ȂȈǿ Partʺʺ: Politics and PhilosophyH.A.L. Fisher, Napoleon escaped to America and become a prosperous
planter. Squire, the editor, postulates discovery of proof that Lord Bacon
wrote Shakespeare’s works.
Such speculation need not be frivolity. Contrasts with what really hap-
pened can deepen our understanding of actual history and of theories of
economics, psychology, political science, international relations, military
affairs, theology, medicine, and even natural science as applied by deci-
sionmakers of the past. History for us was the unknown future for them.
And each of us has undoubtedly experienced choices in his own life very
differently from the way in which a biographer would describe them. He
would know the results; we didn’t.
One subcategory of conjectural history doesn’t much appeal to me.
Like Guedalla’s Grenada scenario, it speculates aboutmajortrends or
conditions that turned out different from the actual ones. What if the
dinosaurs or the Roman Empire hadn’t disappeared? What if Europe
had never discovered America? So sweeping a conjecture is unsatisfying
because it focuses on general frameworks of history instead of particular
events, ones that may have seemed unimportant in themselves but had
major consequences. ( Just what might have enabled Grenada to survive
the Reconquista?) Likewise, it seems out of the spirit of the genre to
use some event or nonevent as a take-off point for sheer fiction, as about
Napoleon’s imaginary exploits in the New World.
Divergences between what did happen and what might have hap-
pened sometimes trigger momentous domino or butterfly effects. Several
may particularly interest libertarians. What if the Civil War had been
avoided, and with it the federal government’s domination of the mone-
tary system? What if the Federal Reserve System had never been created?
What if Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill had heeded
warnings against returning Great Britain to the gold standard inȀȈȁȄ
at the no longer viable prewar parity? What if (as Milton Friedman and
Anna Schwartz have speculated) Benjamin Strong, Governor of the Fed-
eral Reserve Bank of New York, dominant figure in the Federal Reserve
System, and a better intuitive economist than most of his colleagues, had
not died prematurely inȀȈȁȇ? What if Harry Gunnison Brown or Irving
Fisher had headed the System, or if his advice had prevailed aroundȀȈȁȈ?
Would an ordinary recession have turned into the Great Depression, cre-
ating opportunities both for the New Deal and for Hitler? I think not.
But we can carry speculations further. What if Giuseppe Zangara’s
shot at President-elect Roosevelt in FebruaryȀȈȂȂhadn’t killed Chicago’s