Thundering Through the Ages
On the late Paul Johnson, drinker of history
Two months ago, popular historian Paul Johnson passed away at ninety-four. By all accounts he was lucid and prolific well into his golden years.
In this deadline-resistant article (and quite possibly, a Part II), I’ll scamper around as it were, sharing what I’ve read and learned through upward glimpses at a veritable Colossus.
As far as books go, Intellectuals, Modern Times, and A History of the American People are the titles I’m most familiar with. All three piqued my curiosity, roused my hunger for more, and shaped my thinking in deep, contrarian ways. While I’ve also read Creators, Johnson’s short biography on Churchill, and started—only started—A History of Christianity, I’ll draw exclusively from the three that I know best.
While I can’t say that reading Paul Johnson compelled me to go back for a history minor, (does finishing a near thousand-page tome that should be taught in history departments everywhere count?) he came awfully close. His breadth and style mimics Dostoevsky, in the role of the Grand Inquisitor. He’s a seeing eye, almost sinfully keen to good and evil in all of their permutations. His books hum along with bottomless questions, boundless energy, endless hope and curiosity.
Even more, Johnson’s authorly voice is one of a kind. Rich with knowledge, brimming with judgment, candid opinion, and scalpel-sharp insight into complex events, it’s also grounded in traditional, Christian (and as I’ll get into, tragic) assumptions about human nature.
Having come to appreciate it, it’s one ’ll never be able to unhear.
“The world is a vale of tears, always has been and surely always will be. Those who can dry our tears, and force reluctant smiles to trembling lips, are more precious to us, if the truth be told, than all the statesmen and the generals, and brainy people, even the great artists. For they ease the agony of life a little, and make us even imagine the possibility of being happy.”
-Humorists
I say this all having read textbooks I’ll never touch again. If I’m being honest, the same goes for much of the nonfiction I’ve picked up—histories, books on teaching, self-help, pasteurized theology and so forth.
Much of it’s helpful, well-crafted, even thoughtful.
But next to certain authors, everything else tastes like tap water… and in the age of scrubbing Dr. Seuss, Watership Down, and even Roald Dahl for language that might offend, make that tap water from East Palestine.
I digress.
If we’re talking in-depth nonfiction with crisp, flavorful, incredibly lucid prose, Paul Johnson is one of those authors. Chesterton, Lewis, Orwell, Mamet, Theodore Dalrymple, Douglas Wilson, and Victor Davis Hansen, (if you’ve seen him on Fox News and don’t believe me, pick up The Land Was Everything, or Field Without Dreams), come to mind.
That reading him (like any of those authors) builds my vocabulary, challenges my prior assumptions, and reframes my overall thinking without confusing, or showing off, is something of a high watermark. I’m no storehouse of historians, but I know for a fact that few academics, and not many professional writers can pull it off.
As saccharine as it may sound, stumbling on A History of the American People in college, and then Intellectuals and Modern Times sometime after was a gradual epiphany. I had no idea that in the right author’s hands, grand, Dickensian volumes of historic detail could be something I’d devour like a comic book.
All this to say, I have not read the whole corpus, or even a tenth of it.
But remembering much of what I have read, and why I go back and reread it means diving into why.
Elephantine Memory
When Johnson passed, Theodore Dalrymple wrote a brief, heartfelt City Journal piece.
“The range of his writing’s subject matter was astonishing: from Egyptology and the history of the Jews and Christianity to that of the United States; from studies of Mozart, Napoleon, and Darwin to art history and the history of modern times. He was, as this range might suggest, vastly knowledgeable and possessed of an elephantine memory.”
You can verify this description of Johnson’s fifty-five book corpus with a few pages counts. From Modern Times (784 pages), A History of the American People (972), A History of Christianity (556), and on to Art: A New History (792), elephantine sounds about right.
Plus, a bibliography that doesn’t include everything written over an early, long journalism career—hundreds of articles for New Statesman, and later The Spectator might be a good guess—dazzles the mind. Creators, Intellectuals, Heroes, Humorists, Napoleon, Churchill, Socrates, George Washington, The Holocaust, The Renaissance, Statesman and Nations, A History of England, A History of the Jews, British Cathedrals—I can keep going, but you get the idea.
However you slice it, the guy churned out books, articles, and even watercolor paintings like one of Ford’s Model T factories.
Diving In
In both topical range and sheer detail in each sentence and paragraph, Johnson’s memory is hard to match. The books themselves phone nothing in. Flip one open, and you’ll find torrents of detail—choice description, odd facts and quotations, relevant context, and thrumming streams of commentary.
