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DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE URL: 0 2 2009 112309 6/01 c:/C|RC/DataDue.p65-p.15 ARNOLD LUNN AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR By Scott Wayne Joyner AN ABSTRACT OF A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History 2001 Professor Gordon Stewart ABSTRACT ARNOLD LUNN AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR By Scott Wayne Joyner Scholarship on foreign intellectual participation in the Spanish Civil War has centered largely on those who supported the Spanish Republic. This study, instead, examines Arnold Lunn, a right wing, Catholic, British intellectual who supported the Nationalists. It combines Lunn’s own voluminous writings with historical and literary material to examine Lunn’s participation in the war, and to place him within his historical and contemporary contexts. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank Professor Gordon Stewart for suggesting Arnold Lunn as a topic interesting to both of us. I must also thank him for his understated but effective criticism and guidance. Professors David Loromer and William Schoenl were gracious enough to serve on my committee: I thank them for their valuable guidance. I owe a great deal to Professor David Ortiz of the University of Arizona for his direction of my Spanish Civil War readings and for answering numerous questions along the way. Professor Christopher Celenza proved a valuable sounding board about the academic world in general and suggested a couple of books that were helpful indeed. iii Preface This thesis represents something of a compromise. When I was casting about for a thesis subject, Professor Gordon Stewart suggested something about Arnold Lunn. Dr. Stewart’s interest in Lunn centers on his (Lunn’s) mountaineering and skiing activities and the light these would shed on the connection between sport, travel and imperialism. This was honestly outside of my field of interest, but in reviewing Lunn’s books I noted that he was a lesser player in the 20‘h-century English Catholic intellectual revival, a field which I study. Thus we struck a compromise: Arnold Lunn, but as a Catholic intellectual rather than a sportsman. Even so, this was a broad topic. Lunn was an inveterate partisan of his beliefs, carrying on the fight for well over fifty years. But, after his conversion to the Catholic faith in 1933, his world-view gelled into a permanent shape. Looking around for a convenient central topic on which to hang Lunn’s various opinions, I was struck by his partisanship during the Spanish Civil War. Here was a subject which brought together all of Lunn’s major views. The war has proven a very convenient rack on which to hang his major ideas. This thesis has two main goals in relation to Lunn himself. First, it is intended to be a summary of the ideas and beliefs that drove his intellectual life from the Edwardian Age until his death in 1974. As far as I have been able to discover, it is the first scholarship on Lunn. Secondly, this thesis is concerned with how Lunn saw the Spanish Civil War and with the way that this reflected his beliefs as a whole. As such, it does not claim specialist knowledge of that war, beyond that garnered in the reading of a dozen books on the subject. I was guided in the choice of those books by iv Dr. David Ortiz of the University of Arizona. He was instrumental in educating me in the subject; any deficiencies in that knowledge are entirely my fault. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 LUNN AND HIS INTEREST IN SPAIN. MONARCHY AND DEMOCRACY CHAPTER 2 LUNN AS AN ENGLISH CATHOLIC CONVERT CHAPTER 3 DISTRIBUTISM: LUNN’S ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVE TO COMMUNISM CHAPTER 4 LUNN AND COMMUNISM CHAPTER 5 LUNN THE ROMANTIC CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY vi iv 24 46 59 72 79 83 Introduction: Why Lunn Matters If it is true that history is written by the winners, it is also true that they must include those whom they defeated. After all, without James 11, even a Whig historian would find it difficult to cover Parliament, to say nothing of William III, with glory. The victor needs the vanquished to write effective history. This has often meant that historians have bypassed third parties in historical conflicts. That is, there are many, many volumes about the Glorious Revolution and its participants, but works on English republicans during the reigns of James II and William HI are comparatively few and have only recently engaged the attention of scholars. Even more rare would be scholarship on those who supported James II for anachronistic motives such as the desire to return England to a pre-Magna Charta constitution.I There is some justification for the lack of coverage of fringe parties. Not every crank in history deserves book-length consideration. Many hardly merit a footnote. But it sometimes happens that popular, fully-formed and historically significant movements are overlooked because they were neither winner nor loser in the final analysis. This is partially true even today, in the age of recovery of lost voices. As others have pointed out, not only has history been kinder to those who sided with Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War, it has also been more interested in them.2 This tendency, though understandable, leaves a great deal unstudied. Franco had numerous supporters whose degree of fervor ranged from ' I doubt that such people existed. But the parallel with Lunn would be apt. 2 For an consideration of this, see the introduction to Sheelagh M. Ellwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era, (London, MacMillan Press, 1987) pp. 1-3. warm approval to reluctant toleration. This thesis will study one supporter of Nationalist Spain, Arnold Lunn and his motives. It will also place him into the greater historical context in which be operated. Lunn merits attention because he is representative of a significant religious and intellectual movement that flourished in the first half of the 20th century. This movement was a literate counter-assault against that broad, difficult to define mood and mode of thought called modernity. Modernity has proven so hard to define that it will be best here to avoid the task and instead to illustrate briefly what Lunn and his peers put in opposition to it. Then one can reasonably infer, by a method akin to medieval ‘negative theology’, what modernity was, or at least what Lunn took it to be. Most importantly, Lunn called for a return to religion, specifically to the Catholic faith. This was most important because religion informed everything else. Religion led to right morality, which led to an equitable economic system that avoided the centralizing pitfalls of both socialism and Iaissez-faire capitalism. Religion also gave life and decency to European culture, which had flowed like nourishing blood throughout all Christendom until that cultural shipwreck, the Renaissance, wrenched art from the hands of the whole community, priest and king, lord and peasant, and placed it in the elitist hands of a new plutocracy. Lunn also advocated a new socio-economic constitution. It called for a massive return to the countryside and the village, where people would become free- holders, farming for subsistence and some profit, or craftsmen banded together in guilds, each owning some share in the means of production. In the cities that remained, targeted taxation would ensure that the family-owned shop would be the rule, the mammoth franchise store the exception. The goal of Lunn’s economic system was to put ownership, and thus power, into as many hands as possible as a means of abolishing wage-slavery. In terms of political constitution the picture was less clear. Some of Lunn’s peers, and perhaps Lunn himself (it is difficult to say), wanted to see the return of a king, or other figure of strong central authority, who could act as the people’s counter-balance to the excessive power which capitalism had put into the hands of the very few. Others called for a republic. Still others advocated a sort of confederation which hearkened back to the supposedly medieval system of ‘local patriotism’ in which the local units would join loosely under an English king. The common thread in these systems is the determination not to give power to a narrow ruling class. Lunn and his peers deeply disliked most of the innovations in art that the 20th century had witnessed. They longed for a return to the heroic, the romantic and the colorful as an antidote to modern cynicism and alienation. GK. Chesterton wrote A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. Science announced nonentity and art admired decay; The world was old and ended: but we were young and gay.3 Chesterton’s reference to science was typical of the movement as a whole. He, Lunn and the rest believed that dogmatic scientific materialism, typified by the Victorian Thomas Huxley, but enduring in modern times through the likes of HG. 3 GK. Chesterton, “To Edmund Clerihew Bentley,” Collected Poems of GK. Chesterton, (New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1980) p. 103. Wells, was vulnerable at two levels. First, its attempts to subject God and things spiritual to scientific observation were misguided, God being transcendent, unthinkably outside the material universe. Second, 20th century science was, thanks to Einstein and Heisenburg, in the uncomfortable position of admitting that the universe was not, at the quantum level, as absolutely ordered and predictable as previously, and sometimes shrilly, asserted. This left plenty of room for a reasonably ordered universe in which God could still intervene without violating the laws of nature. Thus we have a group of intellectuals that attacked the modern world on its own grounds, employing a sophisticated and encompassing critique and positing a fully formed view of society to replace modernity. This alone makes the ZOm-century Catholic intellectual revival worthy of study. This is all the more so because the movement clearly spoke to people. No one knows how many of those who read Belloc and Lunn were actually willing to leave London for a Sussex farm, or to welcome a powerful king and a return to Catholicism, but it is clear that these writers said something that people wanted to hear. Chesterton and Belloc each wrote over one hundred books, and articles and essays in the thousands. 4 What is more to the point, they found publishers willing to print their work for over forty years. They were also constantly on call for lecture tours and as guest lecturers at universities.5 All this indicates that they had a constant and lucrative audience, which presumably means they said something that a significant number of people wanted to hear. Which makes them worthy of historical scholarship. ‘ 4 Chesterton wrote a weekly column for the London Illustrated News from 1905 to 1936. This was in addition to numerous other such undertakings and the weekly journal which be edited and wrote for. The same holds true for Lunn. Though the quality of his thought and writing is inferior to that of his famous peers, Lunn found an audience as well. (This fact, incidentally, speaks to the power of the message and its historical import.) Lunn wrote and published over forty books and hundreds of magazine articles from the early years of the 20th century until his death in 1974. Lunn, too, appeared on the lecture circuit and was guest lecturer at Notre Dame University (Indiana) and Fordham University. In his old age, Lunn became the sometime Grand Old Man at William F. Buckley’s National Review. This ability to sustain an audience, throughout the century, on both sides of the Atlantic, surely indicates the resonance of his message for many of his contemporaries. 5 Chesterton was at least twice considered for a chair in literature at British universities. Lunn and His Interest in Spain. Monarchy and Democracy. Lunn’s particular interest in the Spanish Civil War was due in part to his friendship, begun in 1.931, with a cousin of Alfonso XIII, the exiled Spanish king. But even without this friendship, Lunn’s personality and upbringing almost certainly would have driven him to join the verbal fray over the war. This being so, a short biographical sketch of Lunn is in order. Biographical Sketch Lunn was born on April 18, 1888 in Madras, India, where his father, Henry Lunn, was a Methodist missionary until ill health forced him to return to England. Henry Lunn was an earnest and principled Christian, embracing Methodism as a branch of the Church of England, which in turn was attached to the Universal Church, which included Roman Catholicism. Arnold Lunn often said that his father was the only Methodist lay preacher to have been confirmed in the Church of England.1 Henry Lunn was also a convinced and lifelong liberal of the Gladstone mold. He participated actively in the great issues of the day. Arnold inherited his father’s habit of intense interest in current events. Both felt morally compelled to take part in those events. Henry Lunn owned a travel agency and several hotels in Switzerland. Arnold Lunn helped his father in the business. This was the beginning of Arnold’s lifelong love of Switzerland, where he was an avid skier and mountaineer. Sport skiing was perhaps the source of Lunn’s greatest fame. He is widely considered the father of the . Sport, which he practiced well into his seventies. He invented the slalom race and founded several famous competitions and clubs. Lunn was educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. He began writing at Harrow and was published soon thereafter. Books, articles and public debates became the second source of Lunn’s fame. He wrote works on mountaineering, skiing and polemical issues. The latter are the concern of this thesis. After Lunn converted to the Catholic Church in 1933 be promoted that cause with his wonted earnestness. The rest of his professional life was taken up with his duties in the world of skiing and with pro-Catholic, anti-Communist campaigning. He was knighted in 1952 for services to British skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations. Twice married, with three children, Lunn died in 1974. Lunn’s Tours of Wartime Spain Lunn twice toured Nationalist-held territory during the Spanish Civil War. His first visit, in 1936, was undertaken at the behest of Sir Arthur Bryant, a leading member of Britain’s Conservative Party. Bryant, anxious to present the Nationalist case, asked Lunn to visit the war zones and afterwards to write a book which would be distributed to all members of the conservative National Book Club and to all Conservative M.P.s.2 The resulting book was Spanish Rehearsal. Lunn’s cicerone on his 1937 journey was Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera. He was a nobleman (Conde de Alba y Yettes) and a retired Army officer who had fought in the Spanish-Moroccan War. His job with the Nationalists was to oversee the travels of foreign correspondents. The section following this one shows Lunn impressed by the Spanish royal family. Aguilera had a similar impact. Throughout several days of visiting the front with Aguilera, Lunn came to view the veteran I Arnold Lunn, Come What May, (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940) p.13. 2 Arnold Lunn, Memory to Memory, (London, Hollis and Carter, 1956) p. 141. warrior in a glowing light. Aguilera was the correspondent’s friend. “Every Press Correspondent whom I met spoke in the highest terms of Aguilera. Everybody knew that his sympathies were enlisted on the side of the journalist attempting to get a story, and that he would pull what wires could be pulled on their behalf.”3 Aguilera was also a scholar and a dedicated family man. His 3000-volume library in Madrid had been burned; his mother and sister were stuck in Republican Madrid, as well.4 Within sight of Madrid, Aguilera put binoculars to his eyes, “’Just ten minutes in a car from here, just ten minutes. . .’” Aguilera said to Lunn. Lunn wrote, “And I knew he was not thinking of the three thousand annotated books, or the M88. on which he ’95 had worked for seven years. Thus, Lunn found in Aguilera the warrior nobleman, a sympathetic figure. Others saw Aguilera differently. The following lengthy passage from Paul Preston’s biography of Franco is cited to illustrate just how differently. Press liaison in the north was put in the hands of the notorious Captain Aguilera. .. a polo-playing ex-cavalryman, mainly on the grounds of his manic bigotry... Aguilera did more harm than good by outrageous and eminently quotable remarks to journalists... On the grounds that the Spanish masses were “like animals”, he told the foreign newspapennen that “We’ve got to kill and kill and kill.” He boasted to them of shooting six of his labourers on the day the Civil War broke out “Pour encourager les autres.” He regularly explained to anyone who would listen that the fundamental cause of the Spanish Civil War was “the introduction of modern drainage: prior to this, the riff-raff had been killed by various useful diseases; now they survived and, of course, were above themselves.” “Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in their infancy... when the war is over, we should destroy the sewers. The perfect birth control for Spain is the birth control God intended us to have. Sewers are a luxury to be : Arnold Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1937) p. 19. 5 Ibid. p. 45. Ibid. p. 50. reserved for those who deserve them, the leaders of Spain, not the slave stock.”6 Lunn’s Aguilera is not remotely similar to the man portrayed above. The closest comparison is a passage in which Lunn made Aguilera sound rather snobbish. Speaking of an insolent man encountered on the road, Aguilera said to Lunn, “That chap was atypical Iberian. You know your Don Quixote don’t you? Well, Quixote is the conquering F ranco-Norman type, tall, fair, blue eyes, and so on. Sancho Panza, on the other hand, is a sturdy, thick-set Iberian type. There was nothing wrong with the Sancho Panzas until the Reds got hold of them. But they’ll never produce leaders.”7 It is a relief to report that Lunn wrote in response, “Perhaps not, but the undisputed ”8 But still, the gap between rule of the Franco-Norman stock is a thing of the past. Lunn’s Aguilera and Preston’s is so great as to demand explanation. It is possible that Aguilera held his tongue around Lunn in an attempt to curry good press from the famous English Catholic writer. This would mean that Aguilera acted differently around Lunn than around other journalists. One wonders just how successful at holding his tongue a dashing, fighting, opinionated nobleman could be. This is especially true of a man who uttered, in the presence of reporters, sentences like those which Preston quoted. It is also possible that Lunn excised from his reports Aguilera’s more offensive comments. It was not in Lunn’s character to do such a thing consciously, but maybe he romanticized Aguilera and his cause to such an extent as to forget, or rather modify, what Aguilera really said. This would fit a pattern to be established in this thesis: Lunn was a romantic. Especially, he romanticized the character of those :Paul Preston, Franco, (New York, Basic Books, 1994) pp. 190-1. Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 38. of royal blood. It would not be stretching things too far to postulate that Aguilera (who though not royal, was a nobleman, the Spanish equivalent of an earl) fired Lunn’s mind in a similar fashion. Lunn’s Royal Spanish Friends Lunn’s second visit to Spain during the Civil War was as a guest of members of the Spanish royal family, and as such is covered in the following section. The immediate cause of Lunn’s intense interest in the Spanish Civil War was his friendship with the Infante Alfonso d’Orleans Bourbon, cousin to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. The infante, his wife and their three sons had accompanied the king to Miirren, Switzerland. The king had gone to Switzerland after he had “suspended the exercise of royal power”9 when the 1931 municipal elections showed an overwhelming republican majority. Thus by the time the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, Lunn had known members of the Spanish royal family for five years. They made quite an impression on him. One of the contentions of this thesis is that Lunn was, regardless of his frequent, rather Victorian insistence on the absolute primacy of reason, really quite romantic. It is also apparent that Lunn had a romanticized image of his royal friends which may have added to his ardor for the Nationalist cause. This regard for royalty also may have been warmed by his ambivalent attitude toward democracy, which he often referred to as “King Demos.” This chapter will therefore explore Lunn’s image — 8 Ibid. p. 38. 10 of his royal friends, his attitude toward monarchy in general and, finally, his beliefs about democracy. It will simultaneously put him into contemporary context on these issues. Lunn had warm feelings for, and a high opinion of, the infante“), his wife (the infanta), and their three sons, Alvaro, Alonso and Ataulfo. His second visit to Spain during the war (193 8) was spent largely with the infante and his sons at the Nationalist air force headquarters at Epila. The infante (also Duke of Galliera) gave him lodgings at the ducal palace where his family lived.” The infante and his family impressed Lunn deeply. His chapter on his 1938 visit is largely a catalog of the brave and fine things they did. It should be said, by way of not making Lunn look ridiculous, that there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the tales or to believe that Lunn’s royal friends were anything other than dedicated and sincere in their actions. But the central place Lunn gives to those actions, as represented by the amount of space he gives them in his war reminiscences, is telling. In Come What May, Lunn recalled the royal bravery on the “perilous journey” out of Spain after the king stepped aside. The king’s aged mother was included among the brave.12 Next Lunn told of the skiing prowess of the infante’s sons, who placed second as a team in the Parsenn Derby, attended by the “best Alpine runners.” On another occasion Alonso trounced a man who had been exceptionally rude to a Swedish beauty at a New Year’s Eve dance.” _¥ 9 He did not abdicate, but rather lefi the issue in abeyance. “0 Because both the king and the infante shared a common first name, each will be referred to by his title. I” Lunn, Come What May, p. 335. .32 Ibid. p. 336. Ibid. p. 337. ll Lunn then told of the infante’s work for Henry Ford at a Detroit factory, some time after leaving Spain in 1931. Ford had insisted that the cousin of the King of Spain start at the bottom like everybody else. He labored six months in a factory before working his way up to a position as a commercial traveler.14 During the war, the infante and his sons were in the Nationalist air force. Father worked at headquarters; his three sons were bomber pilots. Alonso died in his first month as a pilot”, and Lunn’s Spanish Rehearsal is dedicated to him who died “in a battle which is ours no less than theirs.”l6 The infanta was also active and courageous. She organized relief for the poor and ill in a town which was subject to daily bombardment.l7 She objected mightily when those benefiting from her noblesse oblige, even “Reds”, were interfered with. . “I do object to people being arrested when I am feeding them.”18 This list of the virtues of Spanish royalty as recalled by Lunn has been necessary to illustrate the light in which he saw them. Even more telling is the story with which Lunn followed his catalog of royal doings. Immediately after a description of the infanta’s silent daily anxiety about her combatant sons, Lunn wrote, A few months later I met at Dr. Buchman’s Interlaken “house party” the wife of a rich financier who had joined the Oxford Group. “I will give you an example,” she said to my wife, “of how the groups have changed me. The other day I was rude to my butler. Before I came under the 3 Ibid. p. 338. Ibid. pp. 338-339. i: Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, frontispiece. rs Lunn, Come What May, p. 340. Ibid. p. 343. 12 influence of the groups I should have done my best to forget the incident. As it was, I sent for the butler and forced myself to apologise to him. I felt the nails of the Cross in my hands.” When my wife repeated to me this astonishing remark, I had a sudden memory of Good Friday and of Epila. There are closer approximations to the experience of Calvary than apologising to butlers.19 This is an effective story on its own and even more so coming from Lunn. First, he put it at the end of five pages of praise for the infante and his family, obviously intending to make a contrast. Second, the silly woman who apologized to her butler is the wife of a rich financier. Those few whom capitalism had made quite wealthy were the particular betes noires of the socio-economic theory that Lunn advocated.20 The juxtaposition of an insipid rich woman comparing herself to Christ against an embattled Spanish infanta whose men risked their lives daily surely indicates Lunn’s opinion of both sorts. Finally, Lunn’s equation of Good Friday with the events at Epila evinces his decidedly Catholic frame of mind” and the gravity he assigned to the war. Lunn on Monarchy and Feudalism In 1959, Lunn wrote an essay called “The Monarchy”22 which reflected his views on what kings were and should be. Though of a later period than his Spanish Civil War writings, it reflects a consistent attitude about royalty, and as such confirms its rooted-mess. Lunn wrote of Prince Albert’s (later King George VI) insistence on actively serving in the Navy during the First World War regardless of ill health. ‘ 2:Ibid. p. 341. :See Chapter Three for a full discussion of this. :See Chapter Two for a full discussion of this 22Arnold Lunn, “The Monarchy,’ The Month, (1959: June) pp. 363- 372. 13 The front line of battle is the appropriate place for those of royal Birth, as the King and his son instinctively realised, for both accepted as self-evident the basic axiom of feudalism, noblesse oblige. F eudalism with all its defects retained a great principle which democracy has lost, that principle that great privileges implied- at least in time of war— great sacrifices. The feudal chief led his followers into battle, and ran risks which are not faced by those who merely lead their supporters to the ballot boxes.23 Lunn revealed something of himself here. In addition to his praise of kings and of the heroic aspects of feudalism, Lunn made a little jab at democracy. This should be kept in mind for the final portion of this chapter. Chapter Three of this thesis, which deals with Lunn’s economic beliefs, includes some discussion of the strong part a good king could play in the proper economic setting. A king, with some real executive power, could be an effective foil against a greedy plutocracy (perhaps typified by the woman who felt the nails of the cross in her hands?) Lunn saw in King George VI a man who might have been happy in such a role. He had inherited this concept from medieval Christendom which combined the sacramental conception of monarchy with the tradition of the accessibility of the sovereign to the poorest of his subjects... The King fully realised that Social Justice demanded a more equitable division of the country’s wealth. . .24 In another reference to the pitfalls of democracy, Lunn praised the monarchy for lifting the king above the wonies of electoral politics, “For he is not influenced by the wishful thinking which leads politicians to believe what the electorate wants to x :j Ibid. p. 364. Ibid. p. 369. 14 believe... Kings do not have to offer themselves for re-election and are therefore free to warn ”25 All of this does not necessarily add up to advocacy for a powerful monarchy, but it does indicate at least some sympathy with the idea. In this Lunn was not alone. One of Lunn’s most formative influences, Hilaire Belloc, from whom Lunn inherited the socio-economic view called distributism, was a sometime advocate of monarchy. Originally a radical MP within the Liberal party, Belloc grew disgusted with what he saw as the entirely disproportionate power of the rich in British society.26 Belloc saw a remedy for this. The increase in the personal power of the monarch is the one real alternative present before the English state today to the conduct of affairs by organized wealth. To the end of increasing the personal power of the king should be directed the efforts of those who fear mo7st what may be called, in one aspect, plutocracy, in another aspect, servitude.27 Belloc’s calls for monarchy reflected in part his disillusionment with democracy. This was a disenchantment not with democracy per se, but rather with the way it had been co—opted in Britain. Four years in Parliament had convinced Belloc that the party system in Britain was but a show meant to mask the common interests and intimate family relations of the front benchers of both parties. A real democracy, representing the interests of the people, was desirable, but Parliament as it then stood was a sham.28 25 “Ibid. p. 370. :See Chapter Three for a detailed discussion of Belloc’ 5 views, which largely became Lunn’ s. 27.Qtd in John P. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc. Edwardian Radical, (Indianapolis, Liberty Press, 1978) p. 311. 28 This is the thesis of Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, The Party System, (London, S. Swifl, 191 1), 15 Belloc was also not alone in his calls for monarchy based on the problems of democracy. Across the Atlantic, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) praised authority and monarchy and decried democracy with a vigor equal to Belloc’s. He did so to a wide, divided audience, and he did so throughout his long public life. Mencken even sided with the Kaiser and Hitler in the World Wars, at least until the United States became involved.29 Mencken’s motives were far removed from Belloc’s. Mencken opposed democracy per se. A biographer summarizes Mencken’s views, Democracy was “charming” in the abstract but impractical in fact: why should superior men be governed by their inferiors, by “peasants,” by the “eternal mob”? Democracy was “based upon propositions that are palpably not true,” primarily that “the lowly shall inherit the earth.” It was “government by orgy, almost by orgasm,” and worse still, it was a close cousin of Puritanism. Both were based on jealousy of one’s betters.3O Clearly this is quite a different critique of democracy than Belloc’s. Belloc said democracy was not being allowed to work; Mencken said, thank God. This goes to illustrate a wider point: democracy was clearly under siege in the first half of the 20th century. This thesis has quoted Belloc and Mencken because they were public men arguing their ideas in a public forum, much like Arnold Lunn. But the attack on democracy was broad based, going far beyond the newspaper and the debating society. In Dark Continent, Mark Mazower argues that the very essence of the 20’h century’s conflicts was the ideological battle among liberal democracy, fascism and communism. This may be self-evident, but Mazower argues that this was the case ‘ 29 Fred Hobson, Mencken, (New York, Random House, 1994), pp. 133-139, 433-434. 30 . Ibid. p. 265. -16 because democracy, despite its claim to be the voice of the people, had been slow to address certain deep-seated problems in industrial society. “Like it or not, both fascism and communism involved real efforts to tackle the problems of mass politics, of industrialization and social order; liberal democracy did not always have all the answers.”3 I If fascism and communism challenged democracy, so did the political and economic system which Lunn came to embrace. Since this system is fully discussed in Chapter Three, it only remains for this chapter to address Lunn’s particular beliefs about democracy. Lunn and Democracy Lunn’s ambivalent attitude toward democracy had three components. The first was reflected in Lunn’s juxtaposition of elected leaders (and the intellectuals who aided their machinations) with their battle-ready feudal counterparts. “Feudalism. .. gave its chief rewards to men who led their troops in battle and were ready for the supreme sacrifice, whereas Democracy tends to select its leaders among those who are skilful speakers and who possess a talent for manipulating public opinion.”32 This attitude also displayed Lunn’s lifelong assertion that intellectuals, especially those of the left wing, are rarely inclined to action, especially necessary, warlike action. In particular, Labour and Liberal politicians had rendered both World Wars inevitable. “If Colonel Blimp had been in control the Kaiser would have been under no illusions about England’s participation. Again, it was the notorious Oxford Union pledge not to fight for King and country which convinced the dictators that 3 ' Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe 's Twentieth Century, (New York, Knopf, 1999) p. xii. 32 Lunn, Come What May, p. 48. 17 England would not fight.”33 Conservative politicians were not quite as softened by democracy. “The feudal tradition still lingers in the Conservative Party, and it was not wholly an accident that of the eleven members of Parliament killed in the Second World War, ten were conservatives. Left-wing intellectuals... have in general more affinity with ballot men than with bullet men. . .(and) dislike and secretly envy the ”34 This statement makes it obvious that Lunn did not courage of the bullet men. necessarily dislike democracy in itself, but rather in the way it had manifested itself in Britain. This, in turn, reflects the complexity of Lunn’s view of democracy, which will be explored directly after consideration of the two remaining components of Lunn’s ambivalence toward democracy. For Lunn, the quality of democratic leadership was directly tied to the tendency to mob rule. AS the above quotations Show, Lunn thought that undue worry about the future election results weakened politicians’ resolve; he praised kings for not having to worry about such things. This is indicative of a standard objection to democracy, the fear of the tyranny of the majority. Such mob rule could manifest itself in tragic ways. To illustrate the point, Lunn compared the Versailles Treaty with the 1815 Congress of Vienna. The one chance of a reasonable Peace Treaty depended on Mr. Lloyd George’s power to resist “democratic control...” The “Hang the Kaiser election” was the first-fruit of king Demos’s intrusion into the discussion of Peace terms... the aristocrats who met at (the 1815 Congress of) Vienna belonged to an international society whose standards and whose outlook differed only in accidentals. .. and it was men of their tradition that were 33 Arnold Lunn, “British Reactions to the Spanish Civil War,” The Month, (Vol. 30, no. 2, Sept. 1963) . I 50, Arnold Lunn, “A Most Passionate War,” The Month, (Vol. 26, n. 2, Aug. 1961) p. 82. Also see Lunn) Memory to Memory, p. 80 for the endurance of the feudal tradition into the Korean War. 18 responsible for a wise and humane peace... but the (Versailles) Treaty influenced by “democratic control” gave Europe only twenty years of uneasy armistice.35 The third component in Lunn’s complicated critique of democracy was the false egalitarianism it engendered. This leveling was false because humans were naturally hierarchical. It is, perhaps, regrettable that man is a hierarchical animal, with an invincible tendency to create distinctions... (but) the only result of abolishing an aristocracy of birth is to substitute an aristocracy of money, or, as in Russia, of quasi-hereditary bureaucrats.36 This passage is pregnant with import. First, there is Lunn’s assertion that humans are innately prone to the formation of rank and class. This helped to shape his view of democracy, but, as will be seen in the conclusion of this chapter, Lunn believed it possible to reconcile hierarchy and democracy. However, he thought it impossible to square communism with hierarchical human nature. Second, it is significant that Lunn noted that aristocracy would be replaced by a hierarchy of wealth. This is the thesis expounded by the economic system that Lunn adopted after his conversion to Catholicism. Tied to this is the third point of significance, which is actually a magnification of the first. For Lunn, if humans naturally form into ranks and classes, then communism is doomed to failure and will only result in a new elite of quasi-hereditary bureaucrats. One final thought will again illustrate the complexity of Lunn’s estimation of democracy while also leading this chapter to its conclusions. Lunn wrote that “pure ‘ 35 Lunn, Come What May, pp. 149-151. 19 democracy does not provide a congenial climate for art... In an egalitarian society where everybody has enough for the necessities of life, nobody has enough for luxuries and art seldom flourishes. Art naturally takes refuge in aristocratic societies. . 