Historical events of the 20th Century - 25 September 1992

I was about to leave the real world of sea and sky and trees and seagulls and blue fish and sandpipers and go back to the chronic world represented by New York City and the currency crisis and the artificial outrages of Mr Bush and Governor Clinton who are now at that stage in a presidential campaign when they magnify every wart on the other's face into a skin cancer, every small indiscretion past or present into a capital crime and every one of each other's policy proposals into a prescription for chaos and black night. I gather in fact, from both candidates that if either is elected in November, the American republic will cease to exist.

I was I say about to desert the serenity of the great four days when the sun fairly crackles under what Johnny Mercer called "a blue umbrella sky", a dive back into the planned insanity of the presidential campaign when I received a sudden visit from an old mean friend, from Arthur. His surname is Itis, and my old golf pro and I – he's almost my vintage – exchange at all times reconnaissance information about him in the hopes of keeping him at bay, Arthur Itis – a poor joke, but its our own and it keeps our spirits up in trying times.

So I am at the moment you might say under house arrest, a hundred miles from the heart of things.

Of course, I can read the papers as well as the next man and watch the telly, but the papers always seem somehow more irrelevant than they do in town and they also, thanks to the boss of the house, tend very soon to become repositories for tea leaves and lobster shells. So this past week, I was thrown back on the nearest thing to hand, which was a small book, a paperback and it has been a godsend, it is a dictionary of 20th-century history starting in 1900 and going up to the very cusp or hilt of our time, by which I mean 1989.

By the way, it's a sign of how suddenly and swiftly even solid historical institutions can collapse that there is no entry for Boris Yeltsin, whereas Mikhail Gorbachev is presumed to be in his fourth year as Soviet president and it says here might manage re-election for a further term. And Mrs Thatcher is about halfway through her unprecedented third term. No Conservative, writes the editor and I'm pretty sure he would have written the same thing today, "no Conservative since Disraeli has made so personal an impact on party doctrine and practice", but the writer was certainly on his toes in some things, high enough to peek into the immediate future when at the end of a compact history of Serbia, which begins in 1389, we read the final sentence by 1988 a Serbian nationalist revival under the demagogic leadership of Slobodan Milošević threatened federal unity.

One of the pleasures of reading a short history this way A to B, C and so on is that your sliding and bouncing between decades and countries and periods whether you want too or not. This dictionary is incidentally a one-man job, which is a feat in itself and he's an Englishman. Consequently, it pretty heavy on, for instance, British political history and more light fingered on America, old Keir Hardy is in here but not John L Lewis, the first titan of American industrial unionism. I mustn't go on this way.

Have you noticed how the immediate instinct of a reader facing anthology a collection of anything is to complain about what the man left out? Mr Palmer, Alan Palmer, has done a bang-up job, not perhaps, the first adjective by way of tribute you'd think of for a scholar, but Mr Palmer is a scholar of the first chop, though I fancy a lot of very respectable scholars will not be inclined to receive him into their holy order because he doesn't publish reams of references to show how much he's read. And he has another gift, which is an anathema to the double don academic scholar, the gift of brevity, he can summarise a whole world war with almost flip accuracy in 600 words and if you're a history wallah and think this unremarkable, try it sometime.

Naturally at this time of an American year, I hopped around for a time between old and new presidential candidates beginning with the Democrats. Whoops, apart from Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Carter no mention of any Democratic candidate in the past 40 years not Stevenson, not Humphrey, not McCarthy – not Eugene – the good McCarthy that is, the bad one is here all right, not McGovern, not Dukakis. After riffling back and forth, it strikes me perhaps a little late what did all these non entries have in common, they all lost, not a principle of choice.

Why then is there a brief sharp entry on William Jennings Bryan. Who? Feel no shame, if our surveys of educational standards are correct not one American in 10 under the 30 has ever heard of Bryan. But if ever the Democrats thought they had a golden boy it was William Jennings Bryan, a huge brawny brainy native of the prairie the boy, orator of the Platt River he was called. He represented for a whole generation of prairie people what we today call Midwestern farmers, but at a time when six Americans in 10 were farmers, he represented the never flagging opposition to Wall Street, which at that time – and we were in the 1890s – meant a gold standard. Free silver was his cry and if ever a man won the nomination with one speech, nay with one phrase, it was Bryan, he came roaring out of the West only 36 years of age, stood up before the Democratic convention and cried "having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, the labouring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them "you shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind up on a cross of gold". That was considerably more rousing in its time than Mr Bush's "read my lips", but Mr Bush's line won for him and Bryan's great speech lost.

Four years later, the Democrats again looked no further than Bryan. Now he had a new enemy, the first Roosevelt and America's first fling at empire, Bryan was against the annexation of the Philippines or of any foreign country, he lost again. Four years later, its now 1904, the Democrats had to turn to somebody else, but in 1908 back again and for the third and last time the only man who ever did this, he lost.

But there's another loser in here a Republican, Senator Barry Goldwater. Why? Well there's a good case historically to have him there for the reason given that during the Kennedy days and the Johnson days, he became the nation's leading conservative political spokesman, but it says that in the election of 1964, when Johnson massacred him, his views won Goldwater only five states – a clear rejection of Conservatism. Mmm, yes it might have had it that the setback was temporary, his views had been planted and were harvested with passion by the governor of California, one Ronald Reagan who twice slaughtered the liberal Democrats a clear endorsement by the American voter of conservatism.

The question now before the country is, is this nation after 12 years of conservative presidents about to turn once more and move back again, as it tends to do in hard times, to the liberals, who since Presidents Bush and Reagan managed to give liberalism a bad name, now prefer to call themselves centrists. Not much fire in that title – we shall see.

Back to the dictionary, under the letter Q there are four entries only and a masterly quartet they form. Quebec conferences – they were between Roosevelt and Churchill planning the progress of the Second War; Quebec Libre, about the aspirations of the French speakers of Quebec to be independent – to have a longish paragraph on this, I think is brilliant because it focuses on the 1967 visit of President de Gaulle who from a balcony in Montreal electrified a great crowd and sparked a mischief that is alive and bright today by shouting "vive la Québec libre" – long live a free Quebec – an astonishing act of arrogance from a foreign leader.

Number four under Q is Quisling. Quisling and if there are bright students present who think it must be a small fish something like a herring, I'm not going to help them. But the third item is the real surprise, look at it I've just done it in a current American almanac or guide to current events and you will be clever to find it. Yet I'll bet it was the most frequently mentioned foreign word in the presidential campaign of 1960 – Quemoy.

Anybody here remember the great tense debate between Nixon and Kennedy? The occasion when a foreigner dropping in would have thought that the honour or safety of the United States depended on two islands Quemoy and Matsu. They were, I presume they still are, offshore from the mainland of China. They are tiny, they are six miles away from the mainland. The Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek used them to mount guerrilla raids on a mainland port for five years or more after the mainland was Communist. The Nationalists held on to Quemoy and Matsu and the United States backed them. President Truman's great Secretary of State Acheson went so far as to say that the rim of America security, the ramparts we watch, lay on Quemoy and Matsu.

I have no idea if anybody ever did a survey examining the effect of these islands on the election of John F Kennedy. All I can say for sure is that they were never mentioned again, they have totally vanished from the American memory and are still very far away from Taiwan but only six miles from Communist China. A foolish crusade if ever there was one.

I wonder what issue or issues burning bright in the next, the last month before the election will be as frivolous as damp a squib once we've made up our minds whether to stay with old tried and true Bush or up-an'-at-'em Clinton.

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