The New Year's Eve now emerging poses no particular question with regards to the closing of centuries, or even decades, but does remind me of a question posed since several years. Six years past, I put forwards five presidents, including Jefferson, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Coolidge and Kennedy, suggested as the best among the 44 men (now 44 indeed, and all still men) to have occupied the office. I have tried and trussed with regards to the "five greatest" of personalities of the 20th century, speaking solely in terms of affirmed individual influence... good or bad.
The selection has not been an easy one. I had to forgo, most notably given the gender quota (predictable but perhaps not so draconian, in the great century of emancipation) Florence Nightingale and the bulwark of the suffragettes, whose struggle took flight in the late 19th century, harkening back to the Seneca Falls convention in 1848; a different wave, another revolution in another century. Yet, beyond the realm of the strictly political - to which only a minority belongs, and many highly expected have been excluded - there is at least one illustrious whose legacy cannot be but recognised.
Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Innovator of innovators, the first marksman of the 20th century of unexpected, pervasive, inexorable targets, and perhaps the greatest in altering its physical shapes and our day-to-day routines. His example have set the model, his tactics were renowned and bold past the line of insanity, and his antics brought controversy and pure disdain well beyond eccentricity. Quite rightly so, if one would only consider his fate in our light, had the great ideological struggles of the interwar period turned out very differently, and not vainly rocked itself against the American exceptionalism (and isolationism) seemingly so unassailable.
In the great struggles of the late century, which would escalate into the next, he was an innovator of roads Rockefeller would not have foreseen, and combined an industrial mass capacity that inspired rather than rivalled with a perchance for the consumer of limited means, a standard set hard to question. More radical, and perhaps harder to replicate, he raised wages by 120 % to $5, or 1/72 of a standard model a day, to exult even greater efficiency and make the Ford Motor Company the premier patron of low-skilled labour, and thus (not nonwithstanding) the prime producer in a rapidly growing field. In 1918, half the cars in the United States were a black model T and Ford himself had become the largest automobile producer, the first to have thought feasible that which Herbert Hoover later denoted as the dream of "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage", the chickens flocking to the pots as much as the cars made an everyman's luxury, by the end of the century being hardly even considered a luxury at all. In 1926, the company introduced the five-day, 40-hour workweek, further bolstering output and worker loyalty. In this struggle he did not stand alone, but would be a main architect of the consumer society as well. With the increasing contradictions and struggles which came to a close during Hoover's days, and it became questionable whether the system which made Ford, and Hoover, could sustain itself or their manyfold beneficiaries turned more reluctant. Across the Atlantic this sway would turn into bloody mayhem, stoked by the reading matter Ford had gratuitously produced and distributed to awaken Americans in face of an everlasting, and very omnipresent Jewish menace.
The source of Ford's antisemitism is not very well known, but was almost certainly stoked by the fires which burned bright in the East and across Europe, and the presumption of a Bolshevik-anarchist subversion against Anglo-Saxon creativity, Christian society and American toil and success, as expressed by his own life's achievements. Biographer Robert Lacey claimed that it may have ultimately closed his own life, as he suffered a final and debilitating stroke during a newsreel of Nazi concentration camps. In this flirt or rather obsession, not unrivalled, may qualify as one of the most flagrant, if not functional, cases of a man who was on "the wrong side of history".
How he would have fared in Ferdinand Porsche's or Fritz ter Meer's situation, we may not know. But as Porsche and KdF failed to rival Ford's success, so did managed totalitarian economies fail to replace the king. The capitalist economy, and consumer automobile ownership, endured and eventually reached a further zenith after the war which followed, although bolstered by increased regulatory frameworks and the industrial economy would eventually reach a point of robotisation and relocation that quashed any hopes of a workers' capitalism, killed by the ecstasy of the means which made its sustainment profitable, and thus possible. How much he helped to accomplish its consummation, and the unprecedented wealth eventually seen at the close of the century of the automobile, we know not either. But in any individual case, he would have influenced as much as he was moved. Like Tesla, Edison and scores of inventors and innovators after him, and Thomas Jefferson before him, a celebration to the universal genius that resides in the eccentric.
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
The only one to have caught my eye, so to speak, if from a state of slow and ghostly mouldering thus consigned over a stretch of ninety years, caught on as his empire - the state he built - gradually faced a lingering and ultimately fatal decay of its own.