3’37 The final chapter of this thesis deals with Lunn as a romantic, and as such explores his ideas about art. Lunn clearly valued artistic expression and wrote with some discernment about painting and literature. This leads one to ask how much this affected his ideas about democracy, given his belief that the two were mutually exclusive. This question is rendered more difficult by the fact that Lunn’s central criticism of Renaissance art, which be directly owed to John Ruskin, was that it (Renaissance art) was elitist and undemocratic. It is difficult to draw consistent conclusions about the sort of constitution that - Lunn would have preferred, but this is because he was less than consistent on the issue himself. Perhaps one could say that Lunn was a reluctant democrat with yeamings for what he thought were the better qualities of feudalism. It is certain that Lunn did hold such yeamings; the many quotations in this chapter, including those on his royal Spanish friends, illustrate this fact. There might have been a touch of sentiment or romance in Lunn’s estimation of those born to rule. Lunn was aware of this possibility, at least for others. He wrote, Much of the affection which citizens feel for their sovereign is merely an extended form of egoism. Old ladies who snuffle into their handkerchiefs as a king or queen is borne to the grave are really crying over their own dead youth, for in some way they link together their own lives with the lives of j: Ibid. pp. 70-71. Ibid. p. 400. 20 their rulers. And when their ruler passes they feel that something of them passes too.38 One would be mistaken, however, to attribute all of Lunn’s regard for feudal forms to romanticism. Lunn clearly followed Belloc in his approach to modern politics; this is amply reflected in Lunn’s complete conversion to Belloc’s economic ideals following his conversion to Catholicism. It is also reflected in their similar calls for a more active and powerful monarch in their time. It is likely that Lunn hoped for a synthesis of democracy and feudalism. In a consideration of Switzerland, which he believed had “as good a political system as any in Europe today,”39 Lunn wrote, “Political democracy is not inconsistent with a profound if unforrnulated faith in the virtue of aristocratic principle.”40 He went on to praise the Swiss. I have no faith in that servile democracy which hands over the destinies of the people to “planners” and other varieties of the urbanised ideologists, with no roots in the soil and no respect for tradition. But I have great faith in the future of the free democracy of Switzerland. That democracy is based on peasant proprietorship and on small ownership. . .4] Perhaps Lunn was not attempting to attain a perfect constitution. “I find it difficult to understand how any man of adult intelligence can accept with uncritical ”42 enthusiasm any of the existing varieties... of government. One can read this as an ’8 Ibid. p. 236. 39 Ibid. p. 400. Chapter Three reveals Lunn’s belief that the Swiss had the most perfect economic system, as well. Ibid. p. 385. “ Ibid. p. 400. ‘2 Ibid. p. 151. 21 admission that Lunn had not yet found a way to balance the rights of the people with humanity’s inevitable tendency toward hierarchy and class. Lunn continued to think about the problem and came to some sort of a solution after the Spanish Civil War. It is useful to introduce Lunn’s later constitutional conclusion here because it seems to be a concrete version of the shadowy thing that Lunn was grasping for in the 19305. In 1968, Lunn wrote something of the constitutional value of an upper house. I should indeed be slightly less anxious about entrustng the government of my country exclusively to hereditary aristocrats than exclusively to intellectuals... On the international issues of outstanding importance before the second world war (sic) the majority of the intelligentsia were wrong, whereas the majority of the House of Lords were right... If the House of Lords had been in control, both wars might have been avoided. . .43 (It is to be noted with embarrassment that Lunn wrote of the need for an exclusive upper house in response to the contemporary racial problems in the United States and Rhodesia.) Even earlier, during World War Two, Lunn, seemed to have come upon a satisfactory constitutional formula for Britain. Appealing to his Catholic intellectual heritage, Lunn wrote St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, after analysing the evils of absolute monarchy, oligarchy and absolute democracy, proves that, whether absolute power is vested in an individual or in the people, the result is the sme- tyranny. The only escape from tyranny is a mixed regime, of balancing powers, a regime in which king, oligarchy and people all share in the government of the realm. I enjoy reminding my American Catholic fiiends ’3 Arnold Lunn, Unkilled for So Long, (London, Allen and Unwin, 1968) p.143. In 1956 (Memory to Memory, p. 128), Lunn contended that the absence of a kaiser who could have arrested Hitler had prolonged the war by a year. 22 that St. Thomas’ ideal regime has far more in common with the King, Lords and Commons of Great Britain than with republican government."4 After reading this passage, one would like to know Lunn’s opinion of the emasculation of the House of Lords in 1911 by Lloyd George and Lord Asquith. In any case, by 1942 Lunn had developed a complex model of a desirable constitution. Perhaps one would be allowed to smile at the fact that he settled on something very much like what he had lived under since birth. As this thesis will Show, Lunn backed Franco in the Spanish Civil War for a variety of reasons. This chapter has shown that Lunn’s interest in the war was intensified by his friendship with Spanish royalty. It has also demonstrated the part played by his romantic appraisal of these friends, especially when combined with his doubts about egalitarian democracy. While Chapter Two contends that Lunn’s Catholic faith was the main motivation for his support of the Nationalists, his views on authority, heroism and mob rule clearly informed the degree of such support. ’4 Arnold Lunn, And the Floods Came, (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1942) pp. 179-80. 23 Lunn as an English Catholic Convert Lunn believed that, all other things aside, no Christian, and certainly no Catholic, could have any real doubt about which side to support in the Spanish Civil War. He wrote, “the only effective choice was between an authoritarian government which would protect and an authoritarian government which would persecute Christianity.”l It should be noted that he wrote this in London at the height of the Blitz. His disapproval of authoritarianism might have been illuminated by hindsight. As shall be seen, Lunn’s contemporary assessment of Spanish Nationalist authoritarianism was, in current academic parlance, more ‘textured.’ The following chapter will examine how Lunn’s faith influenced his thinking on the Spanish Civil War, with special emphasis on his position as an English convert to Catholicism. It is a truism that Catholic converts are more active and fervent than their cradle Catholic peers. Whether this is generally true or not, it certainly was in Arnold Lunn’s case. After his conversion in 1933, Lunn wrote book after book defending Catholicism and offering various ‘proofs’ of its authenticity. He contributed innumerable articles to Catholic journals on both sides of the Atlantic. He frequently participated in public debates about the Catholic Church and was also a popular guest lecturer at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana) Like Saul of Tarsus, Arnold Lunn had once hectored the church he came to embrace.2 Unlike St. Paul, though, the post- . conversion Arnold Lunn’s writings and thought were far more derivative than ' Arnold Lunn, Come What May, (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940), p. 129. 2 Before his conversion, Lunn had been as assertive in what may be called his dogmatic agnosticism as he later was in his defense of the Catholic Faith. His Roman Converts (Freeport, New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1966) was a waspish critique of eminent British Catholic converts from Cardinal Newman to G.K. Chesterton. 24 original. Part of his inheritance came from the particular history of the English Catholic Church. The Church Lunn Joined- from Elizabethan Persecution to Victorian Toleration The English Catholic Church to which Lunn converted had, historically speaking, but recently found itself on steady footing. The vigorous Elizabethan persecution had been followed by a policy of exclusion less intense but still sanctioned by the State. This had gradually softened, with occasional violent relapses, into unofficial toleration, and finally legal recognition in Catholic Relief Acts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. British Catholics achieved certain legal rights, but popular ‘anti-Popery’ continued long after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. One scholar of Victorian Britain refers to “this wide and weighty phenomenon: the ubiquitous persistence through a century allegedly of secularization, education, propriety, and class conflict, of a tight-knit cluster of avowedly religious beliefs and justifiable feelings springing from ignorance, credulity and prurience, and matched only by ‘Queen and Country’ for its power to unite peer and peasant.”3 Even in 1906 Edwardian England, Hilaire Belloc, standing for Parliament, was advised by professionals to downplay his Catholicism. Instead he stunned a crowd of prospective constituents, saying, “Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell 3 G.F.A. Best, “Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain,” Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson, (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), p. 115. 25 these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He spared me the indignity of being your representative.”4 Mid- and late-Victorian ‘no-Popery’ existed alongside an English Catholic Church reorganized and growing in numbers. The long-dormant hierarchy had been re-established under Cardinal Wiseman in 1850. Wiseman issued a triumphalist pastoral to announce the fact. The announcement had been foreseen and acted upon. Lord John Russell pushed through the Ecclesiastical Titles Act to prevent the renewed Catholic hierarchy from assuming ancient titles (Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance) used by the Church of England since the Reformation. Protestant and official England, including the Times, greeted the re-establishment by accusing Wiseman and his co-religionists of colluding with a foreign power to re-impose the Roman yoke.5 The hierarchy had been re-established in part to accommodate a church that had been growing in numbers (largely because of Irish labor immigration) since the late 18m century.6 In a four year period (1847-1851) at mid-century, the Catholic population in England tripled from 284,000 to 758,000.7 A church militantly reorganized and resurgent in numbers coincided with the advent of an intellectual leavening. John Henry Newman was but the best known and most influential of a series of intellectuals who converted to Rome in connection with the Oxford Movement between 1833 and 1845. A lesser-known but formative group of young men from Cambridge had converted somewhat before the Oxford ’ A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, (New York, Atheneum, 1984), p. 133. The people of South Salford, perhaps illustrating the practical limits of English anti-Catholicism, seated Belloc as their MP. Derek Holmes, More Roman Than Rome, (London, Burns and Oates, 1978), pp. 75-77. 6 Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558-1829, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) p. 140. 7 Walter Amstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid- Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982) p. 50. 26 Movement. This group relied heavily on an appraisal of art, architecture, liturgy and society that criticized both Renaissance and modern forms and advocated a renewal of medievalist values in the disciplines.8 While immediately overshadowed by Newman’s brilliance, this medievalist strand would be taken up again later by figures such as Ronald Knox, Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill and GK. Chesterton. As will be seen, it played a major part in the Catholic intellectual circle with which Lunn associated himself. This Oxbridge group of young, erudite and oft-times witty young converts encountered an Old Catholic and immigrant dominated church whose literature and clergy were somewhat less than intellectually impressive.9 Conscious of the suspicion even among the sympathetic that Catholicism was a haven for superstition and obscurantism, British Catholic intellectuals (whose number was largely drawn from converts) set out to write academic works whose scholarly respectability would be admitted by non-Catholic intellectuals. '0 The Intellectual Crisis in English Catholicism- Liberalism, Suppression and Flowering Unfortunately for the British Catholic Church, this period of growing numbers, triumphalist reorganization and confident, ambitious intellectual assertion was marred by a serious divergence of opinion within the Church Universal. Broadly speaking, the divisive issues were papal infallibility, the pope’s temporal power and the place of modern scientific method and criticism within Catholic scholarship. 8 Three standouts from the Cambridge group were Kenelm Digby, George Spencer and Ambrose Phillipps; Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997) pp. 43-51. 9 . Ibid., p. 3. 27 The history of the “intellectual crisis in English Catholicism”” , which played between 1863 and 1907, is complicated by shifting alliances and expectations and by interventions from and appeals to Rome. For the sake of clarity, a somewhat simplified version of events will be presented. Situation before the Crisis” Since the Elizabethan persecution, the English Catholic Church had relied on certain noble families for its existence. These recusant families had provided financial assistance both to poor Catholics attached to their estates and to dispossessed and harassed clergy. This aid was largely, but not solely, financial. The Old Catholic families, as they came to be called, also provided places for the (sometimes-secret) celebration of Mass, occasional schools for the Catholic poor and varying levels of political protection, varying according to location and timeframe. Perhaps not surprisingly, this reliance on a small number of wealthy patrons gradually impressed a certain character on the English Catholic Church. Recusant families often had to walk a very straight line to avoid provoking popular or governmental resentment. In order not to provoke such resentment, particularly ‘Catholic’ hallmarks were kept to a minimum. Thus, there was usually no outward display of the fact that certain buildings were used for masses and other sacramental functions. Extravagant Marian devotions were avoided, as was obvious clerical distinction. Catholic priests wore unobtrusive clothing and were often referred to as ‘mister’ instead of ‘father.’ I0 - Ibid., p. 2. n William Schoenl, The intellectual crisis in English Catholicism: liberal Catholics, modernists, and the Vatican in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, (New York, Garland Pub., 1982) 28 This obscuring of the priesthood went further. Due to their low profile, often- troubled existence and low numbers, English Catholic priests did not occupy the same leading position in their communities as their brothers elsewhere did. Community leadership fell naturally to the sponsoring nobles; thus, the formation of Catholic communities run largely by the laity became a distinctive characteristic of English Catholicism. By tradition and expediency, Catholic intellectual activity was largely confined to apologetic works designed to answer point by point the standard English Protestant objections to Popery. Their tone was defensive and concerned with what were, after all, very old and well-wom issues. There was little or no attempt by Catholics lay or priestly to engage newly emerging intellectual trends. English Catholicism was largely rural, lay-centered, defensive in mood and dependent on Old Catholic largesse. Changing circumstances and new ideas would change all that. The growing number of Irish workers in England forced the Catholic Church there to shift its focus from rural to urban life. The rural Old Catholic families necessarily lost influence. This was all the more true because the move from country to city coincided with Cardinal Wiseman’s renewed hierarchy; priests and bishops re-assumed leadership roles in their communities. Additionally, Catholic social teaching was slowly moving away from the feudalistic noblesse oblige which motivated Old Catholic charity toward social justice ideals more in tune with an industrial age. Thus, Newman et al joined a church in flux. '2 This section is based on Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984) pp. 1-28; and Derek Hohnes, More Roman Than Rome, (London, Burns and Oates, 1978) pp. 19-25. 29 The Arguments of the Crisis These changes in the English Catholic Church went on against a background of debate in the Universal Church about papal temporal authority and infallibility and the place of modern scientific methods in Catholic scholarship. In its English setting this debate can be seen as a disagreement between two camps, Liberal and Ultramontane; Cardinal Newman is usually identified with the former, Cardinal Manning with the latter. The Liberal camp generally thought that the pope’s continued control over territories in central Italy was a source of scandal and corruption. They believed that any immediate loss of prestige and power attendant on the loss of papal lands would be offset by a corresponding rise in the Papacy’s moral authority. On the issue of papal infallibility the Liberals were split between a few who disagreed with the doctrine on principle and a much greater number who believed promulgation at that point in history would be inopportune. As mentioned, certain Catholic intellectuals (most of them converts) believed that Catholic scholarship, in order to be taken seriously, needed to address and sometimes embrace modern scientific methods. Thus Cardinal Newman said, “I will either go the whole hog with Darwin, or, dispensing with time and history altogether, hold, not only the theory of distinct species, but that also of the creation of the fossil- bearing rocks.”l3 For another example, Scripture scholars should use philological methods to determine authorship of Biblical books, rather than uncritically accepting ‘ '3 Qtd. in J .M. Cameron, “Newman and the Ernpiricist Tradition,” The Rediscovery of Newman: an OXford Symposium, eds. John Coulson and AM. Allchin, (London, Sheed & Ward, 1967), p. 90. 