E. D. Morel
E. D. Morel | |
---|---|
Tom Johnston Edwin Scrymgeour | |
Majority | 32,846 (26.5%) |
Personal details | |
Born | Georges Edmond Pierre Achille Morel Deville 10 July 1873 Moreton Hampstead, Devon , England |
Spouse |
Mary Richardson (m. 1896) |
Children | 5 |
Occupation | Journalist, author, politician |
Edmund Dene Morel (born Georges Edmond Pierre Achille Morel Deville; 10 July 1873 – 12 November 1924) was a French-born British journalist, author,
As a young official at the shipping company
Morel played a significant role in the British
Morel was elected to Parliament in 1922 as a Labour candidate, defeating the incumbent Winston Churchill for his seat, and was re-elected in 1924, dying in office. Morel collaborated closely with future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and was considered for the post of Foreign Secretary, though he ultimately acted only as an unofficial adviser to MacDonald's government.
Background
Morel was born in the
When Emmeline Deville fell ill in 1888, the money for school fees was no longer available and Edmund was forced to return to Paris to work as a bank clerk.
Congo activism
Discoveries at Elder Dempster
In 1891, Morel obtained a clerkship with
Elder Dempster had a shipping contract with the
Morel discussed the discrepancies with the head of the Elder Dempster line, who responded coldly and dismissively. The company soon offered Morel an overseas promotion and then a sinecure consultancy in return for a guarantee of his silence. Morel refused both offers, and left the company in 1901 to become a full-time journalist.[11]
Journalism and Congo Reform Association
In 1900, Morel put new life into the campaign against Congo misrule (begun a decade before by the American George Washington Williams) with a series of articles detailing his discoveries about the Congo Free State trade imbalances.[6] His inside information made him a powerful voice against the exploitation, as previous activists had lacked his access to precise figures about the trade.[12] In 1903, he founded his own magazine, the West African Mail, with the collaboration of John Holt, a businessman and friend of Mary Kingsley, who feared that the system of the Congo Free State would be applied upon the rest of the West African colonies. The Mail was an "illustrated weekly journal founded to meet the rapidly growing interest in west and central African questions".[13] The paper also received initial financial backing from Sir Alfred Lewis Jones, Morel's former employer at Elder Dempster, apparently in a final attempt to moderate Morel's criticism of the company, but Jones soon discontinued his support.[14] Morel published several pamphlets and his first book, Affairs of West Africa, a collection of his essays.[15]
In 1903, under pressure from Morel's campaign, the
The Congo Reform Association had the support of famous writers such as Joseph Conrad (whose Heart of Darkness was inspired by a voyage to the Congo Free State),[22] Anatole France,[23] Nobel laureates Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and John Galsworthy,[23][24] Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle,[25] civil rights activist Booker T. Washington,[26] and Mark Twain.[26] Conan Doyle wrote The Crime of the Congo in 1908,[25] while Twain gave the most famous contribution with the satirical short story King Leopold's Soliloquy.[26] Conrad and Ford Madox Ford also included a devastating parody of Leopold II in their cowritten novel The Inheritors.[27]
Morel's best allies, however, may have been the Christian
In 1905 the movement won a victory when a Commission of Enquiry, instituted (under external pressure) by King Léopold II himself, substantially confirmed the accusations made about the colonial administration.[32] In the face of mounting public and diplomatic pressure, in 1908 the Congo was annexed to the Belgian government and put under its sovereignty.[33] Despite this, Morel refused to declare an end to the campaign until 1913 because he wanted to see actual changes in the situation of the country. The Congo Reform Association ended operations in 1913.[34]
World War I activism
Foreign policy
During the
Pacifism and formation of Union of Democratic Control
As the tension grew in the run-up to World War I, Morel was again sympathetic to Germany, disinclined to stand by Belgium under German pressure, and opposed to the United Kingdom and France getting involved in war. He campaigned for neutrality but on the outbreak of war accepted that the fight was lost, and with Charles Trevelyan, Norman Angell and Ramsay MacDonald, formed the Union of Democratic Control to press for a more responsive foreign policy (he also resigned his candidature at this time). He was Secretary of the UDC until his death. The main demands of the UDC were: (1) that in future to prevent secret diplomacy there should be parliamentary control over foreign policy; (2) there should be negotiations after the war with other democratic European countries in an attempt to form an organisation to help prevent future conflicts; (3) that at the end of the war the terms of peace should neither humiliate the defeated nation nor artificially rearrange frontiers, as this might provide a cause for future wars.