Here’s Johnson on Shakespeare’s lexicon, in a chapter from Creators:
“Indeed, if there is one area in which Shakespeare lacks moderation, it is the world of words. Here he is, in turn, excitable, theoretical, intoxicated, impractical, almost impossible. He lived in a period drunk with words, and he was the most copious and persistent toper of all. He was an inventor of words on a scale without rivalry in English literature—Chaucer, fertile though he was, came nowhere near.”
Note the way he maneuvers from broad summary to who-dunnit curiosity.
“There are different ways of calculating how many words Shakespeare coined: one method puts the total at 2,076; another at about 6,700. There were 150,000 English words in his day, of which eh used about 18,000, so his coinages were up to ten percent of his vocabulary—an amazing percentage. Some were words her took out of the common stock of speech and baptized in print: abode, abstemious, affecting, anchovy, attorneyship, weather-bitten, well-ordered, well-read, widen, wind-shaken, wormhole, zany…1”
Assuming you can paddle, taking all this head-on is a bit like shooting rapids—intimidating, thrilling, and all forward momentum. There’s no testing the water, getting feet and ankles warm first. The heft of his sentences, and of ongoing narratives that don’t always come with chapter breaks, will scare many readers away. But it’s that same heft, doused with a Lewis-and-Clark sized ambition that makes the insights crackle.
Like a good tour guide, Johnson points out all the hidden gems.
Take, from Modern Times, his description of the slippery calculations behind the Allied bombing missions that incinerated Nazi Germany:
“The devastating combination of high technology and unrivaled productive capacity took its most palpable and significant form in offensive air power. There were two reasons for this. First, the British persuaded the Americans it was the best way to make the maximum use of their vast economic resources, while suffering the minimum manpower losses. Second, the bombing offensive appealed strongly to the moralistic impulse of both nations: what the British atomic scientist P.S.M. Blackett called the ‘Jupiter Complex’ —the notion of the Allies as righteous gods, raining retributive thunderbolts on their wicked enemies.”2
There’s rarely a page that doesn’t drop an odd phrase worth remembering… (in case you were wondering, that phrase here is Jupiter Complex. Bonus point if you got it.)
Through it all, and as you come up for air, Johnson couches everything in what he, or Dalrymple, (or me doing my best Johnson-Dalrymple impression) might call broad, Olympian judgment. Unlike so many forgettable history textbooks, Johnson’s opinionated; while not neglecting other perspectives, he doesn’t summarize with bone-bleached neutrality.
Rather, and with something of his own Jupiter Complex, the thunderbolts rain down.
Johnson the Pugilist
Like his late Marxist counterpart Howard Zinn, (in my A.P. U.S. History Class, we checked out, but didn’t necessarily read, Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States… the same book that Matt Damon gives a nod to in Good Will Hunting) Johnson wears his political convictions proudly.
In his short tribute, Dalrymple even calls him ‘a formidable polemicist, a sort of factual pugilist who ‘liked nothing more than to infuriate by means of iconoclastic polemic.’
He’s not wrong, and that charge lands on what might be Johnson's most provocative, upending work: Intellectuals. In short, biographical chapters on their own individual subject (Creators, Heroes, and Humorists follows this format) Johnson takes a hatchet to Rosseau, Shelley, Marx, Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, playwrights Henrik Ibsen and Bertolt Brecht—many of the saintly luminaries who either typify, or helped usher in our post-Christian, secular faith in reason, progress, and egalitarian ideas.
This fits right in with Johnson’s dogged conservatism. He’s no shy critic of what he calls the millenarian fallacy—the notion that grand, untested, utopian ideas are more important than (or as it stands, the salvation for…) everyday people. To that end, and even at its most gossipy, Intellectuals poses a fair question—did these legacy secularists who spent their lives telling everyone else how to run their affairs live up to what they preached? We can quickly guess the verdict, and Johnson’s singular, cherry picking focus on it is no surprise:
Marx sponged off friends, exploited those around him, (including a lifelong family servant he impregnated, but never paid), and never worked a regular job.
Ibsen, a fiery critic of social approval and status-seeking, sought medals like they were going out of style.
‘Papa’ Hemingway, the rugged truth teller, lied frequently… and so on.
Some of Johnson’s colorful chapter titles speak for themselves:
Jean-Jacques Rosseau: ‘An Interesting Madman’
Karl Marx: ‘Howling Gigantic Curses’
Tolstoy: God’s Elder Brother
Lies, Damned Lies, and Lillian Hellman
Bertolt Brecht: Heart of Ice
But even where Intellectuals blends idol toppling with outright character assassination, it’s not unwarranted. Between Paul Johnson and the Marxes, Rosseaus, and Noam Chomskys of the world, whose views continue to dominate in educational and cultural centers of the West?
