What The Hell America!

How did he achieve this enduring popularity? Hill wrote lively, intelligible prose and pioneered what came to be called “history from below.” He tackled big problems about the causes of historical changes and found analogies between the seventeenth century and his own moment.

He did so, as Michael Braddick’s new biography of Hill shows, because of the powerfully liberating influence of Marxist thought, and because he strove to write history in tandem with the struggle for socialism in his own day. Braddick’s book is well-researched, readable, and thoughtful. Although I have some quibbles with his final assessment, it contains precisely the material we need to make sense of Hill’s work.

Braddick situates Hill in a generation of disenchanted intellectuals, arguing that he embraced Marxism in general, and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in particular, as much because of a Modernist sense of alienation as out of specific beliefs in Marxist economic theory. Hill was born in 1912 to a prosperous and committed Methodist family. A precocious student, he was recruited to study history at Balliol College, Oxford.

He thus came of age during the tumultuous 1930s. The Great Depression was ravaging Great Britain and the rest of the capitalist world. Meanwhile, the USSR was rapidly industrializing and seemed to be improving standards of living for ordinary people.

When war broke out between Republicans and the forces of Francisco Franco in Spain, the governments of Britain and France remained neutral, with only the Soviet Union providing aid to the Spanish Republic against fascism. Because of the latter-day polemical uses of Neville Chamberlain’s policy toward Nazism by American neoconservatives, we tend to forget that the capitalist countries did not appease Adolf Hitler and company out of timidity but rather because they were more frightened of socialism than of fascism.

In this context, the appeal of Marxism seemed rather obvious. Braddick suggests, as Hill himself maintained in later life, that Hill was “primed for Marxism . . . by feelings of personal and social alienation . . . his route into Marxism was humanist, not via politics and economy.” That is to say, having read the work of writers like T. S. Eliot, Hill came to feel that Marxism offered an answer to the modern “disassociation of sensibility” — the palpable modern mismatch between thought and feeling that Eliot had diagnosed, with its attendant feelings of existential unease and alienation. For his part, of course, Eliot had drawn deeply reactionary conclusions from the same feelings.

While Hill struggled through Karl Marx’s Capital (calling it “pretty tough going”) and dutifully attempted to study history through the lens of financial records, statistics about the production of potash, and the like, he never developed a taste for it. What he got from Marx was rather the impetus to correlate ideas with material contexts, and the theory that historical change is not a smooth, consensual movement toward enlightenment, but rather a process driven by social conflicts and contradictions.

The older Hill found the idea of describing his Marxism as “humanist” congenial, as does Braddick. As his view of the Soviet experiment soured and the possibility of a socialist revolution in industrialized Europe dwindled, the notion of a “liberal Marxism” (as Braddick describes Hill’s ideas) came to describe not just one’s reasons for converting to Communism or one’s intellectual interests, but also what survived of that Marxism from “the experience of defeat,” to borrow the title of Hill’s 1984 book. Certainly, Hill always seems to have understood Marxism as complementing or perfecting, rather than rejecting, a liberal tradition of free expression, open debate, and individual exploration.

Regardless of how Hill came upon his Marxism, it helped him to transform the writing of seventeenth-century English history. According to the Whiggish narrative that Hill inherited from scholars like S. R. Gardiner, as Braddick writes, it was “the development of human understanding and the power of ideas” that drove political progress. Gardiner had written a fourteen-volume history of the seventeenth-century “Puritan Revolution,” running from 1603 to 1660.

A masterful scholar, Gardiner was also a high, liberal Victorian (and personally descended from Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, the Puritan, Parliamentary leaders in the Civil War). He tended to celebrate the gradual progress of good ideas, especially religious tolerance and constitutional norms. By contrast, Hill’s long early essay, “The English Revolution 1640,” retells this story from a Marxist perspective.

Writing during the revolution’s tricentennial anniversary, Hill emphasized rupture rather than smooth development. In 1640, no less than in 1940, a received worldview seemed radically inadequate. Smug, exceptionalist English writers often suggested that their country, uniquely in Europe, had entered modernity without a bloody revolution; according to this view, the Interregnum was just an unfortunate and insignificant anomaly.

By contrast, Hill insisted that the Civil War was precisely, in his words, “the destruction of one kind of state and the introduction of a new political structure within which capitalism could freely develop.” Ideas did not prevail merely because they were good, but because material change created new forces to fight for them. It is “struggle that wins reforms.”

Hill stressed that the Civil War was a “class war,” one in which a bourgeois Puritan leadership temporarily allied with radical laborers against the old aristocracy. When the new elites got what they wanted, of course, they sold out the radicals. Yet in Hill’s own time, the industrial proletariat was finally strong enough to complete the revolution and achieve socialism.