3O traditional ascription. Intellectuals should also draw some inspiration from the German scholarly pursuit of the ‘historical’ Jesus. Finally, Liberal Catholics had some association with the Old Catholic tradition of a peculiarly ‘English’ approach to the sacraments and less reliance on Rome for guidance. The Ultrarnontanes were different, of course. The name means ‘beyond the mountains’, meaning they looked beyond the Alps to Rome for guidance. They advocated a thoroughly Italianate church in England, doing away with hangovers from the Old Catholic age. They believed a sovereign, defensible papal state was needed to guarantee the independence of the church. They also subscribed wholeheartedly to the doctrine of papal infallibility. An influential group of Ultrarnontanes, led by Manning, hoped for a very broad application of the idea, encompassing the most mundane of papal utterances.l4 They generally opposed the scientific approaches to sacred subjects that many Liberals advocated. On social teaching they also diverged from the Liberals. The latter supported the combination of Old Catholic noblesse oblige and standard Liberal laissez-faire economics. The Ultramontanes generally believed aid to the poor should be a matter of social justice rather than charity, that is, assistance should be viewed as the social duty of the well off, to which the poor were entitled. They also believed, especially after the promulgation of Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on social justice, Rerum Novarum, that equitable social policy should set a middle course between the twin demons of socialism and unregulated capitalism. " Hohnes, p. 145. 31 Ultrarnontanes Triumphant. Official Suppression and an Unforeseen Intellectual Renaissance. Of course by 1870 the pope had lost his temporal power, but that was a result of events beyond the control of the Catholic Church.15 Throughout the church overall, though, the Ultrarnontane position carried the day. The First Vatican Council (1869-70) promulgated the doctrine of papal infallibility, though in much narrower terms than Manning had wanted. Between Pius D(’s anti-modemist Syllabus of Errors (1864) and Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Catholic attempts to engage the modern world on its own terms were discouraged, harried and quashed. It would take the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) to realize Liberal Catholic aspirations. This dampening policy from Rome did not mean that intellectual endeavor died out among English Catholics. Rather than damming the flow of such, the anti- modemist papal actions changed its course. '6 Discouraged from accommodation with the modern world, Catholic intellectual energy bubbled up in an unexpectedly lively confrontation with that world. A literate, confident challenge to the advent of the modern issued from the pens of such Catholics as GK. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy Day, Hilaire Belloc and Thomas Merton.17 Most in this group were converts and all moved vigorously within the field of action framed (negatively) by Pascendi. They presented the Catholic case in the fields of economics, literature, poetry (aesthetics generally), history and social justice. Especially, they posited a '5 The 1861 unification of the Italian peninsula under Cavour and Garibaldi had deprived the pope of the Papal States. '6 Schoenl, p. 232. 32 detailed alternative to industrialized modernity, capitalistic and communist. After his conversion in 1933, Arnold Lunn joined their ranks. How Lunn Fits Lunn found the English Catholic Church and intelligentsia in an unexpected and short-lived bloom. Invigorated and reorganized, its energy was concentrated into a limited but potent stream by Roman discipline. Arnold Lunn worked very much in this tradition, inheriting a great deal from Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) and GK. Chesterton (1874-1936) in particular”, who themselves had been informed by the interaction of Victorian England and the Catholic Church.19 As his work shows, Lunn never evinced any discomfort with the proscribed world of action for Catholic intellectuals. Perhaps this was in part because he thought, along with his intellectual forbears, that materialist criticisms were irrelevant, being based on what may be called scientific leaps of faith. It would be a mistake, though, to see Lunn as purely the child of English Catholicism. Patrick Allitt has argued that when looking at converts one sees continuities as well as breaks. “The Catholic Church saw itself as embattled against the rest of the world, and tried to recruit its converts as polemicists, but they, more often than not, retained heavy intellectual debts to their Protestant past and could not '7 Two of these are American. Patrick Allitt traces the close connections between American and English Catholic intellectuals at this time. 8Lunn’ s intellectual debt to these two can hardly be exaggerated. It 15 almost literally true to say that he hardly wrote a book, or even a chapter, which did not contain a reference to, or quotation from, one or the other. On religion Lunn wrote, “their influence was one of the principal factors in my conversion.” Come What May, p. 75. '9 Belloc had studied at Newman’s Oratorio. He had also met with Cardinal Manning on several occasions. As Belloc recalled, Manning “never admitted the possibility of compromise between Catholic and non-Catholic society. He perceived the necessary conflict and gloried in it.” Qtd. in Wilson, p. 24. 33 ”20 While Lunn derived a great repudiate their personal and intellectual inheritance. deal from Chesterton, Belloc et al, he did not swallow their beliefs whole. For example, he specifically distanced himself from the anti-Semitism of both and from Belloc’s equation, “Europe is the Faith; the Faith is EurOpe.” 2‘ This chapter’s subsections ‘Lunn and the Scientific Method’ and ‘Lunn’s Apologetics’ explore other areas in which Lunn added to his Catholic peers’ usual ideas and arguments. It has been noted that Victorian and even Edwardian England retained a tinge, and sometimes more than a tinge, of anti-Catholicism, as illustrated in Belloc’s challenge to the electors. Lunn was aware of this and even indulged in a sort of rarified form himself at one point. In Roman Converts (1924), Lunn attacked the Catholic position as intellectually untenable”, while granting the church credit for cultural achievements. The book was superior in tone and attributed the conversions of its eminent English subj ects23 to various perversions of personality. For Lunn, Chesterton’s personality compelled him to go against the spirit of the age. “Chesterton is a born heresiarch. He is orthodox by accident, a heretic by temperament.”24 It is probable that Lunn did not know about Chesterton’s 20-year attempt to justify, to himself, staying in the Church of England; in any case, Lunn put Chesterton’s conversion down to contrariness and a willfully convoluted view of history. 2° Allitt, pp. 3.4. 2' Arnold Lunn, “Memories of Hilaire Belloc,” The Critic, (17:1, 1958: Aug/Sept.) p. 7. By this, Belloc meant that all that was good in European culture derived from the Catholic Church, and that the Church itself was bound to Europe especially. ‘2 This is a damnation he later reserves for communists. A future biographer will find fruitful work in the ways in which his conversion changed some of Lunn’s positions radically. Roman Converts is a good starting point. J .H. Newman, H.E. Manning, George Tyrrell, Ronald Knox and Chesterton. 2’ Arnold Lumr, Roman Converts, (Freeport, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press, 1966) p. 227. 34 Of course Lunn’s opinions changed. Perhaps an insightful reader could have seen it coming. Two of his targets, Chesterton and Ronald Knox, reacted cheerily. Chesterton wrote what Lunn later called, “a fiiendly, discerning and effective reply.”25 Ronald Knox wrote to Lunn, “Thank you for the compliment, for it is I suppose a compliment of sorts like the crocodile pursuing Captain Hook.”26 As Lunn put it, “. . .the more far-seeing Catholic critics realized, as was indeed obvious from ”27 the preface, that I was greatly attracted to Catholicism. Lunn’s Catholic Challenge to his Protestant Peers In 1933, Lunn converted and soon began defending the church he had earlier found indefensible. During the Spanish Civil War he challengedthe unctuous silence of British Christians in the face of anti-clerical violence in Spain. Fittingly for an English Catholic, Lunn described the destruction of churches and the murder of priests and religious in familiar terms, invoking the history of Catholic persecution in Elizabethan England. The Catholic pulse still beats in the arteries of Madrid. Red Spain has her Campions, for Red Spain is witnessing a revival of Elizabethan drama, the drama of the missionary priests. The newspaper which two shabby down-at- heel proletarians seem to be sharing with avid interest may be an improvised confessional, behind which a collarless priest gives absolution to a coatless penitent" Th.e manure of communism has fertilized the stricken fields of Spainz,8 and from that bloody soil has sprung the glorious flower of heroic faith.28 Lunn took English Christians to task for their lukewarm reaction to this replay of the ‘Elizabethan drama.’ He even assailed his father on the point. 2’ 26Arnold Lunn, “The Road to Rome, ” Dublin Review (No. 387 Oct/Nov/Dec, 1933) p. 186. SW 1n Arnold Lunn, “Ronald Knox: Some Memories,” The Month (n.s.: 18:5 Nov. 1957) p. 263. :Arnold Lunn, “The Road to Rome,” p 186. 28Arnold Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1937) p. 51. 35 My father, though he remained a Methodist lay preacher, had been confirmed in the Church of England, and had a great sympathy with the Anglo-Catholics. He claimed to be a member of the Catholic Church. “You tell me you are a Catholic” I said to him in the early days of the Spanish War, “and you resent the intolerance of those who maintain that Catholicism is confined to Catholics in communion with Rome; but I hope you aren’t one of those who concentrate on the currants in the Catholic cake, who use our prayers, borrow our ritual and ask the intercession of our saints, but refuse to share in their sufferings. The Church in Spain has fallen among thieves. Are you going to pass by on the other side? On your theory it is your priests who are being murdered and your churches which are being burnt. What are you going to do about it?”29 Anglicanism did not fare any better in Lunn’s eyes. Lunn was not necessarily being over-sensitive on the matter. In his book, Britain and the Spanish Civil War, Torn Buchanan gives both anecdotal and scholarly evidence to Anglican indifference to the suffering Catholics in Spain. By way of anecdote, he quotes a letter George Orwell wrote after his time in Spain. This afternoon Eileen and I had a visit from the vicar, who doesn’t approve at all of our having been on the Government side. Of course we had to own up that it was true about the burning of the churches, but he cheered up a lot on hearing that they were only Roman Catholic churches.30 Buchanan’s scholarship provides details for another point of annoyance for Lunn. A deputation of Anglican deans had toured Spain at the expense of the Republican government, to which they were sympathetic. While admitting that churches had been closed and partially destroyed by the Republicans, they “placed 29 Arnold Lunn, Come What May, (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940) pp. 128-129. 3° Quoted in Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War, (Cambridge, Cambridge up, 1997) 36 the blame for the carnage on the Spanish Church for its neglect of social justice.”3 1 Lunn compared his England’s response to that of England during the French Revolution. I remembered that though England may, as Aguilera insists, have invariably sympathized with revolution on the Continent, the England of to-day compares in one respect very badly with the England of the eighteenth century. The Whigs sympathized with the French Revolution, but the persecution of the French priesthood in France provoked widespread sympathy in Protestant England. England was then as anti-Catholic as England is to-day, but no Anglican deans traveled round France at the expense of Robespierre. No less than 8000 priests sought the hospitality of Protestant England, and did not seek in vain.32 Lunn and the Cambridge Medievalists As mentioned early on in this chapter, there was a small but influential movement of Cambridge students that had converted to the Catholic faith before the better-known Oxford Movement began. The celebrity and efficacy of Newman’s challenge to the Church of England overshadowed the Cambridge group but did not drive out its influence. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Catholic intellectuals would present Catholic, medievalist alternatives to the modern world in many fields. Hilaire Belloc saw a Britain dominated by an industrialist, cosmopolitan plutocracy and by a sham two-party system that masked the familial relations and common material interests of the parties’ leading members. He (sometimes) advocated a renewed and powerful monarchy (along with a general return to the Catholic faith) to act as a foil to Britain’s oppressors.33 GK Chesterton argued for 3' Ibid. p. 172. 32 Arnold Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 41. My italics. 3’ For a clear and concise treatment of Belloc’s political and historical views, see Victor Feske, From Belloc to Churchill: private scholars, public culture and the crisis of British liberalism, 1900-1939. 37 the return of the ‘local patriotism’ of the Middle Ages, by which he meant a loyalty to and pride in one’s village or neighborhood. This was intended as an answer to the personal isolation that modern life supposedly entailed. While these programs might be seen as crankish suggestions from men born in the Victorian Age, the medievalist ideal was also presented in fully formed critiques of modern economic systems and modern aesthetics. Arnold Lunn took up these critiques in earnest. His economic views will be addressed in two chapters, those on distributism and communism. His aesthetic ideas will be touched on in the chapter on communism (which he saw as a ‘revolt against beauty’) and more fully addressed in the chapter on Lunn as a romantic. Lunn’s Apologetics Lunn’s approach to apologetics was similar to that of his peers. Allitt sums up their hallmarks. This generation of converts. .. was equally important for Catholic developments on both sides of the Atlantic. They gave poise and assurance to Catholic literature and presented Catholicism as an attractive religious option for the growing literate middle classes... Trained in the classics at English public schools, they knew how to blend intellectual refinement, accessibility, and rhetorical drama. Living in the shadow of Pascendi, they avoided theology and, as the historian Adrian Hastings says, “accepted the current Roman Catholic position in doctrine and practice as almost unquestionably right in all its details?“ Lunn was educated at Harrow and Oxford. As the many quotations from Lunn in this thesis testify, Lunn’s writing style was intelligent but not scholarly. As such it was ready-made for the “growing, literate middle classes.” When writing 3’ Allitt, page 161. 38 about those things he thought evil, Lunn certainly strove for “rhetorical drama,” though the veteran reader of his works may doubt his success in this matter. Finally, Lunn’s post-conversion writings are essentially devoid of theological questions. In this he was like his post-Pascendi peers who accepted, “the current Roman Catholic position in doctrine and practice as almost unquestionably right in all its details.” Allitt maintains that this generation of convert intellectuals wrote, “partly for a Catholic audience to be sure, but more for their Protestant and skeptical contemporaries. . .”35 This is partially true of Lunn. Seeing most Christians, regardless of denomination, as his natural allies”, Lunn wrote attacks on secular materialism designed to challenge its adherents while simultaneously fortifying Christians for the battle. There is not in the foreseeable future the remotest prospect of Rome abandoning her basic claims or of Protestants accepting those claims... but a militant alliance of those Christians who are unintimidated by the dominant secularist fashion might well produce a real religious revival.37 He avoided venues that would merely mean ‘preaching to the choir,’ preferring instead to debate communists and secularists. “A speaker who is anxious to make converts will inevitably prefer debates, which attract those who disagree with him, to lectures, which are mainly attended by those who do not need converting. . .”38 3’ Allitt, p. 2. 3° Here he certainly diverges from Belloc. In Belloc’s eyes, the Reformation was a disaster, the derailing of European culture and unity. His Ballade of the Heresiarchs begins, “Heretics all, whoever you be, In Tarbes or Nirnes or over the sea, You never shall have good words from me, Caritas non conturbat me.” :78 Arnold Lunn, Unkilled For So Long, (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968) pp. 118-119. Ibid. p. 12. 39 Lunn and the Scientific Method A close reading of William Schoenl’s The Intellectual Crisis in English Catholicism reveals that one of the main points of divergence between l9‘h-century Liberal and Ultramontane Catholics was the relation of God to the material world- Is God immanent or transcendent? That is, does God exist in the material universe or outside of it? Clearly, this is an important question for Catholics. If God exists in the L material universe, then theology would have an experimental, observational component. Thus, science eventually ought to be able to discern materially the Godhead present in the Eucharistic Host. Conversely, if God transcends the material, any such attempt is absurd and doomed to failure. In their desire to accommodate the modern mind as much as possible, Liberals leaned toward an immanent God. Ultrarnontanes answered that the Catholic Church was a revelatory faith, based on acceptance of transcendent mysteries. With the promulgation of Pascendi, the latter position became, or rather remained, the Catholic norm. The transcendent position also became the basis for a spirited defense against dogmatic scientific arguments against the Catholic faith. Thus, Chesterton attacked material science for making claims outside of its purview. When a certain writer rejected the doctrine of original sin because science could find no physical proof of the Fall of Man, Chesterton countered, Did he expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her?39 Man’s primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows... Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word, more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as the sense of 39 G.K. Chesterton, “Science and Religion,” All Things Considered, (New York, John Lane, 1908) p. 189. 40 human sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is something that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something that one cannot help finding.40 ‘ Lunn and his peers took the criticism even further. If science had no bearing on theology, it was also argued that scientific methodology itself was often unduly regarded and influential. Thus, Belloc often attacked scientific historical scholarship for overemphasizing accuracy in detail at the expense of comprehension of the ‘big picture.’ A.N. Wilson quotes a typical example, Belloc goes on to say that the illusion of ‘accuracy’ does not stop historians with no judgement from leaping to the most absurd generalizations. “A cultivated knowledge of the main causes is neglected: precise dates and conventional spelling count for more than a right appreciation of the past, while misprints and slips of the pen are the only things thought to be errors. It is excusable to call Napoleon a second-rate bungler: but it is not excusable to print Monday for Sunday as the day of Waterloo?“ Lunn wrote many similar attacks on the epistemology of materialism. His debt to Belloc and Chesterton is apparent. But he also brought a new dimension to the argument. In addition to the standard line of reasoning (God lies outside of nature and is therefore immune from its laws), Lunn employed arguments borrowed from science itself. In “Science and the Supernatural”, an article written for The English Review, Lunn assailed the old Victorian scientific dogrnatism that drew its conclusions from a Newtonian view of physics. Relativity and quantum mechanics had destroyed the old certitude, Lunn argued. He quoted Sir Arthur Eddington42 on the unpredictability of movement at the atomic level, ‘° Ibid. pp. 191-192. " Wilson, p. 353. 4 An eminent scientist (1882-1944) and writer of popular works on science. 41 “The eclipse in 1899 is as safe as the balance of a life-insurance company; the next quantum jump of an atom is as uncertain as your life and mine... Statistical laws relate to the behavior of crowds and depend on the fact that although the behavior of each individual may be extremely uncertain, average results can be predicted with confidence. Much of the apparent uniformity of nature is a uniformity of averages?”3 Lunn then considered the “well-attested modern miracle’”" in which a Belgian worker’s mangled right leg was instantaneously healed during a visit to a shrine. Lunn argued that both modern physics and transcendent faith offered explanations: the former could argue a rare coincidence of quantum leaps; the latter could argue the intervention of divine will into the natural world. In such a case, Lunn wrote, the believer in miracles “only claims to have opted for the more probable hypothesis... You ask me to believe that this is merely an Eddingtonian coincidence, and I ask you to quote some precedent in recorded history for a coincidence against which the chances are so fantastically enormous?”5 Lunn’s approach to modern science bears the preceding lengthy explanation for many reasons. Lunn’s tone reflected the sort of confident, assertive brand of apologetics that, since Pascendi, had replaced the Old Catholic defensive posture. At the same time, Lunn’s self-assured utilization of quantum theory went beyond the ‘argument from transcendence’ normally employed by his peers. It also reflected Lunn’s intention not merely to preach to the choir but also to those who disagreed with him. Finally, Lunn’s criticism of communism, which he saw as the driving force ’3 Arnold Lunn, “Science and the Supematural,” The English Review, (61, 1935: July/Dec.) p. 446. “ Ibid. p. 448. ‘5 Ibid. p. 447. 42 behind Republican Spain, was based in large part on what he saw as its unduly materialistic, pseudo-scientific worldview. Summary. Lunn and the Catholic Atmosphere. The purpose of this chapter has been twofold: to posit Lunn’s Catholicism as the primary reason for his support of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War; and to place Lunn within the context of post-Pascendi English Catholicism, especially as lived by convert intellectuals. Thus we find in Lunn an active intellectual convert, fully conscious of his church’s dark Elizabethan days and confidently engaging its contemporary opponents. Eschewing the sort of scientific and theological speculation that led to Pascendi, Lunn instead advocated medievalist ideals against his opponents in the fields of economics, politics and aesthetics. In doing so, he, along with Chesterton, Belloc and others, reflected the unexpected intellectual flowering that Pascendi had engendered. Lunn carried all of the characteristics and ideas mentioned above into his writings about the Spanish Civil War. To place Lunn fully in context, this chapter will close with a short consideration of his reaction to what must be called, for the lack of a more apt term, the Catholic atmosphere. As used here, the term means, first of all, Catholic ritual, especially the mass, and the comportment of Catholics during that ritual. In Catholic Converts, Patrick Allitt highlights typical problems for English converts to Catholicism, including discomfort with the High Mass and with their new co-religionists, who were often Irish laborers. Allitt quotes a biographer of George 43 Tyrrell, “he recoiled from ‘the dirt and tinsel, and flashy gew gaws’ in the Catholic chapels, from the ‘essential commonness’ of Romanism. . ”’6 Lunn had a similar, but mixed, experience. He was disappointed and uncomfortable with some aspects of the Catholic atmosphere. Allitt quotes Lunn on attending High Mass, “Even as a Catholic I still retain that queer prejudice inspired by the uneasy conviction that I am watching a spectacle rather than assisting in an act of worship?”7 Lunn also wrote, The difficulty is increased for the Catholic convert with an Anglican background because he has to learn a new devotional language. The first Catholic Prayer-Book which I opened gave me rather a shock. I contrasted it regretfully with the Anglican Prayer Book, in which Catholic prayers are rendered into noble English prose. It is a thousand pities that Newman was never encouraged to do for our generation what Cranmer did for our forefathers. 48 Thus Lunn experienced the discomfort that Allitt finds to be typical of English converts. But during the Spanish Civil War, Lunn came to appreciate some of the ‘common’ elements of Catholic atmosphere. He wrote of a church in Epila, Spain, “Inside the church there was the routine notice, which always makes me feel at home, inviting the faithful to refrain from spitting, as a mark of respect for the House of God.”49 Lunn contrasted this with his with his experiences at Anglican and Methodist services, ’6 Nicholas Sagovsky, Oh God ’s Side, qtd. in Allitt, p. 6. ‘7 Qtd. in Allitt, p. 201. ' ’8 Arnold Lunn, “The Road to Rome,” Dublin Review, (No. 387, Oct, Nov., Dec., 1933) p. 188. ’9 Lunn, Come What May, p. 349. 44 I went out into the April sunshine and I remembered Mattins (sic) in the days of my youth. Paterfamilias breathing decorously into his top hat while the vicar tuned in for his “Dearly Beloved.” A few nervous late-comers tiptoeing timidly to their pews. No rattles, no cautionary advice to the spitters, and no devout women kneeling with outstretched arms in the aisles. And I saw the Catholic Church as the natural home not only of those who feel no temptation to spit in their own drawing-rooms, but also of those who can with difficulty - be prevailed upon not to spit in church.50 5° Ibid. p. 353. 45 Distributism: Lunn’s Economic Alternative to Communism Lunn’s main reason for siding with the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War was his belief that the Republic was merely a front for communist forces bent on destroying the Catholic Church in Spain, along with much else. But Lunn also opposed communism, and thus, in his eyes, the Republic, because he advocated another economic system, distributism. This chapter will look at distributism, its origins and its privileged place in contemporary Catholic thinking. It will also examine Lunn’s particular advocacy of distributism. The roots of distributism can be found in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Promulgated in the pope’s name, it was widely rumored to have been written by Cardinal Manning.I It certainly reflected Ultramontane ideas of social justice, as opposed to Liberal Catholic advocacy of unrestricted, laissez-faire economics. As its title suggests, Rerurn Novarum addressed certain ‘new things’ in society, namely industrial capitalism, with its tendency to concentrate wealth into ever fewer hands, and socialism, with its abrogation of private property. Steering a middle course, Pope Leo condemned both systems. In their stead he proposed an economic system which would protect private property rights, which “every man has by nature”2 while ensuring just wages for laborers. This system could be brought about by cooperative action from church and state, employee and employer. In their separate capacities, the church would be moral arbiter, while the state would fulfill its natural role as guarantor of individual and social justice. ' See Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984) p. 288 for a discussion of the likelihood of Manning’s authorship. 46 Employers and employees would work together and would also form separate associations for the pursuit of just self-interest. In practical terms, Rerum Novarum called for employers to pay a wage “enough to support the wage-eamer in reasonable and frugal comfort.”3 In return, laborers should give an honest day’s work. Finally, private property should be widespread. “The law, therefore should favor private ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many people as possible to become owners.”4 Pope Leo’s encyclical had a great effect in intellectual circles Catholic and otherwise. In the early 20th century groups of Catholics attempted to bring Rerum Novarum to a political and economic fruition. Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton were instrumental in these efforts. The latter dedicated his journal, G.K. ’s Weekly, to advocacy of Distributism. The former wrote the seminal work on the subject, The Servile State, first published in 1912. The Servile State: Fount of Distributism Though largely forgotten today, Belloc’s book had a tremendous effect on Catholic and Liberal economic thinking in its day. Prominent guild socialist Maurice Reckitt recalled, “I cannot overstate the impact of this book upon my mind, and in this I was but symptomatic of thousands of others. .. That Belloc’s thesis contained enough truth to blow the New Liberalism sky-high I was convinced.”5 Among many others, Arnold Lunn became a fervent advocate of Belloc’s economic thought. 2 Pope Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum,” Seven Great Encyclicals, (Glen Rock, NJ, Paulist Press, 1963) p. 3. 3 Ibid. p. 22. ‘ Ibid. p. 22. 5 Qtd. in Victor Feske, From Belloc to Churchill: private scholars, public culture, and the crisis of British liberalism, [900-1939, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996) p. 37. 47 Modern scholars would squirm at Belloc’s conflation of feudalism and manorialism. Belloc did not particularly care about precision of definition as long as his general point was made vivid in the minds of his readers. Belloc’s Middle Ages were a time of widespread private property and the personal freedom that went with it. Unhistorical as this may be, it was the vision Belloc wanted to portray. Lunn’s conversion to distributism meant that he accepted Belloc’s economic vision. As such, Lunn’s definition and image of feudalism are idiosyncratic and not meant to correspond to any precise scholarly definition. The Servile State was a tour de force, a combination of historical survey and economic prescription. Belloc argued that the wealth of pagan Antiquity had been built on slavery.6 With the eclipse of empire and the advent of Christendom slavery slowly had died in Europe. This was not due to an active campaign on the part of the church, but rather to the fundamental incompatibility of slavery with Christianity’s message that all were equal in the eyes of the Lord. The subsequent feudal Christian society was still hierarchical, indeed in many ways more so, but the basic unit of labor was no longer the slave, but rather the small freeholder, owner of the means of production. In the case of manufacture, workers formed guilds for the communal ownership of more expensive means of production.7 For Belloc, capitalism had meant the accumulation of gross fortunes by a very few. Of course, in this he mirrored Marx. But Belloc’s chronology was somewhat different. Rather than seeing the advent of industrial machinery as the catalyst for capitalistic concentration of wealth into progressively fewer hands, Belloc saw the ° Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, (New York, Henry Holt, 1946) pp. 31-36. 7 Ibid. pp. 41-52. 48 ascendancy of capitalism and industrialization as two separate things. For Belloc, capitalism, “the ownership by a few of the springs of life,”8 was an accidental product of the Reformation. Henry VIII sacked the monasteries as a way of weakening the church while simultaneously buying the support of the nobles. But this was a self- perpetuating process, once the nobles began to demand more and more wealth in exchange for their cooperation. Elizabeth I inherited a system that forced her to deliver ever more money and power into the hands of the nobility. In the place of a powerfirl Crown disposing of revenues far greater than that of any subject, you had a Crown at its wit’s end for money, and dominated by subjects some of whom were its equals in wealth, and who could, especially through the actions of Parliament (which they now controlled), do much what they willed with the Government.9 The old medieval tradition of an independent executive in the form of a monarch, to whom the people could appeal in their need, faded away, replaced by a plutocracy. '0 As mentioned, industrialization and capitalism were not linked in Belloc’s vision. He argued that industrialization would have occurred in any case; it was an accident of history that capitalists, because of their huge wealth, were able to control the means of production in the industrial age. If the old system of widespread distribution of wealth had endured, industrial machinery would have been invested in by guilds and other cooperative efforts. In other words, it would have been owned communally.1 1 8 Ibid. p. 53. 9 Ibid. p. 66. '° Ibid. pp. 58-68. " Ibid. pp. 68-70. 49 In the event, capitalism had triumphed. But the triumph was as precarious for Belloc as it had been for Marx. Capitalism destabilized society. More and more people, deprived of ownership of the means of production, were constrained to work for the plutocrats, often at very low wages. The insecurity and anger which attended this circumstance destabilized society. The people naturally demanded redress?2 Enter socialism. Belloc was not concerned with socialism and capitalism as separate adversaries, but rather with how the one influenced the other. For Belloc, socialism gave the workers options, at least in the abstract. This initially tended to the further destabilization of capitalistic society. But in gradual response to the threat of socialism, the ruling plutocracy conceded certain guarantees of security to the wage earner, such as higher wages and a social security system. In exchange for the immediate loss of profit attendant upon making good such guarantees, the plutocrats stabilized society and achieved the defacto, and eventually the dejure, recognition of their status as the owning class. The new relation between employer and employee was scarcely distinguishable fi'om that of Antiquity, when the poor had submitted to slavery in exchange for economic security.13 This type of relation was, in fact, the servile state, which Belloc defined as, “that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor.”l4 '2 Ibid. pp. 80-82. '3 Ibid. pp. 121—143. " Ibid. p. 16. 50 Aims of Distributism Belloc saw three alternatives to unstable capitalism: socialism, the servile state, or a return to the medieval norm of widespread private property. 15 Perhaps reflecting Manning’s influence, he opted for the last. In this he was joined by G.K. Chesterton, whose journal, G.K.’s Weekly, was the primary pulpit for the Distributist League, “founded in conjunction with ‘G.K.’s Weekly’ for the restoration of liberty by the distribution of private property.”16 The League was, of course, founded to expound distributism and, in lesser part, to put it into practice. Some members grew their own food, some (notably in the Glasgow branch) started workshops and some did these things and more in newly founded rural communities.” It has been necessary to trace the history of distributism and its English manifestation, the Distributist League, in order to illustrate the economic context in which Lunn moved after his conversion. It now remains to describe just what the distributists wanted. The short answer is, to spread private property as widely as possible. This was practical and just: practical because it did away with the destabilization inherent in capitalism, just because nature itself endowed humans with the desire to own. As Chesterton said, they “believed that a man felt happier, more dignified and more like the image of God, when the hat he is wearing is his own hat; and not only his own '5 Ibid. pp. 97-101. '6 G.K. Chesterton, G.K. 