critic Marshall McLuhan, Rousseau, Bill Moyers, historian Garry Wills, and others—and he cites George Orwell. Extensively. Gregorian writes:

But—to paraphrase Lincoln in the service of making an obvious point—all the people cannot govern all of the time. George Orwell’s 1984 builds a nightmare world out of that notion, envisaging a society in which a faceless monolithic governing system has taken hold and purports to be the true representative will of the governed. Given those conditions, in the book, the only permissible political act in this society is abject adoration of the leader, Big Brother. Not only human life but human nature is controlled at all levels. There is no pity, love or family; it is a society in which children not only betray their parents, but parents are proud of such keenness and Party spirit in their malicious offspring.

But this is also a society that goes beyond such trappings of totalitarianism to achieve the ultimate in control and dehumanization: in the society of 1984, all are deprived of both past and future, and each lives locked in a perpetual present. A Party slogan says, Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. The past is constantly being fabricated, distorted, or destroyed. No documentation of it exists; all papers, books, notes, etc., are rewritten and the originals sent into the memory hole. Even the literature and the language of the past are destroyed and replaced by gibberish versions in the language of Newspeak, which has as one of its goals the removal of any word constructions that might exemplify the ideas of freedom, liberty, rebellion, and so on. One character says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

It is not just the written past that is manipulated. And destroyed, however. Human memory has become just as variable and erasable. Winston Smith, whose daily job in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite and erase the past, commits the greatest crime in this society—he remembers the past and he pursues it. Winston seeks any fragment untouched by the Party that embodies the past—a glass paperweight, an old-fashioned room in a secondhand shop, an elderly man who can tell him how life really was like before the revolution that brought the Party to power. As he says "If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened, that, surely was more terrifying than mere torture or death."

The society of 1984 not only rejects history as the memory and record of human achievements, triumphs, follies and failures but, along with it, the notion that history teaches us of growth and progress and of the possibilities of an infinite advance for mankind. 1984 rejects our culture, values and humanistic traditions of Western and non-Western societies. It rejects the individual as a unique being, a unique moment in the universe, a rational, spiritual being, torn between the finite and the infinite, between morality and immortality, security and freedom, between agony and the pain of struggle and the joy and ecstasy of being and becoming.

… and a key question …

In any of his books, diary entries, essays, notes, plans or conversations with his wife, friends or colleagues, did Orwell ever think of journeying to America to write a De Tocqueville-type update? A Nineteen Eighty-Four-in-America project? A matching volume or American sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Hold that thought.

2

Eric Blair Becomes George Orwell

Like others before him, including Mark Twain—Eric Blair—born June 2, 1093 and died January 21, 1950—had world experiences fundamental to his writing.

He was born in India, to a family genteel but not wealthy. His father worked in the India Civil Service. A year after he was born, his mother took him and his two sisters to live in England, presumably for a better life. Blair saw his father briefly in 1907, when his father was on leave, but not again until 1912. Blair’s school years were abysmal. He hated his first school, St. Cyrian’s, in East Sussex. He described his next school, Wellington, as beastly, but apparently was happier, when he reached Eton.

(His health problems, which would plague him throughout much of his life—eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis—may have begun, undiagnosed, during his time at Eton.)

Financially he couldn’t afford further university work— moving from Eton to Cambridge University—without scholarship help, which didn’t look promising; he thus decided to leave England. In October, 1922, he traveled through the Suez Canal and Ceylon and arrived in Rangoon in November to join the Indian Imperial Police. He was posted in the Irrawaddy Delta area, then closer to Rangoon.

He gained responsibility there quite young; while his contemporaries in England were still in school. He learned the Burmese language but contracted dengue fever in 1927. He took leave, returned to England, examined his life and resigned from the Indian Imperial Police to become a writer.

Like Mark Twain, and others before him, he mined his travel experiences; his novel Burmese Days (to be cited later) was published in 1934.

Down and Out in Paris and London—1933

In the spring of 1928 he moved to Paris where he lived in the Latin Quarter, where F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had also lived.

He fell seriously ill in March, 1929,