I’m a fan of the “great man of history” theory. For example, some people claim that George Washington was literally the only person who could have won the American Revolution. Average leaders are more or less interchangeable in average situations, but an average leader would have given up at Valley Forge.
But lately I’ve been wondering about that. It may be that Washington was the only person who had the necessary combination of resolve, leadership, and military knowledge to win the war. But over the centuries, there have been other people who certainly had vast amounts of resolve and steadfastness.
I’m thinking of three situations: Washington in the Revolution; Lincoln in the Civil War; and Churchill in WW2. If those three were shuffled in time, could they have won somebody else’s war?
What about other national leaders? For instance, could Margaret Thatcher have won the Civil War? It seems to me that she would have a far better chance than most leaders.
Interesting question. I think Franklin Roosevelt probably could’ve won the Civil War. His handling the Great Depression shows he had skill in dealing with a divided nation (although not divided in the same way, of course.)
I’m not sure about putting Lincoln in World War 2, however. Lincoln dabbled with his generals too much in the early years of the Civil War. I didn’t work well against the Confederacy and it would have been disastrous against Germany and Japan.
Are you suggesting that, in every crucial moment in our history, we had to good luck to have “the right leader” already in place, and not the wrong one?
The kinds of people who rise to national leadership are, with rare exceptions, the kinds of people who can react pretty well to “crucial moments”, or at least, have surrounded themselves with advisers who can. There haven’t been many crucial instances in history in which it can be convincingly shown that somebody else would have averted the disaster – even less to be able to name that somebody else.