While Johnson devotes much time—way too much—poring over his subject’s sex lives, the juicy details aren’t solely gossip. In the chapter on Marx, he casts an eye over the messy, disgusting ailments that probably spurred on the philosopher’s fury.
“His angry egoism had physical as well as psychological roots. He led a peculiarly unhealthy life, took very little exercise, ate highly spiced food, often in large quantities, smoked heavily, drank a lot, especially strong ale, and as a result had constant trouble with his liver. He rarely took baths or washed much at all. This, plus his unsuitable diet, may explain the veritable plague of boils from which he suffered for a quarter of a century. They increased with his natural irritability and seem to have been at their worst while he was writing Capital. ‘Whatever happens,’ he wrote grimly to Engels, ‘I hope the bourgeoisie, as long as they exist, will have cause to remember my carbuncles.' The boils varied in numbers, size and intensity but at one time or another they appeared all over his body, including his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, his bottom, which meant he could not write...3
Johnson’s opinions crop up in other books.
Here, in A History of the American People, Johnson caps off a section on Watergate by taking a side virtually unheard of in American history circles—Richard Nixon, who survives in the culture as a slavering cartoon villain, was an honorable statesman.
“Nixon’s combative instincts told him, as he scribbled on a note-pad, ‘End career as a fighter.’ But he had to bear in mind that the witch hunt had already lasted eighteen months and had done incalculable damage to the American system and to America’s standing in the world. The impeachment process would add many months to the process, during which, the executive power of the world’s greatest democracy, the leader of the Western alliance, would be in suspended animation, and his own authority would be in doubt. In all of these circumstances… he decided it would be in the national interest to resign, rather than stand trial as an impeached official… He gradually reestablished his reputation as a political seer among the American political community—he never lost it abroad, where the Watergate hysteria was almost universally regarded as am exercise in American juvenilia—and became in due course one of the most respected American elder statesmen since Jefferson.”4
Opinionated, sure—but coming from a keen contrarian British observer, it should give us pause.
For the record, and in the golden age of excuses and self preservation, can we imagine anyone, on either political side, resigning out of general concern for the country’s image and institutions?
I couldn’t if you paid me.
Pinned Corners
It’s no surprise that Johnson packs his work with opinion—something most historians, along with the American media, education, and entertainment establishments claim never to have done with a straight face. Like many keystone conservatives, Johnson aged out of younger left-wing activism in the way Winston Churchill purportedly described, becoming a proud Thatcherite in the eighties. Read carefully and you can’t miss that he’s a Catholic, God-believing, British conservative through and through.
But therein, ironically, lies his outsider strength, and a kind of contrarian trustworthiness. To elaborate on something I mentioned earlier, Johnson’s core assumptions about human potential, human events, and humans as a species are grounded in the book of Ecclesiastes, or in what Thomas Sowell aptly calls the ‘Tragic’ vision.
In short, Johnson, like Sowell, like the Old Testament, understands life as tragic, limited, unforgiving. Problems like war, corruption, crime, poverty, tribalism, family brokenness, or even personal dysfunctions like greed, laziness and cowardice are so common and universal as to not even be remarkable.
They’re the grim status quo, with no explanation necessary.
What’s remarkable, and by record of history, are the anomalies.
Affluence, peace, literacy, medicine, rule of law, traditional families, virtues like courage and fortitude, western ideas of citizenship, non-religious government, and constitutionally protected liberties, happy families, creative and cultural achievement, —everything the Left flippantly takes for granted, (or worse, seethes with fury over when it doesn’t crop up equally), Johnson treats with contagious fascination.
His take on Leo Tolstoy’s famous, opening line of Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ is a good example of this:
“Tolstoy came to see marriage not only as a source of great unhappiness but as an obstacle to moral progress. Take the famous sentence from Anna Karenina… the moment one begins to search one’s own observed experience, it becomes clear that both parts of this statement are debatable. If anything, the reverse is closer to the truth. There are obvious, recurrent patterns in unhappy families – where, for instance, the husband is a drunk or a gambler, where the wife is incompetent, adulterous and so forth; the stigmata of family unhappiness are drearily familiar and repetitive. On the other hand, there are happy families of every kind. Tolstoy had not thought about the subject seriously.”5
Again, and like the section on Marx’s habits and hygiene, Johnson reminds us that it’s no small misstep.