The Union of Democratic Control became the most important of all the anti-war organisations in Britain, with membership reaching 650,000 by 1917. His political courage was praised by people such as Bertrand Russell and the writer Romain Rolland, but his leading role in the pacifist movement exposed him to violent attacks led by the pro-war press. He was pictured as an agent of Germany in the Daily Express, a newspaper that also listed details of future UDC meetings and encouraged its readers to attend and break them up. The accusation gained some credibility when Roger Casement, who was known as a friend and supporter of Morel, was hanged for treason (he had contacted the Germans seeking support for Irish nationalism). Morel was even the victim of occasional physical assaults.
Imprisonment
On 22 August 1917 Morel's house was searched and evidence was discovered that he had sent a UDC pamphlet to
His hair is completely white (there was hardly a tinge of white before) when he first came out, he collapsed completely, physically and mentally, largely as the result of insufficient food. He says one only gets three quarters of an hour reading in the whole day – the rest of the time is spent on prison work, etc.
Morel was released in January 1918.[36]
Independent Labour Party membership
In April 1918, he joined the Independent Labour Party, and began to feed his views into the Labour Party to which it was affiliated and which adopted his critical view of the Treaty of Versailles. Morel explained his decision to join the Independent Labour Party to a friend:
I have long been gravitating towards the Socialist position—of course there is Socialism and Socialism, and mine is of the reasonable and moderate kind. When I look over my public efforts through the years, it seems to me that I have been a Socialist all my life. So far as any Party can express what appears to me to be the country's needs, the ILP approximates nearer to my outlook that any other, although I still look forward to and hope for the day when all really progressive forces can unite under the title of the Democratic Party. But Liberalism as represented by both wings—the Lloyd George wing, and the Asquith wing, is right outside my outlook now.
Postwar activism
Treaty of Versailles
Morel was severely critical of the
He did not give up his career as a journalist, becoming director of the UDC's journal, originally titled The UDC, later Foreign Affairs: A Journal of International Understanding.[37] Foreign Affairs became a significant voice of the English left about foreign politics at the time and represented the views of the UDC.[38][39] In his articles for the magazine, Morel blamed France and Tsarist Russia, not the Central Powers, for the origins of the war and was scathingly critical of French imperialism.[38] Morel's articles also deplored the fate of the new nation of Hungary, which had been part of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary before the war.[37] The former Kingdom of Hungary was stripped of more than two thirds of its territory and most of its population in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.[40] Morel portrayed Hungary as a victim of French rapacity that reduced it to "Hopeless, Heart-Breaking Bondage".[37]
The Black Horror on the Rhine
As part of his general opposition to French foreign policy,[38] Morel played a key role in launching the British-based part of the Black Shame campaign, a campaign against the use of 'primitive' black troops by the French Army during its occupation of the Rhineland.[41] In a front-page article in The Daily Herald on 9 April 1920 by Morel about the French occupation of the Rhineland, the headline read, ": "Frankfurt runs red with blood French Blood Troops Use Machine-guns on Civilians".[42] The following day, the same paper had another cover story by Morel, the title of which was "Black Scourge In Europe Sexual Horror Let Loose by France On Rhine Disappearance of Young German Girls". In it, Morel wrote that France is "thrusting her black savages into the heart of Germany" and that the "primitive African savages, the carriers of syphilis, have become a horror and a terror" to the Rhinelanders.[42] In his article, Morel claimed that the Senegalese soldiers serving in the French Army were "primitive African barbarians" who "stuffed their haversacks with eye-balls, ears and heads of the foe".[43] Morel declared in his article:
There [the Rhineland] they [the Senegalese soldiers] have become a terror and a horror unimaginable to the countryside, raping girls and women – for well known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injuries and not infrequently has fatal results; spreading syphilis, murdering inoffensive civilians, often getting completely out of control; the terrible barbaric incarnation of a barbarous policy, embodied in a so-called peace treaty which puts the clock back 2,000 years".[43]
Morel wrote that "black savages" have uncontrolled sexual impulses that "must be satisfied upon the bodies of white women!" (emphasis in the original).[44]
The phrase that Morel coined to describe the alleged terror by Senegalese troops in the Rhineland was the "Black Horror on the Rhine", which became internationally famous, and the campaign against the "black horror" took much of his time for the last four years of his life.[45] Morel predicated the "black horror" would cause another world war, writing that the average German boy was thinking: "Boys these men raped your mothers and sisters" (emphasis in the original).[46] Morel used the "black horror" as a way of attacking France, which he claimed had caused a "sexual horror on the Rhine" and whose "reign of terror" was a "giant evil" that should inspire "shame into all four corners of the world" and ultimately should "a revision of the Versailles Treaty and the relief for Germany".[47]
The German sociologist Iris Wigger wrote that Morel's "Black Horror on the Rhine" campaign has caused much embarrassment to Morel's admirers today, who would rather remember the man who campaigned against the Congo Free State, but in fact, both campaigns were manifestations of the same racism since he believed that all black people were innately stupid and inferior to white people in all respects.[48] Though Morel had been very forceful in condemning the cruel exploitation of the Congo Free State, he believed in a liberal imperialism, just not the cruel exploitative imperialism of the Congo Company. He wrote that it was the duty of whites to serve as the "trustees" for blacks and the "great white father" who would protect the "basic human rights" of Africans while at the same time accepting the "infantile" nature of black people, who not the equal in any way of whites.[49] Morel himself did not see his campaign as racist and always presented himself as a friend to black people. In France, the French socialist Charles Gide wrote about Morel's claims to be a protector of Africans: le genre de protection de M. Morel rappelle un peu le precepte que fait afficher la Society protectrice des animaux: 'Soyez bons pour les betes' (Mr. Morel's kind of protection remind a little of the precepts of the Society for the Protection of Animals: 'Be good to the animals').[50]
In particular, Morel believed that Africans, lacking the self-discipline of whites, had an uncontrolled sexuality and often wrote about that subject.[48] Morel believed that because of the high infant mortality in the tropics Africans had evolved in such a way as to be obsessed with sex, to the exclusion of everything else, as they needed a high birth rate to maintain their numbers.[48] Precisely because Morel believed in the uncontrolled sexuality of blacks, he considered it self-evident that the "sexually uncontrolled and uncontrollable" Senegalese would run amok in the Rhineland and rape every German female in sight.[51] Two contemporaries challenged Morel on that: Claude McKay, the Jamaican poet and labour activist, and Norman Leys, the British Africanist. Leys stated that such allegations constituted "one of the great sources of race hatred" and "should never be repeated by any honest man or honest newspaper".[52]
Morel was very anti-French because of his opposition to the Treaty of Versailles but also the nature of France's
Parliament
In the 1922 general election, which followed the retirement of an incumbent Labour Member of Parliament, Alexander Wilkie, Morel fought the two-member Dundee constituency as a sole Labour candidate. Although he gained fewer votes than Edwin Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition Party, he won the second seat, in the process defeating one of the outgoing members, Winston Churchill, standing as a National Liberal. Morel regarded Churchill as a warmonger and took pride in having defeated him: "I look upon Churchill as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart".[54]
With his foreign affairs specialty, he was expected to be appointed as Foreign Secretary in the government of
Shortly after his re-election in the 1924 general election, Morel suffered a fatal heart attack in London.[55] He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.
