History doesn't repeat. But it rhymes.

Goering and Trump, 1860 and 2020 and 2024(?)

You may have heard an aphorism attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”*

That thought occurred to me a few times recently as I read a pair of histories: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson, and And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, by Jon Meacham.

I’ll start with the Larson book. It focuses on Charles Dodd, who became the U.S. ambassador to Nazi Germany in 1933 shortly after Hitler came to power, and his daughter Martha, a writer and socialite who befriended several prominent Nazis, including the head of the Gestapo (photo above is from a Gestapo staff party). Dodd, an historian, former president of the University of Chicago and Germanophile who fondly recalled his grad student days in Leipzig, came to Germany thinking stories of violent Nazi excesses had to be exaggerations. He soon learned otherwise and sounded the alarm to the State Department about the level of danger posed by the Nazis – and was ultimately replaced by an ambassador who was more amenable to making friends with Germany. Martha, a would-be intellectual who had been friends with Chicago writers Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder, arrived in Germany wanting to see the good in what she thought of as the Nazis’ “social revolution.” She too soured on them (not before dating Gestapo head Rudolf Diels and having a private lunch with Hitler) and eventually fell in love with a Russian agent of the NKVD, the precursor of the KGB.

There’s a lot of fascinating detail in the book, but a couple of points really “rhymed” with more recent history. Relying on diaries kept by both Dodds, Larson provides an engrossing sketch of the number two man in Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, governor of Prussia and head of the Prussian police, among his many titles. There’s one occasion in the book where Charles Dodd is invited to a reception at Goering’s huge, elaborate country estate and we see the man for the vain, evil clown he was as he goes through multiple costume changes over the course of the event, wearing various flamboyant military-style uniforms that he designed himself.

The descriptions of Goering struck me as especially timely as Donald Trump continues his drive to be the Republican candidate in this fall’s American presidential election. We have, of course, heard warnings of fascist tendencies in Trump for eight years now, and many people have noted that Trump’s rhetoric of “enemies of the people” “poisoning the blood of America”  echoes Hitler’s Mein Kampf. But for me, Goering, that cruel, greedy, vain, lardbucket with appalling taste, who devoted as much energy to amassing his vast collection of looted art as he did to defending the Third Reich, seems a better comparison. Trump doesn’t believe in anything enough to be a Hitler, but he could be a Goering. (As Walter put it in The Big Lebowski: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism. At least it’s an ethos.”)

Another thing that jumped out at me was how much all the high-ranking Nazis hated each other. Goering hated SS head Himmler. Himmler hated Goering and Diels. They all hated Ernst Roehm, head of the Stormtroopers (the SA), the street militia that had played a vital role in bringing the Nazis to power. Again, there’s that rhyme. I think of how everybody in the Trump administration hated everybody else: Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, the parade of communications directors, including the hilariously foul-mouthed Anthony (“I’m not trying to suck my own cock like Steve Bannon”) Scaramucci. Since they all believed in nothing but enhancing their own power by being closer to their boss, they all hated anybody who threatened their position.

Finally, reading about the SA – whose rampages were witnessed a few times by figures in Larson’s book – prompted thoughts on the Washington D.C. insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. The SA, of course, included fanatical believers in Nazism. But it’s also clear that many brownshirts were young men who just loved to get drunk and beat people up. For many of them, they weren’t beating people in the street because they believed in Hitler; they believed in Hitler because that meant they could beat people in the street. Surely more than a few of the Proud Boys, militia members and others who attacked Congress in 2021 were attracted to the cause precisely because it gave them the excuse to hit people and wreck things.

Now on to Abraham Lincoln.

Meacham’s book focuses on Lincoln’s lifelong opposition to slavery and is intended in part as a defence against the charge that the president was only a reluctant emancipator. On that matter, Meacham acknowledges that Lincoln did not believe the federal government had the constitutional authority to ban slavery in the slave states. Lincoln’s anti-slavery statements and campaigns had focused entirely on preventing its spread to new territories and states of the west. Even once the war started in April 1861, Lincoln waited two years to make the Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed slaves in rebel states, and waited until after he won re-election in 1864 to push a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery altogether. Meacham argues, convincingly, that pushing for abolition earlier, when the South was winning most of the battles, would have fractured Union support for the war and strengthened slavery for years to come.

But here’s where Meacham’s book really rhymes with recent events. In 1864, Lincoln was in serious danger of losing the election to a Democratic Party candidate who would have opened up negotiations to end the war, allowing the South to keep slavery. Union soldiers mostly supported Lincoln and wanted to win the war, rather than give the South a victory. So both for reasons for democratic principle and to help the Republican cause, the Republicans did all they could to make sure that soldiers were able to cast ballots even if they were far from their homes. The Democrats did all they could to keep those soldiers’ absentee ballots from being counted. It’s a mirror image of the 2020 election, when the Democrats wanted to make sure that people worried about covid – largely poorer, non-white and Democratic-leaning – could vote in advance polls and the Republicans made it as hard as possible to do so.

An equally striking historical rhyme dates to the start of the Lincoln presidency, in 1861 Then, as in January 2021, there were a lot of people who wanted to stop the electoral votes from being counted and prevent the winner of the election from being sworn in as president. There was talk of sending an army of volunteer rioters from the south to Washington to that end. And the outgoing vice president, a Kentucky slave-owner named John Breckenridge who had run unsuccessfully against Lincoln (the Democratic party had split in two in 1860 and ended up with two presidential candidates, which is what allowed Lincoln to win) was obviously sympathetic to those who didn’t want Lincoln sworn in. But Breckenridge, like Mike Pence in 2021, carried out his assigned duties as vice president to certify the election result.

We’re a little less than a year away from the start of a second Biden presidency or a second Trump one. How many more rhymes are we going to hear?

Since I started with a famous quotation falsely attributed to one southern writer, I’ll end with one that is definitely by Mississippi novelist William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

*According to the site Quote Investigator, Twain never said it. It was probably coined by a psychoanalyst named Theodor Reik.