's Weekly, A Sampler, ed. Lyle W. Dorsett, (Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1986) p. 253. '7 Maisie Ward, G.K. Chesterton, (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1944) p. 251. 51 hat, but his house, the ground he trod on... most of them felt that something was added to the dignity of men when they put on their own hats.”18 To achieve their goal, distributists offered a double strategy. First, individual members should deal as much as possible with small shops and farms, make or grow as much as practicable for themselves, and, for some, live in rural distributist communities. In short, live as distributists. Second, distributists should strive for enough political power to effect certain changes conducive to their goals: to reward with higher interest rates those with small saving accounts, to encourage small- holding farmers and craftsmen with tax abatements and to tax heavily large fortunes and business concerns. This reflects distributist concern not to confiscate private property from the rich outright.19 Belloc and the distributists’ vision of medieval society might seem a bit romanticized. If so, this would place it squarely in line with contemporary medievalist views. In Inventing the Middle Ages, Norman Cantor argued that Victorian scholarship on the Middle Ages had certain strengths and weaknesses. Among the strengths, l9‘h-century romanticism had managed to rescue a great deal of the spirit of the Middle Ages, overly ridiculed by Renaissance figures, but it had also oversimplified the picture, sometimes to the point of idealization. 20 It is possible that 20‘h-century distributists had made a similar mistake. According to Cantor, eminent 20’h-century medievalists had done so. Marc Bloch had “exulted in the autonomy of medieval peasant communities.” So had Henri Pirenne. But, Cantor asserted, Michael Moissey Postan’s research on medieval economy had exposed it as quite '8 Qtd. in AN. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, (New York, Atheneum, 1984) pp. 293-294. '9 John P. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, Edwardian Radical, (Indianapolis, Liberty Press) pp. 307-310. 52 vulnerable to Malthusian booms and busts. 2‘ In any case, many people in the 20‘h century, distributists and otherwise, looked back to the Middle Ages for economic alternatives to capitalism and socialism. After his conversion, Arnold Lunn was among them. Lunn’s Conversion to Distributism Lunn’s adoption of distributism represented at least as much of a conversion E as did his move to Roman Catholicism. In the chapter on G.K. Chesterton in Roman Converts, he mocked the romanticism of Chesterton’s economic theory, especially regarding workers and trade guilds. He wrote, i But the tyranny of the millionaire is giving way to the tyranny of the Trades Union, and I hope G.K.C. will be as ready in the future, as he has been in the past, to champion the victim of all oppression, even where the victim is an unromantic member of the middle-classes groaning under the despotism of the modern guilds.22 Lunn granted that industrial capitalism was not perfect. “Modern industrialism is, of course an easy target for the destructive critic. Its faults are obvious, and its success in raising the standard of life among the proletariat is easily ”23 overlooked. The prevailing tendency (is) to idealize the medieval guild... Lunn then criticized the monopolizing tendencies of the guilds. But a system of protection and monopoly, of which the Guild was the supreme expression, is only of value in an age of universal insecurity, and is mischievous once trade becomes intricate and international. The Guilds soon :2 Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, (New York, William Morrow, 1991) pp. 27-30. Ibid. p. 394. 22: Arnold Lunn, Roman Converts, (Freeport, New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1966) p. 231. Ibid. p. 253. .53 lost their old virtues, and developed into privileged corporations in which membership tended to become hereditary.24 The exaltation of guilds was part of a larger trend.- “The Chestertonian Catholic, on the other hand, idealized the Guild because the Guild was one of the leading institutions of Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages.”25 This was a misguided view of the Middle Ages. “The fact is, of course, that the Catholic Church has always been consistently on the side of the rich and powerful... In so far as the Middle Ages were happy, they were happy in Spite of rather than because of their religion. . .”26 Obviously, Lunn’s conversion to distributist ideals called for explanation. None was forthcoming. This is puzzling indeed. Lunn wrote inexhaustibly, especially about himself and his opinions on everything from skiing to economics to ectoplasm. Almost every non-skiing book (though he often managed'to work religion into the mountains, as well) he wrote contained an account of his conversion to Catholicism. But a review of more than 150 magazine articles and forty books written by Lunn reveals not so much as a sentence of explanation of his newfound advocacy of distributism. Given Lunn’s penchant for detailed elucidation of his views, his habit of telling his reader “I hate communism for reasons x, y and z,” and his lifelong insistence on the intellectual self-deception involved in not having such reasoning behind one’s beliefs, it is difficult to understand his silence on this issue. Late in life Lunn wrote for William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine, a bastion of the purest laissez-faire economics. Lunn evinced no discomfort in writing for Buckley. In fact, they became close fiiends. Given the preceding facts, one would 2‘ Ibid. p. 254. 2‘ Ibid. p. 254. 54 like to surmise that perhaps Lunn was not strongly enough convinced of distributism to preach it loudly. But, as will shortly be seen, this was simply not the case. Lunn’s silence remains a mystery. Lunn’s support of distributism was based in part, like that of his predecessors in the movement, on certain ideas about the Middle Ages and economics. Lunn approvingly referred to Professor H.J. Laski’s idea that liberalism arose “as the result of a widespread desire to liberate the rich from the restrictions which the medieval Church imposed upon money-making.”27 Lunn saw in this the beginnings of plutocracy. In the Middle Ages the idea of acquiring wealth was limited by a body of moral rules imposed under the sanction of religious authority... (Beginning in the Reformation these rules) were evaded, criticised, abandoned, because it was felt they interfered with the exploitation of the means of production.28 Liberalism meant the monopolization of the means of production by a plutocracy. Socialism meant a similar domination by the state. Distributism was, an awkward word for a fine ideal. That property should be widely distributed is, of course, the ideal of all social reformers; but whereas the ideal of the Socialist is a state in which every citizen shall draw a good wage as the employee of a bureaucracy, and shall own a small car, the ideal of the Distributist is a state in which the ration of those who own their own land or their own small businesses to those who are the employees either of the state or of big business shall be as high as possible.29 2‘ Ibid. pp. 255-256. 27 Arnold Lunn, Come What May, (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940) p. 125. 28 Ibid. pp. 125-126. ’9 Ibid. p. 392. 55 Lunn saw at least some movement toward distributist ideals around the world. In 1937, he even looked across the Atlantic to the American president as at least a partial distributist. Roosevelt is often described as a progressive. On the contrary, he is a reactionary, reacting from the great heresy of economic Liberalism- the heresy that moral values must be subordinated to economic law. He is reacting to the medieval view that economics should be subordinate to human welfare.3O Perhaps uniquely in the distributist literature, Lunn cited Switzerland as a realized distributist state. “Switzerland is the finest example in the world of a Distributist state.”3 1 The Swiss accomplished this status by protecting and thus preserving the peasantry from the effects of free trade and by paying urban workers a relatively high wage. This guaranteed their satisfaction, much to the chagrin of any would-be socialists in Switzerland. Finally, “Switzerland has no great towns, and most of the evils of modern civilization are generated in the evil atmosphere of giant cities.”32 If Switzerland had achieved something like economic justice, there was a chance for Spain do to the same, if Franco won. Authoritarian regimes did not necessarily fare any worse in this arena than liberal democracies. In fact, they might do better. In Spain during the Civil War, Lunn got into a debate with Randolph Churchill about the subject. Lunn argued that workers in fascist Italy were better off than their English counterparts. 3° Arnold Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1937) The italics are mine. They are meant to clarify Lunn’s meaning. Lunn made a didactic point of using the verb ‘react’ with the correct prepositions. 3‘ Ibid. p. 392. 32 Ibid. p. 392. 56 Mussolini is the only dictator in Italy, but there are plenty of industrial dictators in England. In Italy the workman who is sacked has the right to appeal to a Labour Court on which both workmen and employers are represented, and I am told that the majority of these appeals are decided in favour of the workman. I am sure, however, that our great industrialists would be horrified by any attempt to introduce economic democracy in England.33 Spain had its problems, Lunn admitted. “Nobody denies that there were grave ”34 social evils in Spain... People at the top of Spanish society were to blame. “Selfishness and corruption in high places are the causes of most revolutions. . .”35 The forces behind Franco were fighting in part to create a new Spain. Carlists36 and Phalangistsz’7 broadly agree on a social policy which is sternly anti-capitalist, for the Nationalists are determined that in the new Spain the producer shall not be at the mercy of the banker... (This new policy) has already been translated into practice... in territory. . .under Nationalist control.38 Lunn backed this argument up with a detailed account of a labor court in Nationalist Spain similar to the one he described in Italy.39 Thus Lunn, a converted advocate of distributism, looked around the world and thought he saw at least some aspects of his beliefs being put into practice. It is notable that he saw this under both democratic (Switzerland, the USA) and authoritarian (Italy, Nationalist Spain) govermnents. Lunn’s writings at this period, 3’ Ibid. p. 25. 3‘ Ibid. p. 10. 3‘ Ibid. p. 40. 36 Disaffected monarchists supporting Franco. Carlists were distinguished from other Spanish monarchists by their belief that Don Carlos should have ascended the throne in 1833 instead of Isabella II. 37 Spanish Fascists 38 Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 153. 3’ Ibid. pp. 153-154. 57 including the portions quoted above, show him not necessarily averse to authoritarianism as such. As was seen in the Chapter One, Lunn certainly did not have the sort of mystical reverence for democracy, per se, that many others had, including Chesterton. But the Nazi onslaught in Europe appears to have tempered whatever feelings of toleration he might have had for authoritarian regimes. Thus Franco, in Lunn’s estimation, passed from being a frustrated liberal (l) in 193 740 to being a likely ally of Hitler in 1940."1 ‘° Ibid. p. 84 “ Lunn, Come What May, p. 455. 58 Lunn and Communism As the various chapters of this thesis show, Lunn’s partisanship in the Spanish Civil War was based on several factors, negative and positive. On the positive side, Lunn believed that feudalism, as typified in the aristocracy and the church, still had a part to play in the new Spain. Connected to this was another positive aspect. Lunn believed that a medievalist economic theory, distributism, offered the best, most equitable solution to the socio-economic problems of Spain. On a few occasions, Lunn evinced his expectation that Spain under Franco, composed of monarchist, militarist and falangist/populist factions, would move toward such a redress of grievances. But Lunn’s opposition to the Republic was also driven by one very strong negative factor, his opposition to communism. Lunn was an intractable enemy of communism, carrying on the battle until his death in 1974. Though his Catholic faith was the main determinant in his support of the Nationalists, it is safe to say that even without this factor, Lunn would have opposed any government that included or catered to communists. This chapter will explore the components of Lunn’s anti- communism, which was as detailed as it was unsophisticated. Conflation of Left Wing and Communist The first point to consider is Lunn’s equation of the Republican government with communism. Lunn discounted any real differentiation among the various factions of the Spanish Left. He argued that in the end, though socialists and others may not have known it, the communists, who took their orders from Moscow, called the shots. 59 Many Left Wing careerists who describe themselves as Socialists have no desire to destroy Capitalism. But the distinction between the sincere Socialist and the sincere Communist is artificial... and is maintained solely for tactical purposes. Both... desire the State ownership of all means of production, and the disappearance of Capitalism. .. (Their) immediate objective... is the establishment of State Socialism, and as the two parties are admittedly striving for the same objective, the Communist party, as such, could be destroyed, with little effect on the cause of Communism, so long as the Socialists continued to gain ground.l Thus Lunn claimed that socialism and communism were the same thing. It is also important to note, for use later in this chapter, that Lunn ascribed any confusion on this point to left-wing ‘tactics’, implying a central plan and controller, Moscow, E which had chosen such tactics. Also note the term ‘lefl wing careerist.’ This indicates Lunn’s conviction that many intellectuals on the Left were more self- serving than otherwise, especially since communism was logically indefensible. This, too, will be dealt with later in the chapter. Using such logic, Lunn was able to dismiss the Republican government out of hand as the dupe of Moscow. The February 1936 elections (the last before the Civil War, they remain hotly contested even today) had returned a majority for the Popular Front, composed of radicals, progressives, bourgeois Catalonians, socialists and communists. In short a heavily left-wing coalition. Socialist and communist deputies made up less than half of the Popular Front total, but this was enough for Lunn. “Far the most successful invention of the Communist Party is the ‘Popular Front’... (a) Trojan Horse, which conceals the invaders until they are ready to capture ’92 the citadels of democracy: In late 1936, he wrote that the prime minister of the ' Arnold Lunn, Revolutionary Socialism, (London, Right Book Club, 1939) p. xii. 2 Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 123. 60 Republic, Francisco Largo Cabellero, “has never been an official Communist, but he takes his orders from Moscow?” This reflects the lack of sophistication of Lunn’s outlook on the war in Spain. It cannot be denied that the extreme left wing of Spanish politics exerted ever more control over the Republican government and military during the war. It also cannot be denied that Largo Cabellero sometimes embraced quite violent and revolutionary ideas, getting more radical with age. Finally, it cannot be denied that Stalin, via his ambassador, could intervene considerably in the affairs of the Spanish Republic.4 But this is emphatically not the same thing as ‘taking one’s orders from Moscow.’ Such a rm. . statement, though, is typical of Lunn’s simplification of the motives and organization of the Left.5 Of course it is easy for a scholar to write such things 65 years after the fact. Doubtless things appeared differently to those involved, especially in the ideologically charged atmosphere that prevailed in the 19305. .It is not the purpose of this thesis to damn Lunn for his one-dimensional assessment of the Spanish Left, but rather to note and consider it. Thus, it is next to be noted that Lunn was not alone in his generalized view of left wing factions. In addition to Captain Aguilera and the Spanish royals, Lunn had many other friends involved in some way in the Spanish Civil War. Their assessment of their Republican enemies is similar to his. Thus 3 Ibid. p. 132. ’ Burnett Bulloten, The Spanish Civil War, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991) p. 119. 5 This is in great contrast to his attitude toward non-Catholic Christians. Lunn repeatedly called on his fellow Christians, Catholic and otherwise, to ascribe good motives to one another and to work toward understanding. Lunn was capable of true magnanimity toward his foes, provided they were not communists. See Arnold Lunn, “Ronald Knox: Some Memories,” The Month, ( 1957, Nov) and Arnold Lunn, Unkilled for So Long, (London, Allen & Unwin, 1968) Chapter XIV, for examples of Lunn’s ecumenical toleration. 61 Douglas Jerrold (Lunn’s friend and the man who arranged Franco’s flight from the Canaries), in a book heartily and repeatedly recommended by Lunn, wrote that the leaders of the Spanish Left had become “a conspiracy of ruthless adventurers sustained in power by force alone?” Obviously, as adventurers, communists did not act out of idealism. J errold’s accomplice in Franco’s flight from the Canaries, Luis Bolin, was also Lunn’s friend. In another book approved of by Lunn, Bolin’s chapter called “The Popular Front” betrays a similar outlook on the leaders of the Republic.7 Of Lunn’s older friends, Chesterton died in 1936, but Belloc continued to write. He saw the basic problem in Spain in “peasants not possessing their own land... and a revolutionary proletariat denied their just rewards by greedy capitalists?” As such, they had Belloc’s sympathy. But in spite of this, anti-clerical communist interference meant that Belloc was forced to side with the Nationalists. “For Belloc there were only two sides: Moscow and the opponents of Moscow, and Moscow meant the end of European civilization?” Following Lunn’s logic, the Popular Front government elected in 1936 was a communist government (because of the strong presence of communist and socialist deputies) and as such took its orders from Moscow. Accepting this as true for the moment, the question becomes, why did this insure Lunn’s opposition? In other words, what was wrong with communism? Why was it such a trip-wire for him? ‘5 Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938) p. 356. 