How could we describe him, apart from (as well as making justice to) Robert Service's statement that indeed "we live in his shadow"? In the lingo of builders; the architect, if it doesn't sound to pessimistic, of the modern bureaucratic-totalitarian state, although its facets may not have been those he had selected at another time. The destruction ball and undertaker of an old and society which, in his analysis, had come to a point of self-breaking, a humanity divided, and yet strained against orthodoxy in his proposition that radical socio-economic change could be orchestrated, ultimately, in a society so backward that his great master had never bothered to renounce it. You make your soup with the ingredients at hand, as a great Swedish cook supposedly (but, as with many cases, probably never) said. His country, his people were Russia, and the first to be rocked by major upheaval in the first existential struggle of this century of revolutionary alterations challenged only by the previous. His life, blossoming in this catalyst of carnage and change, had been prepared for this moment. He acted with novelty decisiveness, intrigue and stubbornness as he returned from exile to encompass the destruction of a dynasty responsible for the death of his older brother Aleksandr Uljanov, the man of Simbirsk, and eventually millions of others - the inexorable march not towards, but already into something different, a baptism of fire and blood that would not only destroy old Russia, but make the new world.
And home he spirited, or was spirited; aimed, inserted and (in Churchill's words) injected into the Russian body politic. Months later, after steering fractional infighting and yet another exile, in the eery dark hours of an early morning in what was October on the pages of the outdated Czarist calendar, the man of history emerged victorious - not a victor, but at head of an unruly movement how united, at least inside the borders within it would finally govern, and ultimately most potent of the forces unleashed. Old Russia had seen a potential which its institutions and traditions were unable to capitalise on, which would eventually - within the lifetime he might have expected - see the rise of the country as the a superpower on a map made bipolar.
But Lenin would see none of it. Suffering from a number of conditions since long, and baptised in power with a submersion into incapacity by an hail of bullets sent by a scion of the deposed Socialist-Revolutionary party - which under Lenin's dominance had bested him in the election to the Constituent Assembly, Russia's first real parliament, almost immediately discarded - his health subsequently deteriorated, his body made useless just as the war had been turned and the world won for the new state. He would spend his last two vile years a figure more impotent than the lesser of the Czars whose position of ritualistic symbolism had earned his hatred. In death, this humiliation would escalate under a successor he had groomed, then struggled, and arguably acted to preempt, one who would go on to massacre most of the men of 1917 - and a few of its illustrious women too - in a sanguinary vortex of personal ambition, imperialist state building that would rival the world and exceed that under which they were born, and entrenching "Marxism-Leninism" as the leading force of the workers Lenin had hoped to unite.
His failure may have proved even more fatal, had he lived to see his further successors and their treatment of his legacy and in the remains smouldering, if yet in greatness, one may only ask if the Germany a century later has not proved in spite of its failed revolution a better case for the workers' state, a state of justice and rid of want, and what could have accomplished had it been rocked into the violent currents of 1917-22. Seldom before, and never after, had someone so readily stood at the gates of history both as a case of greatness accomplished - in pursuit of either terror or the promise of a future without the throes of abjection - and the empty promise of the counter-factual which, in slightly different circumstances, could have been that shadow.
Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997)
Deng Xiaoping was born a Hakka, the endo-Han ethnic group associated with the leadership of the Taiping, the most significant of many movements to rock the corrupt, decaying and eventually dethroned Qing tutelage, whose position on that day may yet have seemed unassailable. After training in France, a return to a country wrecked by long-delayed change and upheaval, of a nation breaking apart and a society deeply at odds with its bimillennial legacy, Deng joined the nascent Communist Party (Gongchandang) in its early infancy. It might not have spelled his path to power. After spending years hiding in the mountains after the collapse of the Jiangxi Soviet, haunted and betrayed even by the socialist state whose main interest had been the devouring of Mongolia and Xinjiang into its own sphere of influence, the great and terrible war engulfing both - and finally uniting the revolutionary parties - would push China into the same mold.
But it was only after its own revolution came into Deng's hands that China could stand up and walk with dignity past its northern neighbour. After destroying the Japanese, Chiang's "disease of the skin", the Reds would escalate the struggle and push Guomindang into the sea and over it, and under the new constitution of 1954 Deng finally rose to the position of finance minister. He would not keep it long, and spent years of increasingly erratic and sanguinary purges - and the great starvation which would double the pain and consumption of the war - he was stripped of all offices, exiled, and all but lost his eldest son, beaten and abused into a less illustrious station. Had it been Deng, or had he suffered the fate of many others - including Mao's dauphin Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi, the nominal supreme official - we might know a very different China.