Rather, the glib opener to one of the most beautifully executed novels ever written is yet another mirror into Tolstoy’s inner life of (at least, to hear Johnson tell it) egotistical self-sabotage. Through his wide influence, and with families and birthrates under siege around the world, Tolstoy’s sucker punch at happy families might be more far-reaching than we realize.
A Kind of Generosity
Johnson doesn’t claim that family strife, or for that matter national atrocities with countless innocent deaths should be forgotten or shrugged off. Modern Times recounts the Twentieth Century and its demons, with some hundred million dead thanks to Communist governments alone, in wrenching detail.
But as we see in his stately introduction to A History of the American People, Johnson knows how, and when, to bring questions of justice and moral performance into play:
“The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind…it raises three fundamental questions.
First, can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past. The United States, from its earliest colonial times, won its title-deeds in the full blaze of recorded history, and the stains on them are there for all to see and censure: the dispossession of a indigenous people, and the securing of self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race. In the judgmental scales of history, such grievous wrongs must be balanced by the erection of a society dedicated to justice and fairness. Has it expiated its organic sins?
In the process of nation-building, can ideals and altruism—the desire to build the perfect community—be mixed successfully with acquisitiveness and ambition, without which no dynamic society can be built at all?”6
If this is run-of-the-mill pro-America bias, then I think it’s the right kind.
Probing, and unflinching on enormous past, Johnson, the British Catholic, manages to be openly, almost patriotically generous with the protestant United States—a quality that Americans on the shrill, race-and-grievance obsessed left, and even on the growing, fringe-theocratic right, can’t, for all their shouting, seem to muster.
In the same way that expecting nothing primes you for being pleasantly surprised, Johnson’s tragic vision leaves him free to be generous, while staying truthful at the same time. He’s free to make judgments, condemn what’s ill-fitting, and praise what’s remarkable. Through rollicking summary, with case studies of the unique American character in people like Sir Walter Raleigh, Washington and Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, the American Presidents and Frank Lloyd Wright… Johnson trolls us with an unspeakable conclusion: all things considered, the dynamic, largely Christian, self-correcting United States, and despite its tragic past—deserves admiration.
Were Johnson alive, and writing today—and after he’d had his kicks shooting down anti-racism, masking, vaccine mandates, climate justice and preferred pronouns like clay pigeons—he hold his ground on that conclusion.
Like Victor Davis Hansen, he’d bring up a dozen or so historical corollaries to remind us that there’s nothing new under the sun, all that all past sins and present divisions duly noted, the United States is a tottering achievement and a model for people around the world.
Would your average, American history teacher touch any of that?
History versus A People’s History
Comparing Johnson’s lens to Howard Zinn’s is quite telling.
Where Johnson makes a comprehensive effort to consider America’s past sins—tragedies of conquest that, unlike most countries, were recorded in full view of history and not buried in obscurity—and asks, fairly, if society dedicated to opportunity and justice can overcome them, Zinn starts by playing the noble savage card.
“These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.”7
If we shouldn’t judge on first impressions—or in this case, opening sentences—we can certainly call out a pungent, openly hostile vibe.
Where Johnson sets out to pile on the evidence, cross-examining people and events throughout American history like a skilled lawyer—attempting of course, to exonerate his client but through an earnest attempt to show a jury every side of the incident—Zinn works his angle like a ninth grader. Packed with evidence, and even sharp commentary, his chapters still boil down to variations on a 1619 Project-like formula.
Indians were hospitable; white men were scoundrels, and all about money.
Slaves were oppressed; white men oppressed them.
Women, minorities, and wage laborers were all oppressed; white men oppressed them.
Four legs good; two legs bad.
To his credit, but in a blunted attempt to pad his own agenda, Zinn calls out the fact that historians self-select what’s important them:
“The historian’s distortion is more technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.”8
All kinds of interests except his, of course.
Having said that nobody can transcend their crass economic, racial, or political categories (does that sound familiar), he goes even further:
“One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide. But he does something else—he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world…”9
Having gone out of his way to say this, Zinn stumbles right off the starting block.
A few paragraphs later, he mentions that the Aztecs and Mayans killed ritually and even built an economy and civilization by enslaving other tribes—but then, of course, he moves right on to what’s more important to him, the ‘total cruelty’ of the Spaniards in nauseating detail.
Without even realizing it, he does exactly what he accuses other historians of doing. He mentions the atrocities—tribal warfare (without mentioning that large swaths of North America were riven with it), enslavement, conquest—but then moves on to the groundwork, his seven-hundred-page sentencing of the American experiment for unique, never-before-seen sins.
Fair enough—it’s a book about the American People.
But preening about what other historians shouldn’t do, and then doing it himself right off the starting block is a little rich. Par for the course as far as left-wing ideologues go. Standards applied to others rarely apply to their own pet project.