7 Luis Bolin, Spain: The Vital Years, (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1967) pp. 144-153. 8 Jay P. Corrin, “Hilaire Belloc and the Spanish Civil War,” The Chesterton Review, (Vol. XII, No. 2, 1986) p. 204. 9 Ibid. p. 206. See Chapter Five of this thesis for Lunn’s tendency to think in similar apocalyptic terms. 62 Communistic Atheism First, there was communism’s anti-religious bent. Of course there were the famous aphorisms of Lenin and Marx on the subject, but it went much further than that. Beyond the throwaway phrases, Communist atheism was in deadly earnest. “Proletculture10 wages relentless war on religion... the attack on the Christian creed is daily becoming less timid.”ll This was part of a larger, longer battle. The war in Spain is only a phase in the recurring battle between the two rival interpretations of life, the spiritual and the materialistic. The economic issues are of secondary importance... We must fight materialism with the weapons of the spirit, for Communism cannot be kept at bay merely by social reform.I 2 This, in turn, was part of the greatest battle of all. In many books and articles, Lunn recalled an incident from his 1938 tour of wartime Spain. He came upon a desecrated graveyard in an area formerly under Republican control. A few weeks later I spent a few hours in a cemetery near Huesca, in Spain, where the chapel had been turned into a barber’s saloon and the walls covered with obscene drawings... I felt as if I were in contact with an intelligence which is exploiting with satanic skill the weakness and vices of mankind. '3 Thus the fight against communism was part of a greater historic struggle, which itself was but an extension of the ultimate cosmic war between good and evil. Not surprisingly, Lunn shared his teleological view of history with Hilaire Belloc. For Belloc, all historical conflict was ultimately theological at root. His 1928 book, How the Reformation Happened, began with a listing of the main causes of the Reformation. '0 Lunn’s word for the culture which replaced Europe’s old Catholic culture when communist revolution came. ” Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 120. '2 Ibid. pp. 176-177. The italics are mine. Lunn’s juxtaposition of materialist to spiritualist philosophies is very much in the spirit of the battles within the 19‘” century English Catholic Church. _ See Chapter Two. '3 Lunn, Revolutionary Socialism, p. 7. 63 But the last factor, the hatred of the Faith... was so much the most intense, and was in the nature of a leaven which could rapidly infect all society, once it was given play... We must remember that this hatred has always been present. That it is present today most Catholics and all converts know... Such hatred is natural and inevitable. All energy polarizes, and the Catholic Church is the most powerful source of energy on earth. . . '4 The energy that polarized against the Catholic Church during the Reformation was that same satanic intelligence that led communists to desecrate cemeteries. As such, Lunn, Belloc and their ilk felt morally compelled to join the battle, which they did with great satisfaction. Surely the knowledge that they were taking part in the only war that really mattered, that between God and Lucifer, lent a bracing, romantic air to life. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson addressed the changing conceptions of time that had facilitated the move from medieval concepts to modern. Among the concepts considered was the objective value of time. Anderson drew a quote from Walter Benjamin to illustrate the medieval view of time. If an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ. .. then a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally or causally... It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding. . .15 Clearly, Lunn, Belloc and the others, 20‘h century figures thoroughly familiar with the clock, the railroad, the newspaper and all the other things that make up Anderson’s modernity, still had something akin to a medieval view of time. As " Hilaire Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, (Rockford, Illinois, TAN Books, 1992) p. 36. '5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London, Verso, 1996) p. 24. 64 globetrotting, famous writers taking active part in the events of modern Europe, they still were able to picture their frantic activity within the framework of Divine Time. This is not to discount Anderson’s very useful book; it is to suggest that some people have been able to appropriate facets of modernity and fit them into older schemes. '6 For Lunn, communism’s atheistic component had immediate cultural and political consequences. Stalin’s Show trials, the liquidation of the Kulaks, the brutal F attacks on priests and nuns in Spain, the defilement of churches, in short, the ‘Red Terror’, issued directly from communist atheism. Russia is the first European country officially to accept atheistic materialism E as the State creed, and only those who are willfully blind can continue to ignore the fruits of that false philosophy... Soviet Russia within a few short years has sacrificed the hard won gains of the Christian spirit and has reestablished the ruthless standards of the pagan world into which Christ was born.'7 Without the Christian spirit (which, it will be recalled from Chapter Three, had been responsible for slavery’s demise in Europe) society would devolve into the fabled brutality and hardness of pagan Rome, or worse. “The complete collapse of morality and the return of the ancient brutality in Russia is a grim warning of the consequences that follow when the ‘good gorilla’ returns to the jungle from which he came.”18 One can see, only halfway through a consideration of Lunn’s objection to communism, the tremendous moral weight attendant upon this struggle. Speaking long term, the battle was God’s battle- communism attacked His church and in the - process overran the hard fought introduction of Christian decency and mercy into '6 David Blackbourn’s Marpingen, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993) is a model of research on this subject. It studies sightings of the Virgin Mary in 19‘h century Germany, in a town which at the time of the apparitions was also being assimilated more fully into Bismarck’s Reich, via railroads and the rest. '7 Arnold Lunn, “The Fruits ofa False Philosophy,” Spain, (Vol. 111, No. 6, Jan. 1, 1939) p. 5. 65 human society. Lunn’s belief in what would later be called the domino theory (if Spain fell, then France might be next and on to Britain, etc.) added even greater urgency to the matter.19 All of this might seem overblown until one recalls the tremendous ideological polarization of the 1930s. Economic depression, alarming social change brought on by technological advances, the unjust Versailles settlement and the rise of communism and fascism all combined to lend a mood of urgency to the era. Lunn’s zeal was probably roughly equal to that of his more dedicated opponents in Spain. Communism Ignores Human Nature Even apart from communism’s anti-religious component, Lunn disagreed heartily with communism’s egalitarian aims. Humans are hierarchical by nature, Lunn argued, and therefore, communism’s goal of a classless society was impossible - on the face of it. As such, communist strivings were a tremendous waste of time and energy, and all of communism’s bloodletting was made doubly tragic by its futility. Chapter One studied Lunn’s views on monarchy and democracy. Lunn made it quite clear that he was not averse to an aristocracy with a certain amount of power in society. In this he believed he was being a realist, as opposed to an ideologue. It is again Utopian to hope that classes will ever be abolished. Homo sapiens is a class-conscious animal. “One has been tempted at times,” wrote Malcolm Muggeridge in the New Statesman, “to announce the death of the upper classes and write their obituary... The captains and kings depart (though all too slowly), but only it seems to make way for the meritocrats. . .”20 '8 Arnold Lunn, “The Good Gorilla,” The Catholic World, (Vol. CXLII, No. 850, Jan. 1936) p. 400. '9 Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 85, 180. 2° Lunn, Unkilled for So Long, pp. 75-6. 66 Of course, Lunn believed the Catholic Church supported him on this. “The Church cherishes no illusions as to the possibility of a classless society. The Church has met too many revolutionaries who promised the abolition of privileges only to substitute a new privileged class of their own for the liquidated aristocracy?” Thus communism, every other objection aside, could not work; nature guaranteed this. “Nature, that incurable reactionary, persists in awarding her prizes to the aristocrats of her own selection.”22 In this Lunn obviously showed absolutely no sympathy with the Marxist-Leninist idea that human nature could eventually be trained to act for the good of all. Original sin guaranteed against such utopian schemes.23 Well Meaning Ignoramuses, Lazy Escapists and Left Wing Careerists So who could subscribe to such a system, then? If communism was both evil and completely, eternally unfeasible, were its proponents peerless dunces, unable to see the world as it really was? Or were they evil, promoting the war against God’s church and spirit? For, Lunn the answer was somewhere in between. Lunn was at his most annoying when writing about communists and their sympathizers. For the most part, he refused to give them the courage of their convictions. With very few exceptions, be dismissed communist sympathizers as “well-meaning ignorarnuses.”24 “ When Englishmen foregather in Spain a note of exasperation creeps into their voices. How can people be so blind? Must they wait for barricades in Bond Street before they see the Red light?”25 2' Lunn, And the Floods Came, (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1942) p. 181. 22 Arnold Lumr, “A Tragic Misapprehension,” Dublin Review, (Oct., Nov., Dec., 1938) p. 243. 23 Arnold Lunn, Memory to Memory, (London, Hollis and Carter, 1956) p. 190. 24 - Ibid. p. 189. 25 Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 12. 67 For the most part, though, Lunn put communists into two groups- careerists and their ignorant dupes. Communist intellectuals and leaders were self-evidently careerists because communism was intellectually untenable. It may be recalled that this is the same argument that Lunn leveled at Catholics before his conversion. In Roman Converts 26, Lunn dedicated himself to discovering the real reasons that eminent converts had gone over to Rome. Lunn argued that, Catholicism being intellectually indefensible, his subjects, all quite intelligent men, must have had other, hidden reasons for converting, reasons not divulged in their several autobiographies and apologetic works. After his conversion 1933, Lunn took a similar approach to communists. Beyond those poor lambs who simply did not know what was really going on in the world, most communists were either dishonest intellectuals or the rabble whom the former stirred into action. Lunn did not write much about the rabble, but what little he did write is slightly redolent of the unpleasant side of Captain Aguilera, revealed in Chapter One. “But the most powerfirl and most constant factor in that complex of interests which keeps revolutions in being is the resentment and envy of those who are condemned by nature to inescapable inferiority.”27 Communism played to the forces of envy. “Hence the famous Communist slogan: ‘To every man according to his needs.’ It is easy to understand the appeal of this principle to those whose needs are great and whose unaided power of satisfying those needs is extremely small.”28 Thus was Lunn able to explain, and explain away, the appeal of communism to the poor. Communist leaders exploited this envy. “Subversive leaders encourage 26 (Freeport, New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1966) 27 Lunn, “A Tragic Misapprehension,” p. 243. 68 the illusion of those condemned by nature to inferiority by the hope of a Utopia in which all inequalities will be leveled out?29 Before examining why communist leaders and intellectuals manipulated the rabble thus, this thesis will explore how Lunn thought they managed to ‘keep a straight face’ while preaching a theory they know to be illogical. Such communists simply skipped logic and appealed to emotion. On a debating platform, as I know, the champions of Red Spain make no ‘ attempt to meet a single point that their opponent makes; they just rant. Their propaganda depends partly on actual photographs and partly on words... The written propaganda of the Reds relies not on facts but on word-pictures, for the Reds are too clever to defend a hopeless case, and are wise to concentrate on word-pictures imposed by the hypnotic effect of endless reiteration.3o On another page, Lunn wrote, “Communism is rotten with intellectual dishonesty, for Communists are instructed to preach, for tactical reasons, a policy which they will disavow when the moment comes to strike?3 1 The roots of communism’s dishonesty could be found in Marx himself, who, as an ideologue, refused to see human nature as it really is. “Marx was a lazy escapist who took refuge from the harsh world of fallen man in the messianic future of the Marxist faith.”32 Lunn quoted Chesterton to assist in his consignment of Marx to the category of cowardly dreamers. “All feeble spirits live naturally in the future because ’3 Ibid. p. 244. 29 Ibid. p. 243. 3° Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 8. My italics. 3' Ibid. p. 114. 32 Lunn, Revolutionary Socialism, p. 211. 69 it is featureless. It is a soft job. You can make it what you will. .. It requires real courage to live in the present.”33 Lunn could dismiss the communists of his day as easily as he had dismissed Marx. Envy and opportunism were their prime motivators, especially given the obvious falseness of communist theory. If men could learn from experience, Socialism would no longer be a danger. P Unfortunately revolutionaries are inspired not by reason, but by resentment; and the failure of Socialism, wherever Socialism has been attempted, is no deterrent to men who are ready to perish in the ruins of a catastrophe which they themselves have provoked, provided that those who have succeeded in _ the social order in which they have failed perish with them?4 a . This was how Lunn described those motivated by envy. The other type of communist was the left wing intellectual motivated by opportunism. Left Wing views are fashionable... There are many careers and professions in which advancement is difficult for the champions of tradition, and easy for the apostles of subversive doctrines. Hence the contrast between the readiness of intellectuals to denounce Hitler or Mussolini and their reluctance to denounce Stalin or Negrin. It is not only in Nazi Germany that the intellectuals have come to heel.35 It is worth noting that George Orwell, though fighting on the opposite side in the Spanish Civil War, made similar criticisms of left wing intellectuals who refused to call Stalin to task. Lunn and Orwell were acquaintances after the war. Perhaps their shared zeal for intellectual honesty helped to form a common bond. This is the essence of Lunn’s superficial treatment of communism: Marx was a coward, too weak to deal with reality; the native envy of the inferior masses can be ’3 Ibid. p. 210. 3‘ Ibid. p. xi. 7O whipped into revolutionary violence by skilled intellectuals, who themselves are motivated either by jealousy of their betters or the cynical manipulation of contemporary forces for their own benefit. The beginning of this chapter stated that Lunn’s critique of communism was as detailed as it was unsophisticated. He wrote a handful of books analyzing communist theories and tactics. They are packed with quotations from eminent communists, ‘Red’ newspapers and debates in which Lunn took part. He read dozens of books, by authors from the lefi and the right, about communism and the war in Spain. He subscribed to an economic theory that itself was critical of the excesses of capitalism. But nowhere does he betray even an inkling of understanding for the convinced communist. All of his words and details conspire to paint a silly, unconvincing caricature. This chapter’s fifth footnote addressed the contrast between Lunn’s sympathetic treatment of those Christians whose theology he disagreed with and his one-dimensional portrayal of communists. Perhaps the reason for this contrast is that Protestants are still Christians and as such are on the right side of the cosmic conflict. For Lunn, Communists obviously were not at all on the right side. Perhaps this is the reason for his crude portrayal of his communist enemies. As mentioned above, it was the same approach he took to the Catholic Church before he converted. Whatever the motivation, it is telling that Lunn reduced both of his betes noires to cartoonish figures while opposing them. 3‘ Ibid. pp. 89-90. 71 Lunn the Romantic The preceding chapters have explained many aspects of Lunn’s worldview, with an eye toward understanding his opinions on the Spanish Civil War. As the introduction to this thesis said, I‘ have used the war itself as a convenient rack on which to hang much of Lunn’s thought. Thus we now know what Lunn thought about religion, politics, economics and human nature. All of which goes a long way toward understanding him. But any picture of Lunn’s worldview that did not include his romantic outlook would be incomplete. The minor inconsistencies of his thought and work melt away when one considers him as a romantic. Introduce romance into Lunn’s voice, and he comes off as a man trying to bring both sense and beauty to his life, instead of as a doctrinaire pri g. This last chapter will posit Lunn as a romantic and put him into the context of his equally romantic peers. This is not an attempt to place Lunn within the confines of an academic definition of romanticism. That is to say, I am not placing Lunn in the tradition of Lord Byron or Shelley. The thirst for romance, not romanticism, shaped Lunn’s life. Chesterton provided a useful definition. I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom had rightly named romance. For the very word “romance” has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome... The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired... nearly all people... would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance.l ' G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1959) pp. 15-16. 