After the death of the Chairman, the table would creak - and all bets were off, and increased manyfold. But ultimately, the alliance with the man christened as the young and impotent ultimate successor, the Malenkov of the Red Emperor, secured his return to power and rise within the Central Committee, without ever becoming the head even of the party apparatus. His personal dignitas was so looming that he could sway policy decisions and direct them through his (gradually junior) proxies, only remaining the chairman of the military commission, the newly created advisory commission and the Chinese bridge society, from which he maintained this position already conquered with the grace, cooperative instincts and soft eloquence of a player of the game. Antagonising the Vietnamese, reconciling with the Indians and maintaining and strengthening the bond with the United States which drove an ultimately tripolar Cold War to a conclusion, his main object into which he poured his prestige was the reconstitution of the revolution, and of revolutionary China itself under the principles of Deng Xiaoping Theory (邓小平理论), and the more universal and compact notion of "seek truth from facts" (实事求是), often summed up by the maxim that the cat - whatever its colour - must foremost be concerned with catching the mice. Its inherent pragmatism and reduction of dogma was a cold breeze, but if the world had found the new leader a member of a reformist camp, its contents would stun nonetheless.
The result, secured and emerging potent only under the 1990s, was grandiose indeed, and put the country onto a path whereby its internal strength would inevitably accomplish the hopes of Chinese intellectuals for two centuries of stagnation, subjection and starvation - intellectual and political as well as raw, material - under a pennant far wider, and perhaps more promising for democratic aspirations, often mechanistically and dogmatically understood as part of economic liberalisation and decentralisation. But as for the latter, while the eastern twin whose pursuit of the same path under different conditions had just seen and all but endorsed the formation of a real opposition party, Chinese activists raised their voices in defiance not only of Deng, but the Gongchandang predominance and a history of Chinese authoritarian rulers in itself, and in Zhao Ziyang found a living voice within the establishment willing to take their side and argue the case of political reform. Deng, ever the flint-hearted pragmatic molded by the starkest of reality, sent in the tanks and snuffled the rebellion before it started, detaining Zhao for the remaining years of his life, to scant praise and glowing condemnation. But the repression came too soon to seem unprecedented, and hostility could not resume. His last years would be more quiet, but help establish the predominance of his reforms, as well as the inception of a non-autocratic system later to bend. As he died, he left an obvious successor, but within a different system and a different China, most clearly defined by the reduction of North Korea from a client slave state into a peculiar and erratic phenomenon, parted in essence from the moderation of its great and increasingly uncomfortable patron.
His work, rather than his creed, fought for and built new China in all its greatness, its reduction in poverty and its stark repressive horror, but nevertheless inaugurated a new era of optimism over dogmatism, development over worldwide ambitions, accomplishment over brazen unity. As the new century loomed, one may not have proposed which change it would accomplish in the world, rather than the opposite, but like Marx it is a question which looms larger as the years pass by and the influence makes itself further known farther from its shores.
Edward Bernays (1891-1995)
You would be forgiven for not knowing about him. Still, suggest he hasn't had an impact on the life you lead - perhaps so many main facets of it - and you may be mistaken in a manner so as to make him very proud indeed. Bernays was a maker in the shadows, a remaker of countries who never raised a sword, a Kaunitz or Machiavelli or Metternich whose works - and words - were never consigned to and often parted from the strictly political. A nephew of Freud, and arguably the last standing of the "great Austrians" of the 20th century, his talents would transcend the strictly personal and psychological to the great affairs of state, of sociology, mass politics and economics, and - above all - consumer society as a practice and an ethic. The greatest changers of history, it must be said, are those whose paradigm are so hard to grasp, yet seemingly so entrenched. Hegel, Aristotle and Luther are easily forgotten, but the residue of their produce so ever-reaching. From Bernays' theory of mass behaviour, and how it could be manipulated - rather than, as was the case for Marx, merely predicted - would emerge not only a series of propagandistic means of warfare seemingly more fit for the era of nuclear non-warfare and perpetual power balance, the new society of the postwar period, defined by consumerism and propaganda, in its wider, less sneering sense. In this, every society of affluence live within his legacy, and reproduce it whilst knowing. What Freud did for psychiatry, he made for Western capitalism, and in this made it stronger and more pervasive in times of great trials.
