Historical Insanities: Doing the Same Thing Over Again

We go from the Crusades to Agincourt to 1950s Elections in a quest to learn that doing the same thing over again is not a recipe for victory.  

Transcript

Historical Insanities: Doing the Same Thing Over Again

April 2023

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” That witticism—let’s call it “Einstein Insanity”— is usually attributed to Albert Einstein. Though the Matthew effect, a tendency of individuals to accrue social or economic success in proportion to their initial level of popularity, friends, wealth, etc., may be operating here, it is undeniably the sort of clever, memorable one-liner that Einstein himself often tossed off.

"Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always comes around to where you started again." 

Stephen King

But is life a wheel? 

If you had asked an English nobleman in 1385 which ruling family would possess the crown 100 years later, the first answer would probably have been Plantagenet. Richard II, king in 1385, was a Plantagenet, and one had to go back over 250 years to the Norman kings to find another house. Some clever fellow might have said Lancaster given the power wielded by John of Gaunt in the late 14th Century. There were some Percys and Arundels as well, but the one name that would not have come up would be Tudor. It took the Wars of the Roses to eliminate so many peers that only then could a grandson of Owen Tudor assume the throne and create one of the greatest dynasties in British History. As the fictional Daenerys Targaryen of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones, partially based on the Wars of the Roses, stated, “Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell, they're all just spokes on a wheel. This one's on top, then that one's on top, and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.” She concludes with determination: “I'm not going to stop the wheel. I'm going to break the wheel.” One could replace the fictional houses in Martin’s work with Lancaster, Plantagenet, Percy, Neville, York, and Beaufort, then change the quote to Henry VII Tudor, and it works. Well, the Tudors did not precisely break it being from the Lancastrian side of things, but they indeed represented something new.  

Nor would I say that history is precisely like a wheel, more like a jagged road that provides strange curves along the way.  History is not. However, an arc constantly bending towards the better, as Progressive historians would have us believe.  Things are much better today for the average person than for the peasant living during Tudor times, infinitely better.  But that is as much a virtue of capitalism as any unseen deterministic force. We also have rulers putting millions of humans into ovens, and as should be noted in Putin’s Russia, the arc can bend backward.  

What history does provide as much as a wheel is a redo, an echo, a sense of doing the same thing over again. And as with the apocryphal Einstein quote, expecting a different outcome. These can be comical, as with the Democratic party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries always believing that William Jennings Bryan would happen if given just one more chance. It can also turn terrible as we look at redos in war.  

We began with the Plantagenets, so let’s go to a historical occurrence near contemporary to their dynasty. The Crusades get a lot of press, and rightly so. The movement dominated European and Near Eastern Asian history for the better part of 250 years. Yet out of roughly eight Crusades, only the first was fundamentally successful. In that case, and it was a near thing, the Christians carved out four territories during the Crusades. 

After the first Crusade, the success of the endeavor was checkered. In the Third Crusade, Richard I of England took the city of Acre, which was to last for another one hundred years. The sixth Crusade saw Emperor Frederick II regain territory, and the Baron’s Crusade did enlarge the Kingdom of Jerusalem for a time. Still, for the most part, many were failures, and none were enlarging upon the conquests of the first. 

The Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land instead, sacking Constantinople instead. And yet the ardor to go on Crusade did not ebb until the death of Louis IX of France in the Eighth Crusade, not in the Holy Land but around Tunis in modern-day Tunisia.  

Louis's first Crusade, the one called the Seventh, was fought in Egypt, and despite some victories, Louis was thrown out. So why would so many Europeans keep trying after the failures of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Crusades? Part of it was religious ardor; in the 2nd and 3rd, there was an element of glory-seeking, especially on the part of Richard. But part of it was coveting the lands held by the Arabs and Turks. 

But the problem was obvious. A crusading army would have first to conquer their base and then rely on supplies shipped from Europe. Men lost on the part of the Turks and Arabs could be replaced. But, on the other hand, men lost by the Europeans would have to be sent for, and there was no guarantee.

I started this with the English Wars of the Roses, but before England tore apart, they ruled over a good part of French established through three battles ranging from the mid-1300s to the early 1400s. The first was at Crecy, won by Edward III, partly due to English Longbowmen. During the height of the battle, the French launched a cavalry charge. This was disordered by its impromptu nature, by having to force its way through the fleeing Italians, by the muddy ground, by having to charge uphill, and by the pits dug by the English. The attack was further broken up by the heavy and effective shooting from the English archers, which caused many casualties. 

Ten years later, at the Battle of Poitiers, Edward’s son, also Edward, better known as the black prince, won another victory. One attack resulted in heavy casualties when the English realized the French horses mainly were only barded on their forequarters. The English archers would shoot into the horses' unprotected hindquarters. The French Cavalry took heavy casualties and withdrew. Though the French greatly outnumbered the English/Gascon force overall and had an even more lopsided advantage in cavalry, the English still won. 

And some 60 years later, at the battle of Agincourt, where Edward III’s Great Grandson, Henry V., The French cavalry, despite being disorganized and not at full numbers, charged toward the longbowmen. It was a disastrous attempt. The French knights could not outflank the longbowmen (because of the encroaching woodland) and could not charge through the array of sharpened stakes that protected the archers. One theory is that the longbows' main influence on the battle was injuries to horses: armored only on the head. For over half a century, English victories came not just because of the Longbow but because the French believed in cavalry attacks against such weapons riding ill-armored mounts. The French eventually won the Hundred Years' War. Given the size of France, which had nearly four times the population of England, it should have been inevitable, but the inability of the French to learn from their errors prolonged the bloodshed.   