Or so it seemed, at least for a few, glorious years. By 1940, like a number of leftists of his generation, Hill had learned Russian and studied in the USSR. Much of his early writing, some of which appeared under a pseudonym, sympathetically explained the Soviet experiment to an English audience. During World War II, he served in the Foreign Office as a liaison to the Soviets.

Braddick’s book debunks, finally and thoroughly, a nasty allegation that Anthony Glees made in the 1980s, accusing Hill of having spied for the Soviet Union during World War II. Braddick shows that Glees was an incompetent reader of the National Archives who also badly misunderstood the wartime context. Hill received his job precisely because he knew Russian and could work with Soviet peers. The British state thus obviously knew he was a Communist, and its officials kept him under careful surveillance during and well after the war.

By the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were trying to destroy Communism altogether, but the position of Western capitalism had been far weaker during the war. At this earlier stage, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt desperately needed the USSR to defeat Germany, and British public opinion was strongly pro-Soviet. By the end of the war, in other words, Hill could be optimistic that the alliance of 1640 between the bourgeoisie and workers had reemerged, but that this time, the future lay with the fully formed, industrial proletariat.

He was wrong for two reasons: First, the reality of the USSR was now a Stalinist, dictatorial nightmare, to which, as Braddick discusses in detail, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was disastrously tethered. This situation led the party, and committed intellectuals like Hill, to take embarrassing positions.

In 1950, Hill lectured on the Soviet Union and, in his own words, “painted a very rosy picture of the Communist way of life,” downplaying reports of mass starvation and ignoring the existence of the gulag. As late as 1953, Hill praised Joseph Stalin as a historian, writing that the Soviet leader “was a highly responsible leader” whose views represent the “highest wisdom of the collective thought of the USSR.” As Braddick writes, with charitable understatement, “It is hard to know what to make of this paean to Stalin.”

However, as Braddick also shows, Hill understood his own historical breakthroughs as stemming directly from the example of Soviet socialism. For one thing, he was drawing on the analytic insights of Soviet historians of England. More broadly, when Hill’s early articles on Thomas Hobbes, Andrew Marvell, and James Harrington, discovered in the thinking of these figures both radical novelty and tense internal contradictions, they could do so only because of a Marxist analysis that Hill identified with the party and with the USSR. Hill’s apologetics for Stalin reflect the uncomfortable existential truth that Hill’s major innovations were tied to the Soviet experiment.

If Hill’s assessment of Stalin was wrong, he also did not anticipate the rapid breakdown of the wartime alliance between the capitalist West and the USSR and the systematic dismantling of the Communist left in the context of the Cold War. Great Britain certainly experienced nothing as vicious or widespread as the American Red Scare. Still, as the historian Matthew Gerth has shown, the government of Labour prime minister Clement Attlee clamped down on Communism at the same time that it was nationalizing key industries and building the National Health Service.

Attlee’s government branded striking miners and dockworkers as Communist dupes while creating an Information Research Department to disseminate anti-communist propaganda and purging Communists from government positions. Braddick doesn’t give this repression as much space as he should. He only briefly mentions the denial of an academic position to Hill in 1949 because of his politics and balances it with a gripe from the conservative historian Hugh Trevor-Roper that Marxist scholars ganged up to criticize his writing. By emphasizing the CPGB’s internal weakness, Braddick gives us the impression that its decline was inevitable, downplaying the importance of external pressure as Labour politicians allied with the United States in the Cold War.

Regardless of the reasons, the CPGB certainly declined. After the revelations of Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956, the British Communist leadership clarified its expectation that “intellectuals” (who were contemptuously, if incoherently, contrasted with real “workers”) should subordinate themselves to the party. It rejected the proposals of Hill and others, including his fellow historians John Saville and E. P. Thompson, for internal reform.

Hill left the CPGB on May Day, 1957. If he initially read the seventeenth century through the optimistic, orthodox horizons of the party in its heyday, a second, later strand in his work tried to grapple with what had gone wrong, and identify what remained of its legacy.

Other radical writers and academics — many, as Braddick astutely notes, a decade or two younger than Hill and thus less tied to the Soviet Union of the ’30s — fashioned what became called the New Left. Hill, by contrast, seems to have concluded that nothing would replace the party. He remained broadly, amorphously progressive, and he never attacked his former comrades, but he plunged himself into writing and teaching. Eventually, he became the master of Balliol College, Oxford.

