Comments on: Flight’s message to the politicians

By: Airminded · The enemy within

Airminded · The enemy within — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:42:35 +0000

[...] month I touched on the Hidden Hand, an alleged German conspiracy during the First World War, supposedly undermining the British war [...]

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:01:11 +0000

Erik:

Yes, the trial itself was about lesbianism, but male homosexuality was definitely a big part of the first 47000 stuff. And lesbianism plays into the gender-inversion thing on the home front, anyway, with fewer men around and women doing previously male jobs. It’s a good point that the Hidden Hand wasn’t repeated in WWII, or at least wasn’t as popular, but there are some pretty big differences between the mobilisation in WWI and WWII. I haven’t checked this, but my guess is that a bigger proportion of the Army stayed at home between 1940 and 1944, where they obviously weren’t being killed or maimed, and there were also a lot of RAF boys at home (although they were being killed). Plus a lot of Americans from 1942 to help keep the womenfolk on the straight and narrow, so to speak, though that would obviously lead to a whole other set of concerns. In WWI, more men in the Army and most of them were in France for most of the war.

As I say, it’s just a half-baked idea, and no doubt other factors were at play too. Maybe demographics, as you suggest. Also female suffrage — that was an unresolved tension in WWI, but had been resolved by WWII. Which reminds me, I’m sure Christabel Pankhurst’s conversion to hyperpatriotism and obsession with veneral disease is somehow connected to all this. I think she dabbled in the Hidden Hand stuff too.

Jonathan:

Agreed!

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:25:09 +0000

I find myself longing for some kind of quantitative attack on the question of homoerotic innuendo in public life.

That may be the best historiographical comment I read all month.

By: Erik Lund

Erik Lund — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:43:09 +0000

Kitchener frozen in a cave of ice? That’s just stupid. They’re thinking of Captain America.
On the other hand, “inappropriate embrace with a subordinate?” Now that’s the Kitchener I know.
As for the “Hidden Hand,” wasn’t it mostly lesbians in Pemberton Billing? On the other hand, all that association with the French… how many snide comments about English public schools do you have to hear before you begin to have some doubts?
And again, Keynes was the fiercest critic of the reparations lobby, at least later on. And we all know about Keynes. And then there was the prewar press campaign against the Kaiser…..

I find myself longing for some kind of quantitative attack on the question of homoerotic innuendo in public life. Is it more prevalent in the Great War era? Can we link it overarching social factors? Mobilisation doesn’t do it for me, since the implicit comparison is with World War II. I have a gut sense that demographics, and particularly the relative predominance of the European youth cohort in 1914 is going to be the explanation for any social oddities that come up. If that be the case though, any pan-European phenomena is going to be significantly more prevalent in Germany than in the United Kingdom, with France lagging both.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 03:57:51 +0000

Absolutely, it’s extraordinarily lurid stuff! Hayward seems to suggest that this is mainly the product of one fevered mind; but clearly his ideas had some wider appeal. It’s easy to come up with a half-baked theory for the rise of sexual anxieties. On the one hand, so many men were away from home for long periods of time, in camps or overseas, spending their time with other men (with little female companionship except for women of questionable virtue). On the other, women were taking over many previously-male jobs on the home front, where they presumably outnumbered men. All this disruption of traditional gender relations due to the war could easily lead to anxiety about sexual relations which centred around homosexuality in particular (as did the Maud Allan-Pemberton Billing affair), it seems to me. I don’t know if anyone has ever looked at the Hidden Hand from a gender perspective — I don’t think anyone much has looked at the Hidden Hand at all — but I think it would be a fascinating exercise.

BTW, I realised that perhaps the fear/threat of revolution after winning the war was not so silly after all, when one considers that the notion of a “mutilated victory” was to become a crucial element in Fascist propaganda in Italy in the next few years …

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:53:13 +0000

The Hidden Hand stuff is pretty dramatic, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Copperhead/Dolschtoss narrative with an emphasis on sexuality before. Religion/ethnicity, sure, but not sexuality.