Historians have been busily herding human events into generations, centuries or eras for a long time now, with many also indulging in that most popular and no less arbitrary way of organising the past: by decade. All of which, before we’ve even got going, and whether I like it or not, situates this very review in the decade of centenaries (the 2010s), the century of technology, the knowledge age, and the post-millennial generation (to name but a few).
Cast in iron by a seemingly harmless shrug of the shoulders and the “well, you know, it was the ’60s”, these influential categorisations of the past can become intellectual cages into which entirely isolated and random events are shooed. But there’s a relatively new escape route from all this, and it’s trending in today’s historical writing: the book about one particular year.
In recent times we’ve had 1606, 1820 and 1965 (apologies if your favourite year has been venerated in print and I’ve omitted it, but it’s sometimes hard to keep up).
A review in the New Yorker on last year's 1995 – grandiloquently subtitled The Year the Future Began – branded this the "one-dot theory of history". I'll go one further and call it the annual-report approach.
This is not to denigrate Simon Hall’s fine narrative history of 1956. Unlike 1995, as a year 1956 has more than the mere patina of historical significance to it. It was the year that witnessed the Suez crisis, the Montgomery bus boycott and, most significantly, the Hungarian uprising. Despite its defeat to Soviet force, Hungary’s revolution would permanently taint the USSR and portend its eventual collapse.
Alongside its more profound consequences, events in Budapest led Britain’s young, left-wing historians of the 1950s to leave the British Communist Party en masse in protest. But Hall, a young British historian whose research specialises in the American civil rights movement, begins his history of 1956 with a failed bomb attack at the Alabama home of 27-year-old Baptist pastor Martin Luther King jnr. As the author himself admits, a book of this kind does not contain much in the way of revelation or primary source material, instead leaning heavily on the work of other scholars. But the narrative is at its best with Hall in comfortable command of his specialist area. The story of King’s journey from possessing a mini arsenal of weapons, to long nocturnal discussions with pacifists over pig’s-ear sandwiches and other soul food, to his final embrace of Gandhian principles, is particularly readable.
Rebellious moment
While you can’t exactly smell the cigarette smoke at the riotous Fats Domino concerts, Hall captures the spirit of ’56 – one of teddy boys and tribulation – pretty well. The secret is letting the immediacy of the rebellious moment speak for itself. When a female Polish protester claims that now, for the very first time, she has “zest for life”, Hall ensures you can almost picture her lips moving.
Parts of the “world in revolt” narrative are a bit too intoxicating and, as the story unfolds, the author just about manages to suppress the aching urge to proclaim 1956 the moment when a global civil rights movement flowered, which would have made this a simplistic tale of goodies and baddies, of pious protesters on the one hand and stubborn white supremacists and Soviet generals on the other. Rather, “the people”, whether in the boulevards of Budapest or the souks of Algiers, may have had ideas of social justice on their side, but they were also capable of horrific violence. “Mass resistance”, Hall reminds us, could also take the form of popular support for the Jim Crow laws.
While two enormous bronze shoes may have been the only part of Stalin’s statue to survive the Budapest mob in 1956, Hall argues that some great men of the year possessed feet of clay, not least the martyred Hungarian premier Imre Nagy.
Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev, similarly out of touch with the exhilarating spirit of youth in revolt, are juxtaposed with Angry Young Man Fidel Castro, whose bearded guerrillas would, ironically enough, go on to provide the very unbending communism under attack in the east with a dollop of Caribbean sex appeal.
In this fluidly written global history, chapters take the form of vignettes. By adopting such a format, Hall manages to squeeze in goings-on in South Africa, Cyprus, Ghana, Algeria and Cuba, alongside the more predictable focus on the US and the Soviet Union. In the sections on Britain’s numerous overseas problems, there’s no mention of the IRA’s Border campaign, launched that year. This speaks to the fact that this remains a superpowers story, a point emphasised by the paucity of material on places for which 1956 would also hold importance (such as Pakistan, China and Latin America) and on the nonaligned movement as a whole.
Another unifying and recurrent cold-war theme is that of the bogeyman. Just as conservatives in the southern US could dismiss campus protesters as “reds”, so Soviet officials could paint liberal reformers as imperialists and cryptofascists.
Pivotal
So just how pivotal was 1956? If the number of countries boycotting the Olympics is taken as a barometer of global political tension, or if the classic scene of the mob demanding cheap bread is indicative of revolution, then the answer is “very”. Despite focusing on just one year, this book actually contributes much to the revision of the view of the 1950s as a staid decade. And, unquestionably, 1956 was the turning point for the post-Stalin Soviet Union.
Yet 1789, 1848 or 1917 it was not. Hall is too good a historian to claim that everything hinged on 1956, that history changed course thanks to this single year. The closest he comes is to state that, of those who took to the streets to clamour for change, “some sensed that they were part of a larger, interconnected story”.
Here, unfortunately, we come to the central problem of the annual-report approach: claim too much interconnection between events in your particular year and you appear hyperbolic; claim too little and you have chronology but no thesis.
But just as those tacky souvenir keyrings listing all the events that happened on one’s birthday somehow still hold appeal, so the marketability of this product cannot be disputed. Know someone approaching their 60th birthday in 2016? This is the perfect gift, for this enjoyable book, as Hall’s demographically conscious publisher will be very well aware, is a valuable addition to the genre.
Bryce Evans is senior lecturer in history at Liverpool Hope University. His most recent book is Ireland During the Second World War: Farewell to Plato's Cave