Following the Slant
All this begs a question—and to be fair, it’s the same one we should frequently ask about Johnson, given his clear, conservative-Christian bias. How honest and openminded is someone with one slant or another, Zinn’s slant, or Paul Johnson’s likely to be?
When it comes to the historian’s messy task: striving for a comprehensive, but necessarily incomplete account of complex, often tragic events through mixed narratives and conflicting accounts—what wisdom will someone like Zinn bring to the table?
What understanding of flawed, selfishly motivated but nonetheless striving people, (and not the people as Marx would have it) confined to a harder time and place, will he go about his work?
Furthermore, and in a question Black Lives Matter and its acolytes have already answered in no uncertain terms—with what generosity will someone like Zinn approach a tragic, all-around-brutal, patently unfair and unequal past?
Dare I say we already know?
In contrast, and almost inadvertently, Johnson’s tragic bias finds him calling out evil everywhere, with no ideological agenda, while also seeing and praising what’s good, true, and remarkable, in a kind of overarching bulwark. Thinking the way he does—that is, wisely—leaves little susceptibility to ideological cant, and makes the Marxist’s (or on the other side, the blood and soil Fascist’s) incessant pleas for cosmic justice, retribution, and unbridled power sound exactly like what they are.
Adolescent whining.
To the extent that Johnson’s ‘ideological interest’ means peeling back the layers on history’s remarkable things—namely the liberty, opportunity, well-being, achievements and failures of ordinary people who reflect God’s image—it’s a generous, forgiving posture. Reading Johnson, you brush up against an inquisitorial, skeptical, but above all even-handed mind; the kind that runs circles around anyone, left or right, shilling for an political-ideological solution to timeless problems.
A Lens Worth Looking Through
Bias, especially among those who write the history books, is a serious liability.
In scorching Zinn, but defending Johnson, conservative bias, and all, it probably sounds like I’ve twisted my argument into a pretzel. In a way, I have… but before I’m through, let me sprinkle a little salt on it.
In book after book, and with the hints of a Catholic-Christian worldview that’s palpable but not overpowering, Johnson shows us the right kind of historical bias—the kind that a truthful documenter of humans, human history, human achievements, human shortcomings, and complex, swirling events comprising all of those things should really have.
One grounded in the fear of God10, which brings wisdom, and the acknowledgement that Jesus of Nazareth correctly, deeply, knew what was in a man.11
But above all, a bias that tends toward fascination—astonishment over all that’s happened and especially the good, remarkable, Providential things that shouldn’t have happened, but somehow did.
Bombastic as he is, Johnson wears his jersey in the right ways, for the right reasons, and in broad support of those who need him to—ordinary, humdrum, people crafted in the image of God. In particular, those at the mercy of grand utopian schemes for their own good, from inflation to energy-starving policies intended to save the planet. The ones who, as he reminds us in Modern Times and again in Intellectuals, all too often, become putty in some ideologue’s hands, and then numbers in a mind-numbing body count.
Unlike so many in his profession, Johnson remembers that the United States and its first amendment, for all their imperfections and with the grievous omission of slaves brought over from Africa, were brought about to protect ordinary, hard-working, freely worshipping people from those (tyrannical monarchs, religious powerbrokers, corrupt civil magistrates) who would crush and control them.
As different parts of our country splinter and separate, and with opportunists clambering to overturn its laws and traditions for their turn with the ring of power, we ignore this at our own peril.
Johnson’s lens for the world and its history, like his splendid prose and vigorous writing, is something all serious readers, (left or right, believing or not) should warm up to.
Or at least sample, once in their reading lives.
Paul Johnson, ‘Creators’ Harper Perennial. Pages 55-66
Paul Johnson, ‘Modern Times’ Harper Collins. Page 703
Paul Johnson, ‘Intellectuals’ Harper Perennial. Page 73
Paul Johnson, ‘A History of the American People’ Harper Perennial. Page 906
Paul Johnson, ‘Intellectuals’ Harper Perennial. Page 122
Paul Johnson, ‘A History of the American People’ Harper Perennial. Pages 3 and 4
Howard Zinn, ‘A People’s History of the United States’ Page 1
Howard Zinn, ‘A People’s History of the United States’ Page 8
Howard Zinn, ‘A People’s History of the United States’ Page 8
Proverbs, Chapter One
John, Chapter Two, verses Twenty-Three to Twenty-Five
Really enjoyed reading this, Curt. It’s had the unfortunate result of adding copious tomes to my already swollen “read before you die” list. Thanks a lot.