Northern Generals fighting in the East set a pattern in the American Civil War. They would March south from Washington into Virginia, get beaten, and then March back. Popes from McClellan to Pope, Burnside, and Hooker followed this example. So it was when Grant, also beaten in Virginia in the Battle of the Wilderness, broke this trend by marching further South after his defeat. It took three years to learn, but Grant knew that after every battle, the North could replace the fallen troops, but the South could not.  

War is horrific, regardless of the size and scale. None was more significant than World War II. But for me, World War I always seemed the worse. There was no liberation of Europe. No ending to Nazi brutalities or stopping Japanese Imperial atrocities. It was just a group of nations with grudges settling their animosities over the bodies of tens of millions. And in the slaughter on the Western Front, insanity ruled. A British infantry assault on the still-impregnable German positions followed a weeklong artillery bombardment. Nearly 60,000 British casualties (including 20,000 killed) occurred on the first day. The offensive gradually deteriorated into a battle of attrition, hampered by torrential rains in October that made the muddy battlefield impassable. By the time it was abandoned, the Allies had advanced only five miles. The staggering losses included 650,000 German casualties, 420,000 British, and 195,000 French. The battle became a metaphor for futile and indiscriminate slaughter.

As if this was not horrific enough, it came after the Battle of Verdun. The battle began on February 21, 1916, when the German army began pounding the forts and trenches with artillery fire. One thousand two hundred guns smashed the French positions. And just as in the Somme, early German progress, at a fearful cost, soon led to attrition. Despite heavy shelling, the French infantrymen (known as “Poilus”) clung to their positions, and the Germans could not advance further. General Pétain then took command of the troops. He was ordered to defend Verdun. He increased the traffic volume along the Bar-le-Duc to Verdun road, later known as the “Sacred Way,” the only route taking men and munitions up to the battlefield. In all, some 4,000 trucks, 2,000 cars, 800 ambulances, 200 buses, and numerous vans passed along it. Both sides suffered over 300,000 casualties, and about the same number were killed. And so when the British launched their offensive on the Somme months later, they did the same thing. 

I also mentioned William Jennings Bryan. This Nebraskan was an American lawyer, orator, and politician. In 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States in the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections. He served in the House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895 and as the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the ordinary people, Bryan was often called "The Great Commoner," and because of his rhetorical power and early fame as the youngest presidential candidate, "The Boy Orator."

That first election, in which Jennings lost to William McKinley, was by a 4.3% margin in the popular vote and 100 electoral votes. When Jennings tried again four years later, the popular vote barely budged, but the electoral votes got worse, losing by nearly 150 this time. The Democrats sat out Bryan in 1904 (a good thing because uber-popular Teddy Roosevelt won the popular vote by almost 20 pts, but they were game again in 1908 against Taft. Different election, same result, 7% margin in the popular vote, with Taff getting 321 Electoral votes over Bryan’s 162. In an Atlantic Article by Jacob Stern, the author calls Bryan a “superstar loser,” lopping him into contemporary governor territory with two-time losers Stacy Abrams and Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke. But governor races are different, the stakes are a bit lower than the presidency, and we are talking not twice but three times. I have to chalk up Bryan’s continual hold on the Democratic party during the period from 1896 to 1912 as a combination of his undoubted charisma exemplified as the leading orator of his day, the lack of solid substitute (note that dismal 1904 thrashing, if you actually want to know who lost to TR, you might be a bigger history geek than I - it was the immortal Alton Parker BTW) and that in none of his three losses did he face the same GOP nominee. This time will be different could be explained away because, in the persons of McKinley and Taft were two very different men.  

None of this, the charisma, solid alternatives, nor different opponents can explain the Democrats and Adlai Stevenson II. He was a politician and diplomat who was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 1961 until he died in 1965. He served as the 31st governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953 and was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956, losing both elections to Dwight Eisenhower. He was also the grandson of a vice president of the same name who served in that office under Cleveland. Anyone who drives to the Southwest of the city of Chicago knows the name, Stevenson. Because of his hold with a tight-knit group of liberals in the party, Stevenson was able to try again in 1956 though he almost lost to TN Senator Estes Kefauver, later to be Stevenson’s running mate. In addition to being the darling of the liberals, there was speculation that Eisnhower’s 1955 heart attack might sideline him. However, he recovered and received the GOP nomination unopposed. Heart attack or not, Eisenhower won easily, carrying 457 electoral votes to Stevenson’s paltry 73. And this total only added to Eisenhower’s previous win in 1952. In both elections, Stevenson not only lost badly and ceded his home state of IL as well.  

Now would be a good time to pull out a quote from George Santayana; for those history or philosophy geeks among us, he is known as a Spanish and American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the US from age eight and identified as an American. But to most others, he is the man who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet, frequent listeners to a few of these podcasts will know that I often condemn the concept of simply learning the past. Instead, the trick is knowing which lessons to learn. For example, Louis XI, King of France and not affectionately known as the spider, saw that part of the issue with losing to the English was not just riding into arrows on unarmored horses but rather the divisions within France. At least early on, the English enjoyed an alliance with the powerful Duke of Burgundy. Louis would not allow these sorts of alliances to form but did everything he could to sow animosity among the English.  

Alternatively, the French took the lesson of World War I, where entrenched fortifications were paramount, and built even larger and more complex fixed lines in the Maginot Line. The German Wehrmacht also saw the issues with entrenched fortifications and developed their mobility through the Blitzkrieg to neutralize fixed emplacements. 

They rolled around the line. 

Just as with the political issues facing the Democrats of 1900 and 1908, today's GOP is considering nominating a candidate who has already lost once. To his ardent supporters, they are ready to mount their unarmored steeds and ride hard, right into a volley of arrows. This time may be different. History says otherwise.