Legacy
In assessing Morel's impact on the Congo, contemporary author Adam Hochschild—whose bestseller King Leopold's Ghost had revived Morel's reputation—wrote:
Did the Congo Reform campaign save millions of lives? For many years, the conventional answer was yes ... but the truth is more somber. Some of the worst abuses in the Congo, such as the kidnapping of hostages, did stop as a result of the publicity. But the near-genocidal death rate in the territory continued for more than a decade under Belgian rule.[61]
After making this statement, Hochschild concludes, Morel's movement served two great purposes:
First, they put a remarkable amount of information on the historical record ... The movement's other great achievement is that, among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for being outraged because pain is being inflicted on another human being, even when that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country ... It is this spirit that underlies organisations like Amnesty International ... and Médecins Sans Frontières.[61]
See also
- List of peace activists
- Jules Marchal, Belgian diplomat and author on colonial exploitation.
Books published
- Affairs of West Africa (1902)
- The British Case in French Congo (1903)
- King Leopold's Rule in Africa (1904)
- Red Rubber – The story of the rubber slave trade that flourished in Congo in the year of grace 1906 (1906)
- Great Britain and the Congo: the Pillage of the Congo Basin (1909) - Introduction by A. Conan Doyle
- Nigeria: Its Peoples And Its Problems (1911)
- Morocco in Diplomacy (1912) (reissued as Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy in 1915)
- Truth and the War (1916)
- The African problem and the peace settlement (1917)
- The Black Man's Burden (1920)
- Thoughts on the War
- The Peace, and Prison
- Pre-War Diplomacy
- Diplomacy Revealed (1921)
- The Horror on the Rhine (1921) (pamphlet)
- Military preparations for the Great War : fact versus fiction (1922)
- The Secret History of a Great Betrayal (1924)
Notes
- ISBN 978-0-19-954089-1.
- ISBN 978-0-394-48726-7.
- ^ Joseph Foster (1872). A revised genealogical account of the various families descended from Francis Fox of St. Germans, Cornwall; to which is appended a pedigree of the Crokers of Lineham. pp. 3–.
- ^ Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. p. 177.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 177.
- ^ a b c d Dorward, David. "Morel, E.D." In Colonialism: An International, Social, Cultural, and Political Encyclopedia, Volume 1. Eds. Melvin Eugene Page and Penny M. Sonnenburg. ABC-CLIO, 2003. p. 392.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 188.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 173.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 178-180.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 180.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 185-186.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 185.
- ^ Hochschild 1998, p. 186
- ^ Hochschild, p. 213.
- ^ Olusanya, G.O. "Reviewed Work: AFFAIRS OF WEST AFRICA by E. D. Morel". Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. Vol. 4, No. 4, June 1969. pp. 639-641.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 194-95.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 195.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 201-204.
- ^ Pavlakis, Dean. British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896-1913. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 204-205.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 206-207.
- ISBN 9781472436498– via Google Books.
- ^ a b Hochschild, p. 236.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 273.
- ^ a b Hochschild, p. 271.
- ^ a b c Hochschild, pp. 241-242.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 257.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 259-260.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 216.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 213, 216.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 263-264.
- ^ Hochschild, p. 251.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 257-259.
- ^ Hochschild, pp. 271-273.
- ^ Rodriguez, J. (2011). Slavery in the Modern World: A History of Political, Social, and Economic Oppression. ABC-CLIO. p. 405.
- ^ "Morel, Edmund Dene". International Encyclopedia of the First World War. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Retrieved 15 November 2017.
- ^ a b c Orzuff, Andrea. Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914-1948. Oxford University Press, USA. 2009. p. 153.
- ^ a b c Ashworth, Lucian M. International Relations and the Labour Party: Intellectuals and Policy Making from 1918-1945. I.B.Tauris, 2007. p. 61.
- ^ "Union of Democratic Control". Working Class Movement Library. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
- ^ "Treaty of Trianon." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed 1 May 2018.
- ^ Tirard, Paul (1930). La France sur le Rhin. Paris: Plon. p. 302.
