Saturday, December 09, 2006

Andrew Uses the Kerry Excuse

I read Andrew Sullivan's book, The Conservative Soul, in galleys. At the time, it seemed to me too insubstantial to merit much comment. The book reminded me of an old jibe (was it Arthur Balfour's?) about Winston Churchill's book on the First World War: "Winston has written a great big book about himself and called it The World Crisis." The Conservative Soul is an excellent summary of the more or less random political preferences of one Andrew Sullivan, Esq. Beyond that ... well as I said: it was insubstantial.

I was most disappointed by the book's noticeable disdain for fact. I didn't much like the misleading use of quotations from me personally, but by now I am used to that. I was however surprised to see the British-born and Oxford-educated Andrew refer to "Prime Minister" Benjamin Disraeli as the architect of British "universal suffrage." As I've mentioned in this space before, that is quite a historical clanger.

Apparently others have registered the same complaint. So today, Andrew defensively explains himself , adapting the "just one word" excuse last heard from Sen. John Kerry:

It's now clear that I'm guilty of one example of sloppy word use in "The Conservative Soul," and I'll correct it in future editions. Here's the paragraph:

One famous example of just such a pursuit of intimations was Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli's decision to back universal suffrage in the nineteenth century. "Toryism" if turned into an ideology would have rejected this as a negation of its own identity and meaning. Tories were defined by their adherence to the prerogatives of the monarchy, nobility and rural, landed gentry. The idea of bringing vast masses of untutored and possibly radical working class voters into the political system seemed like socialist revolution.

Disraeli differed. He saw that England was changing, that the industrial revolution was urbanizing Britain at a rapid pace, that the masses were acquiring economic power and leverage, that they were susceptible to being coopted by dangerous and radical forces. He intuited that the job of a conservative was to deal with changing social reality. So he proposed coopting the working classes for Toryism, giving them the vote, appealing to their patriotism and faith, and remaking conservatism in his time.

All of this is true except for the word "universal." Obviously, Disraeli didn't include women, and not all men, in suffrage in the 1867 Reform Act. Wikipedia provides the most concise summary:

The Reform Act 1867 (also known as the Second Reform Act, and formally titled the Representation of the People Act 1867), 30 & 31 Vict. c. 102, was a piece of British legislation that greatly increased the number of men who could vote in elections in the UK. In its final form, the Reform Act 1867 enfranchised all male householders and abolished compounding (the practice of paying rates to a landlord as part of rent). Due to this act working-class men gained suffrage for the first time in Britain.

So you can see my gist was correct, and my point stands, but my wording was sloppy.

Alas, this is one of those corrections that only makes things worse.

Let's start: Benjamin Disraeli was not "prime minister" in 1867. He was the leader of the Conservatives in the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The prime minister in 1867 was Edward Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby, who sat in the House of Lords.

To say that the 1867 Act "did not include all men" betrays a similarly weak grasp upon the relevant history. Even after the 1867 Act, the large majority of adult English males - about 60% - still lacked the franchise. To put it another way: Before the 1867 Act, about 1 million of the 26 million people in England, Scotland, and Wales possessed the right to vote. Afterward, the number of voters increased to a little shy of 2 million out of 26 million.

To say that "working-class men gained suffrage for the first time" again misses the nail. The 1867 Act gave the vote to men who (a) lived in officially recognized towns, or "boroughs," and who either (b) owned or (c) were the primary lessee of an officially recognized house or else (d) paid more than 10 pounds a year (a substantial sum) to lodge in someone else's house. Since most urban working-class men lodged in other people's houses and paid much less than 10 pounds per year in rent, the 1867 Act excluded the large majority of them, as it did almost all agricultural laborers and virtually all domestic servants.

Nor is it quite right to describe the Reform Act as the product of deep moral, ideological or strategic vision on Disraeli's part. His Whig and Liberal opponents had been developing a second reform bill since the 1850s. One such bill had been introduced and defeated as recently as 1866. Disraeli voted against it!

There were more (and much more important) voting reforms in 1884 and 1885. It was those bills (authored by William Gladstone's Liberal government) that truly brought the working classes into British political life. But universal adult male suffrage did not come to Britain until 1918. (Women over 30 got the vote that same year.) Universal suffrage on equal terms for men and women did not arrive until 1928.

Why go into such detail? Who cares?

1) Nobody needs to master the complexities of electoral law in Victorian Britain. That is - unless you propose to write about the subject. If you do, you should make some effort to know what you are talking about.

2) To call Benjamin Disraeli a "prime minister" when he wasn't, or to describe the 1867 Act as creating "universal suffrage" when it didn't, can be said to be "one word" mistakes. But only in the sense that saying, "The US Civil War began when the North seceded from the Union," is a "one word" mistake. Sometimes one word is all it takes to reveal total ignorance.

3) We all make mistakes of course. I know I often do. When readers bring my mistakes to my attention, I thank them for enlightening me and do my best to correct my error. When apologies are called for, I willingly offer them. To respond instead by denial and bluster is not the way an honest man proceeds.

Look again at that blog post I quote from Andrew above. It is not an acknowledgment of error. It is an attempt to evade responsibility for error, to pretend that one knew something all along but merely expressed oneself inexactly. ("When I said that the Civil War began when the North seceded, I meant that the war began when the northernmost of the Southern states seceded. My gist was correct; only my wording was sloppy.")

Nor does Andrew's blog post evince any sincere desire to get the facts right. The electoral history of the United Kingdom is a subject that has produced a vast historical literature. (Here is a link to one classic work on the subject.) You might have expected Andrew to delve into this material in an effort to understand where he went astray. But no. Rather than lift his seat out of his chair, Andrew instead opened his browser to Wikipedia, in search of some form of words in that unreliable source that would permit him to bluff his way out of his embarrassment.

4 ) I do not mean to call Andrew intellectually dishonest. That is, I don't believe that he consciously tells untruths. Rather, I think that when he is caught in strong emotion (as he so frequently is) he simply becomes indifferent to truth. It's analogous to the difference between immorality and amorality. If the truth would serve his purposes, he'd be just as glad to use it - provided of course that it cost him no extra work.

12/09 09:52 AM