72 The first task is to find the romantic side of Lunn’s work. It is not difficult. His Spanish Civil War writings are packed with it. We have already seen the light in which Lunn cast the Spanish royal family. He also saw the entire struggle as a Crusade of the old type. In April 193 8, Lunn witnessed the final Nationalist drive to the sea, which split Republican Spain in two. On arriving at Saragossa, I met an officer who greeted me with the words, “Today our outposts saw the sea.” I shall never forget the mystical enthusiasm with which he said these words... We left our cars and started up the hillside... Many a time have I scrambled in a crescendo of excitement up the last yards leading to an Alpine pass, but never with a greater sense of expectancy than on the final slope of this nameless hill. I broke into a run on the last incline of limestone boulders, and suddenly the ground fell away from my feet. Beyond the 2plain and the ultimate hills was a thin blue strip- Thalassa! Thalassa! “The sea,” says Euripides, “cures all the evils of men.” Not all evils, but the brigade of Navarre which fought their way to the healing waves helped to purge Spain of the Red evil.3 What could be more romantic and grand? The mystical joy of the Spanish officer, Lunn’s excited race up the hill to see Spain’s salvation4, the comparison with a heroic Greek tale, the purging of evil. All of it combines into the shimmering, joyous moment when Franco’s victory could no longer be doubted. And Lunn could tell himself he had had some part, however small, in bringing it about. The above citation was not unusual. Lunn’s mountain writings are filled with such things, as are his writings on Spain. This thesis will quote one more instance, which took place in early 1936, when it was by no means sure that the Nationalists would win. In fact, things looked rather grim. 2 The cry of Xenophon’s army when it finally saw the sea after fleeing from Artaxerxes. 3 Arnold Lunn, Come What May, (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940) pp. 327-328. ’ This sounds more than a little bit like Peter and John’s race to Christ’s empty tomb. 73 I see the women praying for the deliverance of Spain before the tomb of Cid Campeador5 . .. (I see) the note of gay color in the Phalangist crests and the red berets of the Carlists, and I hear the song of troops on the march, “Up squadrons, and let us conquer, for the dawn is breaking...” Cara al sol. . .”facing the sun.” Many years ago I shivered through the long night on a glacier ledge. We had no food and no drink and never did the stars march more slowly through the roof of heaven. We sat with our eyes to the east, and then suddenly a crystal point burned on a mountain ridge, and the point expanded into a rim of fire and the rim grew until the full circle of the sun soared above the mountain barrier and flooded our frozen bodies with renascent warmth. Cara al sol. And when Mola6 spoke on the balcony at Burgos, Spain knew that the black night of fear was past.7 Thus the sun of Franco would one day burst upon Spain’s communist darkness. One can only imagine the sustenance Lunn drew from this view of the world. It doubtless enabled to him to carry on the battles of his life energetically. Hilaire Belloc once prayed, in verse, for “one steadfast, passionate flame to nurture me.”8 It is obvious that Lunn had such a flame. If the romantic flame nourished Lunn, it is hard to deny that it also narrowed his view. In the largest sense, his ideas sometimes seem tohave very little to do with the ‘real world.’ Lunn dealt in ideals and syllogistic thinking, much as he accused Marx of doing. This sometimes blinded him to very real problems that did not lend themselves to pat arguments or formulas. We have already seen Lunn’s one- dimensional portrayal of communists. The very romantic outlook that allowed Lunn 5 51 Cid of rrredieval fame. ° Nationalist general. 7 Arnold Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1937) p. 6. These examples are taken almost at random. When writing about the things that really mattered to him, Lunn almost always cast a romantic mist, mixed with historical and mythical references, over them. 8 Hilaire Belloc, unnamed poem, Complete Verse, (London, Duckworth, 1970) p. 164. 74 to be (justly) indignant at Republican murderousness made it impossible for him to differentiate among left wing views and proponents. It also blinded him to the faults of his own side, the Nationalists. Lunn consistently denied reports of massive Nationalist atrocities. In late 1936 he denied the reported Nationalist massacre of 4,000 at Badajoz; he also denied that Nationalists had anything to do with the destruction of Guemica, which he attributed to Basque or Asturian anarchists.9 Perhaps this was understandable in 1936. The war had just begun and each side leveled fabricated charges against the other. But Lunn continued his denial into later years. In a 1963 book review, Lunn still insisted that Basques had destroyed Guemica.lo Such an insistence was, by that time, unscholarly, unsupportable by any reasonable standards; it also risked inviting comparison to those who deny the Holocaust.ll Apparently, Lunn’s black and white picture of the world did not allow him to admit such things of his friends. It is reminiscent of his incomplete portrayal of Captain Aguilera, as reported in chapter one. It is easy to trace the roots of Lunn’s romantic outlook. By his own acknowledgment, John Ruskin was a formative figure in Lunn’s artistic and spiritual life. Among the many suasions which influenced my return to Christianity was the suspicion, which the events of recent years have converted into a certainty, that the decline of Christianity had coincided not only with a flight from 9 Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, pp. 229-230. '0 Arnold Lunn, “British Reactions to the Spanish Civil War,” The Month, (Vol. 30, No. 3, Sept. 1963) .147. R Dr. David Ortiz, in private correspondence with the author. 75 reason, but also with a flight from beauty. This, indeed, was the thesis of those “sermons in stone” which Ruskin discovered in Stones of Venice.12 Lunn learned many lessons from Ruskin. He learned the value of bold color, the danger of too much Greek influence and, most importantly, the superiority of medieval to Renaissance art and architecture. On this last point, Lunn quoted Ruskin to the effect that medieval art, with its grotesqueries (goblins, bad statuary) and its sublimities, was more democratic and more inclusive than Renaissance art, which was made by and for an elite, insular group of pedants.l3 Such a starkly drawn line of artistic values appealed to Lunn. One wonders if part of the appeal was the connection of Renaissance Italy to banking and commerce and the wealthy few, as opposed to Lunn’s medieval idea of widespread private property. If Lunn drew from Ruskin’s romantic aesthetic, he was also influenced by that of his Catholic contemporaries. They were romantic indeed. Much has been written (deservedly) about 20th century art’s mood of despair and its glorification of the irrational. One could take examples almost at random. T.S. Eliot’s Preludes describing the haunted drabness of modern city life. Hemingway complaining about the “mechanical oppression” of modern life.” The shattered psyches of World War One veterans/writers. Dadaism. And so on. Comparatively little has been written about another current in modern art, both pre- and post-World War One. This school remained stubbornly faithful to romantic and medievalist ideals in art and literature. They quite consciously trumpeted their festive and anachronistic outlook as an antidote to modern despair '2 Arnold Lunn, “The Flight from Beauty,” The Month, (Vol. 179, No. 936, 1943: Nov./ Dec.) p. 420. '3 Arnold Lunn, “John Ruskin,” The Dublin Review, (#450, Fourth Quarter, 1950) pp. 109-113. 76 and confusion. Patrick Allitt, in his seminal work on Catholic convert intellectuals, described the stance of Lunn’s peers. Be a Catholic, they said, because it is fun! Life is richer, the world more beautiful, sex more rewarding, family life happier, food and wine tastier, literature fuller, art and the landscape more beautiful, the sun more brilliant for people who understand that all good things come from God and that God’s promises are guaranteed by Christ’s sacrificial death. Catholic apologetics until then had been somber. Now it glittered.15 It glittered because it was cast in a romantic light, and that in an era supposedly dominated by the art of the broken and doubtful. The poetry and novels of Chestertonl6 and Belloc were quite as popular as anything written by G.B. Shaw or Erich Maria Remarque. A critique of Chesterton’s verse by Professor Daniel B. Dodson reveals the basic mood of his work, and also that of Belloc and Lunn. Rejecting the languishing Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism of Wilde and Swinburne... on the one side, the fate-directed tragedies of rural England in Hardy’s tales on the other (he once described Hardy as “a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot”) and totally impervious to the modernist movement in poetry that emerged in the twenties with Pound and Eliot, Chesterton deliberately turned his back on the experiments of this alien world. In novels, literary studies, and in verse, his vision is didactic, personal, anachronistic, and utterly exempt from the complex ambiguities of symbolism, imagism, dadaism, and surrealism... Quite clearly this is the expression of a very ancient poetic mission, primitive, indeed bardic, in its appeal. '7 The trio of adjectives, “didactic, personal, anachronistic” could be applied just as easily to Lunn as to Chesterton. Their romantic view of life represented a " Donald w. Goodwin, Alcohol and the Writer, (Kansas City, Andrews and McMeel, 1988) p. 61. '5 Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997) p. 163. '6 If one includes mystery novels among the traditional and romantic, as I am inclined to do, then the balance of popularity (surely a measure of relevance) must swing heavily away from the works of Eliot et a1. 77 .. .9934 .3 . conscious attempt to pose an alternative to the ugliness and despair which they saw in the modern world. It was sometimes taken to extremes, turning romantics into foolish Quixotes, seeing what they wanted to see. This is the only explanation for Belloc’s description of Franco, written after an arranged meeting in 1939. “When I entered Franco’s presence I entered the presence of one who had fought that same battle wherein Roland of legend died fighting, and Godfrey in sober history had won. . 3’18 Like Belloc in the preceding sentence, Lunn sometimes let his romantic enthusiasm blind him or at least distort his vision. But it is also true that he found in it, composed of Catholic, medievalist and crusading anticommunist elements, a “steadfast, passionate flame to nurture him.” '7 Daniel B. Dodson introduction to, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, (New York, Dodd and Mead, 1980) pp. xii, xiv. '8 Qtd. in Jay P. Corrin, “Hilaire Belloc and the Spanish Civil War,” The Chesterton Review, (Vol. XII, No. 2, 1986) p. 207. 78 CONCLUSION The immediate occasion of my interest in Arnold Lunn was Dr. Gordon Stewart’s suggestion of him as a good thesis subject. To be honest, I was not sure that I wanted to write about Lunn at first. But I read a half dozen of his books and realized that he was a secondary player in a subject of real interest to me, the Catholic revival of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This was a case of serendipity: Dr. Stewart had suggested Lunn for far different reasons, but he turned out to be a relevant study for me. As I have said, I am interested in the Catholic revival that began in the mid- nineteenth century, stretching from Manzoni in Italy to the devotional revolution in Ireland, to the mid-twentieth century, when it encompassed such figures as Arnold Lunn, Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton in Britain and Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Fulton Sheen in the United States. The Catholic Church had been discounted in the intellectual world, especially in soocalled Protestant countries, as a force of reaction, an antiquated hangover with no relevance for the modern world. And it must be said that certain papal actions, especially the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) appeared to have confirmed the suspected obscurantism of the Catholic Church. But the restrictions imposed by Rome had surprising consequences. Instead of entirely quashing Catholic intellectual endeavor, Rome rerouted it. Social policy encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931) challenged modern economic systems both communistic and capitalist. In literature 79 and apologetics Catholic intellectuals also asserted themselves in an energetic attempt to counter what they saw as the hallmarks of modemity- despair, cynicism and the glorification of the irrational. Thus at the papal and intellectual levels the Catholic Church was revivified for a time. The effect at the popular level remains unstudied. It is a subject I may take up at the doctoral level. The Catholic revival fizzled out at the time of the Second Vatican Council. Evelyn Waugh said it “had knocked the stuffing out of him.” I do not think it was coincidence that the revival died in the 19608. The Catholic Church had been presented by Lunn and his peers as a rock of stability in a changing world. The sweeping changes made in the name if Vatican 11 (some of which have been rolled back since) made it difficult to portray the church as a timeless institution. In any case, the revival ended after one hundred years. It remains an understudied subject. So, historiographically speaking, my thesis has been a matter of recovering lost voices. In Lunn’s lifetime fascism, communism and liberal democracy drowned out other voices, at least theoretically. That is, Franco, though he was really solidly in the tradition of Spanish military coup makers, was compelled by contemporary politics to identify himself at least partially with the F alangists. Similarly, the rhetoric of the time has led historians toward a study of the major players, the big winners and losers, leaving active third parties relatively unexamined. As this thesis has reflected, Lunn was an active, though secondary figure, in one of those third parties. His wide-ranging, fairly articulated alternative to the modern world, being medievalist and Catholic, was shared by his intellectual forbears, especially Chesterton and Belloc, his Catholic contemporaries like Dorothy 80 Day and, apparently, based on readership, by a sizeable number of English and American supporters. As I have said, Lunn was decidedly a junior member of his group. The quality of his thought and writing is inferior to that of Belloc and Chesterton. His work was quite derivative, though his critique of modern science went a few steps further than those of his intellectual fathers. Lunn’s very inferiority, his clear " secondary status, serves to reinforce the relevance of studying the Catholic revival. Lunn was able steadily to publish and sell essays, articles and books for over sixty years. The ability of this jitney intellectual to sustain an audience and a living by parroting the thought of his betters surely reflects the resonance of his message for his contemporaries. As such, the message and its heralds deserve historical study. 81 BIBLIOGRAPHY 82 ‘W BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY SOURCES: Belloc, Hilaire. Complete Verse. London: Duckworth, 1970. How the Reformation Happened. Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books, 1992. The Servile State. New York: Henry Holt, 1946. Belloc, Hilaire and Cecil Chesterton. The Party System. London': S. Swift, 1911. Chesterton, G.K. Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1980. G.K. 's Weekly, A Sampler, ed. Lyle W. Dorsett. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986. Orthodoxy. 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London: Hollis and Carter, 1956. 83 “The Monarchy,” in The Month 1959: June. “A Most Passionate War,” in The Month, Vol. 26, No. 2, Aug. 1961. “The Road to Rome,” in Dublin Review, No. 387, Oct/Nov/Dec, 1933. Roman Converts. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1966. “Ronald Knox: Some Memories,” in The Month, n.s. 18:5 Nov., 1957. Revolutionary Socialism. London: Right Book Club, 1939. “Science and the Supernatural,” in The English Review, Vol. 61, 1935: July/Dec. Spanish Rehearsal. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1937. “A Tragic Misapprehension,” in Dublin Review, Oct., Nov., Dec., 1938. Unkilled for So Long. London: Allen and Unwin, 1968. SECONDARY SOURCES Allitt, Patrick. Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome. Itahca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1996. Amstein, Walter. Protestant versus Catholic in Mid- Victorian Britain: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns. 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From Belloc to Churchill: private scholars, public culture and the crisis of British liberalism, 1900-1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Goodwin, Donald, W. Alcohol and the Writer. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1988. Hobson, Fred. Mencken. New York: Random House, 1994. Holmes, Derek. More Roman than Rome. London: Burns and Oates, 1978. Jerrold, Douglas. Georgian Adventure. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938. Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe 's Twentieth Century. New York: Knopf, 1999. ‘ McCarthy, John, P. Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978. Mullett, Michael, A. Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558-1829. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Norman, Edward. The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Preston, Paul. Franco. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Schoenl, William. The intellectual crisis in English Catholicism: liberal Catholics, modernists, and the Vatican in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New York: Garland, 1982. Ward, Maisie. G.K. Chesterton. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1944. Wilson, A.N. Hilaire Belloc. New York: Atheneum, 1984. 85