- ^ a b Reinders, Robert C. "Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the 'Black Horror on the Rhine.'" International Review of Social History, Volume 13. 1968. p. 1.
- ^ a b Campbell, Peter. "The 'Black Horror on the Rhine': Idealism, Pacifism, and Racism in Feminism and the Left in the Aftermath of the First World War". Social History, Volume XLVII, Issue 94. June 2014. p. 477
- ^ Lusane, Clarence Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era, London: Psychology Press, 2002 p. 73.
- ^ Reinders, p. 2.
- ^ Reinders, p. 5.
- ^ Wigger, Iris. The 'Black Horror on the Rhine': Intersections of Race, Nation, Gender and Class in 1920s Germany. London: Macmillan, 2017. p. 60.
- ^ a b c Wigger, pp. 52-53.
- ^ Wigger, p. 54.
- ^ Reinders, p. 19.
- ^ Wigger, p. 57.
- doi:10.25158/L5.1.2. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
- ^ a b Wigger, pp. 55-56.
- ^ Wright, Patrick. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 170.
- ^ a b c Wustenbecker, Katja. "Morel, E. D." In World War I Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. ABC CLIO, 2005. p. 815
- ^ Cline, Catherine Ann. E.D. Morel, 1873-1924: The Strategies of Protest. Blackstaff Press, Ltd.: 1980. p. 134.
- ^ Wong, Amy. "Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Great New Adventure Story': Journalism in The Lost World". Studies in the Novel Vol. 47, No. 1. Spring 2015. pp. 60-79.
- ^ Russell, Bertrand. "Freedom and Organization. 2010 [1934]. Routledge Classics. Page 350.
- ^ Orwell, George. "Far Away, Long Ago." The Observer, 6 January 1946: 3.
- ^ Fforde, Jasper. "Ten Things You Never Knew About Jasper: (and never thought to ask)." jasperfforde.com. Accessed 29 April 2018.
- ^ a b Hochschild, Adam. "King Leopold's Ghost." In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. Eds. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p. 468
References
- Alexander, Nathan G. "E.D. Morel (1873–1924), the Congo Reform Association, and the History of Human Rights." Britain and the World 9, no. 2 (2016): 213–235.
- Campbell, Peter "The “Black Horror on the Rhine”: Idealism, Pacifism, and Racism in Feminism and the Left in the Aftermath of the First World War" pages 471-496 from Social History, Volume XLVII, Issue 94, June 2014
- ISBN 0-330-49233-0.
- Lusane, Clarence Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era, London: Psychology Press, 2002 ISBN 0415932955.
- Reindeers, Robert "Racialism on the Left: E.D. Morel and the 'Black Horror on the Rhine'" pages 1–28 from International Review of Social History, Volume 13, 1968
- Stanard, Matthew G. Selling the Congo: A history of European pro-empire propaganda and the making of Belgian imperialism (U of Nebraska Press, 2012).
- Wigger, Iris The 'Black Horror on the Rhine' Intersections of Race, Nation, Gender and Class in 1920s Germany London: Macmillan, 2017 ISBN 978-0-230-34361-0.
- Daniël Vangroenweghe (2004), Rood Rubber – Leopold II en zijn Congo, ISBN 90-5617-556-4.
Further reading
- Africanus (1918). The adjustment of the German colonial claims; dedicated to the American and British delegates of the Peace conference. Bern. p. 7. Retrieved 2 November 2009.
External links
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by E. D. Morel
- Catalogue of the Morel papers at the Archives Division of the London School of Economics.
- An article on Morel from Liverpool's 'Nerve' magazine
- E.D. Morel, the man and his work, with an introd. by Colonel Wedgwood ([1920]), full text
- Report of the British Consul, Roger Casement, on the Administration of the Congo Free State.
- Journal of Belgian History, Digital Archive
- White King, Red Rubber, Black Death (2003) (TV) at IMDb
- Newspaper clippings about E. D. Morel in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
- Works by E. D. Morel at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)