While much of this writing elaborated themes already sketched or suggested in the 1940s, the freshest material reckoned with what had gone wrong. Hauntingly and powerfully, The World Turned Upside Down narrates the advocacy, often by people of humble class origins, for disestablishment of the English Church, freer attitudes toward sex and marriage, land reform or outright communism, and a democracy based on a wide franchise.

If Hill’s early account of the revolution emphasized the delicate coalition between workers and progressive elites, he was now foregrounding the tensions between the two elements. The book showed how the sentiments and dreams of common people had so frightened Cromwell, Ireton, and other Puritan leaders that they had compromised the cause.

Hill’s subjects were odd folks: Abiezer Coppe, for instance, who reportedly preached profanity-laden sermons about free love in the nude. Hill was clearly finding seventeenth-century models for the sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Such marginal figures did not always leave extensive paper trails. Moreover, after 1660, many radicals went underground or retrospectively bowdlerized their own work.

George Fox, for instance, reimagined the Quakers after the Restoration as a harmlessly pacifist tendency, even as he wrote women out of the movement’s early history — resembling, in Hill’s own time, any number of postwar liberals who conveniently forgot their own earlier, Communist leanings. To reconstruct this suppressed past, Hill turned in part to Royalist and conservative propaganda, which tended to focus on the most radical elements in their Parliamentary opposition.

This method is obviously dubious — a little like watching Fox News and concluding that Antifa super-soldiers are roaming the streets of major American cities. But the broad landscape of a society in turmoil is convincing, even if one squints at the details. Moreover, Hill announces at an early stage that he is writing about “another revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened.”

The book thus has a self-consciously fictional quality, which is not to say Hill made anything up, but rather that he stretched to imagine the counterfactuals that lay beneath the social surface. Surely, he did so because he had himself longed for a parallel transformation and lived through its stifling and death.

After The World Turned Upside Down, Hill largely shifted to popularizing and rehashing his previous work. In the dismal, reactionary ’80s, he was increasingly embattled. While literary scholars were drawn to his work, younger historians often approached it skeptically; the historian J. C. Davis even claimed that Hill had made the Ranters up.

So-called “revisionist” historians questioned whether the sides in the English Civil War aligned neatly with socioeconomic classes and whether the war was fought over big ideas at all. They proffered instead contingent explanations of historical events as local disputes between specific elites. Meanwhile, Hill was the target of right-wing attacks in the press, including the spurious accusations that he had spied for the Soviet Union.

Braddick weighs Hill’s work judiciously, explaining these disagreements and, finally, faulting him for not catching up with the field and mostly ignoring questions about empire, colonialism, or race. He rarely wrote about women, and his writing about sexuality never got beyond binaries of repression and liberation. Despite a growing historiographical emphasis on manuscript sources and private papers, he also did little archival research, instead relying heavily on literary sources and focusing on what was in print.

Much of this critique is fair; certainly, many scholars do their freshest work when they are young. But Braddick seems to me on shakier ground when he faults Hill for not adapting to newer historiographical techniques. These were, after all, pioneered by the revisionists, who found the study of the elite’s private papers congenial to their skepticism of large-scale historical causation, whether Marxist or liberal. Was Hill’s continued emphasis on print simply old-fashioned?

Certainly, it is impossible to claim Hill was being lazy, since, as is often observed, he seems to have read and retained more of seventeenth-century English writing than anyone who has ever lived. Rather, I think, it reflected Hill’s sense that the history he wrote about had unfolded in, and now belonged to, a public. Thus, as he liked to insist, the story had to be rewritten for each generation, because it was itself part of collective, deliberative politics.

After all, the emergence of a print public during the Civil War, through ideological struggle — the loosening of licensing and censorship, the explosion of polemical pamphlets, and so on — was one of Hill’s great, exciting themes. Hill always understood himself to be writing for ordinary people, alongside scholars, in a continuation of the democratic print commons born in 1640.

In this regard, a telling detail in Braddick’s book concerns the journal Past and Present, which Hill helped found. Braddick rightly describes the journal as part of a “great broadening of historiographical imagination in the post-war years.” In its pages, British scholarship brushed off its stuffy, dusty antiquarianism, embracing social history, tackling global and comparative questions, and more.

Yet the journal was only financially viable because its loose association with the CPGB attracted nonacademic subscriptions from party members. The economic dependence perhaps suggests an alternate reading of Hill’s career arc as a historian, and of his later work’s comparative staleness. Hill’s scholarship, it seems, derived its vitality from its connection to a real social movement and political organization, as Hill first buoyantly analyzed its bright prospects, then reckoned with its failure and defeat.

Great history books, as Hill himself would have been the first to suggest, are not only the products of good ideas, rigorous methods, or broad erudition. Rather, they are made, like history itself, through participation in collective, social struggle.