Secretary of State Cordell Hull, c. 1940 (Harris & Ewing / Library of Congress)

My Impromptus column today has several corona-related items — how could it not? — but it leads with a story out of the Middle East: a story touching on the Arab–Israeli conflict. But hang on, that one is corona-related too, as it deals with a Zoom conversation between Palestinians and Israelis, and everyone is Zooming in this time of pandemic.


The other week, I said that our theme song should be “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” (Aretha Franklin). But the Middle Eastern matter is grave — innocent and gutsy people are in the hands of Hamas — and I should not be talkin’ light.

In my column today, Cordell Hull comes up, and I would like to say a bit more here. Hull, you recall, is the Tennessean who served as FDR’s secretary of state. He was in that position for almost the whole of that long presidency. In 1945, Hull won the Nobel Peace Prize, chiefly for fathering the United Nations, but not only for that reason. He was a formidable person.

David Frum quotes him in a remarkable piece called “The Coronavirus Is Demonstrating the Value of Globalization.” The subheading of that piece is: “We are experiencing a painful introduction to anti-globalism and its consequences.”

He quotes a Hull speech from the summer of 1942. I would like to quote it at a bit greater length. You can find it here. Hull began,

The conflict now raging throughout the earth is not a war of nation against nation. It is not a local or regional war or even a series of such wars. On the side of our enemies, led and driven by the most ambitious, depraved, and cruel leaders in history, it is an attempt to conquer and enslave this country and every country. On our side, the side of the United Nations, it is, for each of us, a life-and-death struggle for the preservation of our freedom, our homes, our very existence. We are united in our determination to destroy the worldwide forces of ruthless conquest and brutal enslavement. Their defeat will restore freedom or the opportunity for freedom alike to all countries and all people.

There is a lot to chew on in that paragraph alone. But we will move on, as Hull said elsewhere in the speech,

One of the greatest of all obstacles which in the past have impeded human progress and afforded breeding grounds for dictators has been extreme nationalism. All will agree that nationalism and its spirit are essential to the healthy and normal political and economic life of a people, but when policies of nationalism — political, economic, social, and moral — are carried to such extremes as to exclude and prevent necessary policies of international cooperation, they become dangerous and deadly. Nationalism, run riot between the last war and this war, defeated all attempts to carry out indispensable measures of international economic and political action, encouraged and facilitated the rise of dictators, and drove the world straight toward the present war. During this period, narrow and short-sighted nationalism found its most virulent expression in the economic field. It prevented goods and services from flowing in volume at all adequate from nation to nation and thus severely hampered the work of production, distribution, and consumption, and greatly retarded efforts for social betterment.

As I said, Cordell Hull won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945, chiefly for his work on the U.N., which would replace the battered League of Nations. But that was not the only reason for his award. I will quote from my 2012 book, Peace, They Say, which is a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. Bear in mind that this prize is given in and by Norway, so when I refer to the chairman, he is a Norwegian:

Giving the presentation speeches in 1945 was a new committee chairman, Gunnar Jahn — an economist of the Liberal party, a Resistance leader during the war. In his speech for Hull, he cited and praised the laureate’s fathering of the U.N., of course. But he spoke about much more than that. Hull had evidently not received the Nobel prize for the U.N. alone. Jahn spent some time on Hull’s career-long devotion to lower tariffs and free trade, hailing him as “representative of all that is best in liberalism, a liberalism with a strong social implication.” He also made a point of Hull’s opposition to isolationism in foreign policy.

Back to David Frum’s piece, and the speech that Hull gave in July 1942. David writes,

Hull was 70 when he spoke those words — old by the standards of his time. Some of the younger New Dealers dismissed him as an anachronism. His ideas about free trade, they said, should be consigned to the dead past, not the exciting new future of national planning and state control. The old man was right, though, and the bright young New Dealers were wrong. Hull’s memory of how things had been proved the opposite of reactionary. Adapted to the new conditions of the postwar world, the old ideas delivered even more abundant prosperity and an even more secure peace than they had before. We need Cordell Hulls for our time.

Shortly after I read this piece, I read a book by Javier Cercas, the Spanish novelist, literary scholar, and journalist. It’s called “Lord of All the Dead,” and I have reviewed it for the forthcoming issue of National Review. A particular passage reminded me of what David had written. I’ll have to give some background.


Cercas is imagining a scene between Manuel Mena (his great-uncle), a bright teenager smitten by fascist ideology and rhetoric, and his beloved teacher, Don Eladio. José Antonio, remember, was the founder of the Falange Española.

Okay, here’s Cercas:

It is tempting to imagine Manuel Mena trying to persuade Don Eladio of the newest revolutionary merits recently learned from José Antonio, and Don Eladio countering Manuel Mena’s fresh-faced, ardent rhetoric and the utopian spell of the Falangist ideology and its shiny new suggestion of youth and modernity with the old rationalist scepticism and the old and peaceful arguments of the old liberal ideology, which Manuel Mena would consider out of date.

Such discussions are taking place this very day. There is nothing new ever, is there?