The manufacture of consent, in itself a revolutionary concept, would be ironically more potent in the society lauded for its liberty, on which Bernays' family threw itself, and he his career. He assisted Calvin Coolidge in his successful 1924 campaign, which saw Coolidge win an absolute majority despite the re-emergent fracture between progressive and conservative Republicans from 12 years before, and carried the means of hard, scientific-tested campaigning to the foreign policy field until the end of the Cold War and the emergence of American consumer capitalism, at the shelf and ballot alike, as the unquestioned victor, having broken down socialist alternatives in the Soviet Union and Sweden. He made women smoke by making smoking feminist, he made bananas popular amongst a wider selection of consumers to a tally of millions and billions, and complimented the workingman's egg breakfast with a Catholic marriage with bacon, all by nudging at the lowest denominators in preference selection, and in this accomplishing more than had been done by any sinister preacher or microphone-kissing dictator in manufacturing what the totalitarians could not; the desire of the subject, and by so systemic means so as to make it almost scientific, in this preceding the attention economy. As Schopenhauer famously claimed, man "cannot will what he wills", but what was filling this mysterious void, he could say little. Few before Bernays would have tried to answer it. But as the century came to a close, which he would follow into the IT revolution, the Clinton administration until its last breaths, Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman held the greatest credit of shaping the new world marked by Fukuyama as the destiny of mankind - now, as he would have affirm poignantly with scant idealism, like wiping a smudge, humankind.
Among his lesser known, and lucrative works include assisting the establishment of the NAACP, increased awareness of multiple sclerosis, and arguably put his theory in service of democratic institutions and several progressive causes - but facing rigid criticism for undermining its tenets, including by author and critic Marvin Olasky, who suggested Bernays' scientific approach to the inner workings of decision-making made the notion of equal, independent-minded citizens more harm than a growing bastion of freedom, a point echoing in the age of stolen elections, troll armies and desinformation, the balkanisation of the media and the disintegration - and perhaps reemergence - of legal constricts.
What he would have said in the era of Facebook, Snapchat, Cambridge Analytica, Netflix - the latter being founded by his great-nephew - and the emergence of the attention economy and netocracy to displace physical consumption, or rather improve it, we cannot know. But in appealing to the personal and narcissistic in individuals, he managed to govern them all, in a way negating Marx' precepts as the great socio-political revolver of the 20th century.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
Edward Bernays
Finally, a fifth name, which would have to be offered as a dark horse had I not thought it in the very top tier. Which, of course, it reasonably must be:
Maria Skłodowska (1867-1934)
Hers was the first recognition with no equal of its kind twice granted, both earnestly, and the first issued to a woman scientist in the - dare I say it? - actually accomplished, prestigious categories. From not so illustrious beginnings, Polish Maria Salomea fought, moved, loved, delved deep into the expanding frontiers of natural science, rejected orthodoxies and never stopped the relentless pursuit of enquiry, wherever its truth and its undue harshness would take her. Ultimately, her work very much changed the workings of the 20th century more so than Alfred Nobel's own, or her predecessor Wilhelm Röntgen's, of science and society as well as geopolitics and ideology, and grant an eery truth to the pricemaker's desire for a weapon so destructive it would render war all but impossible. A child of a homeland lost and the first woman accepted as a professor at the Université de Paris, an institution of early beginnings but not as mighty a name as Sorbonne, her research would earn her a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. In an alleged fit of precautionary madness, the initial laureates would have been her husband Pierre, and co-researcher Henri Becquerel, for groundbreaking work on radiation. More memorably, the subject matter would pose an eerily prescient hint on the manner of their deaths. Her doctoral adviser, Gabriel Lippman, would follow her only five years later, for his own research.
For they met in
Einstein once said that of all the celebrities of his time, Marie was the one who fame had not corrupted (ostensibly, though his sentiment may not rule it out, excluding himself). Few of her kind would pay so high a price, and the wrecking fate inflicted on both the Curies, and for which there was not then any effective cure, would double down on the so lately restored Polish commonwealth by a rising threat whose ambitions her field would have to marshal their best to quell.
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