Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  If either could have seen the unpublished poems, they might have hit upon verses twelve and thirteen of “The Burden of Jerusalem” (what a chap Kipling was for burdens, to be sure). Written after a visit to Palestine under the British Mandate, which was to bequeath that burden to the United States as it had and would so many others, the poem shows a tension between Kipling’s unease with Jews and his dislike of anti-Semitism when it came from non-English sources. (This is not the place for this argument, but many people who don’t much care for “Cohen from Jerusalem” may still express outrage when he is roughly handled by their rivals or enemies.) As for “burdened Gentile o’er the main,” the addiction of Kipling to the idea that dominion was something thrust on an unwilling island race is here shown to be incurable. (It also copies the second line of the third verse of “The American Rebellion,” where the “burden” is the thirteen colonies.) Balfour appears by implication as the only sufferer from his Declaration, which slyly promised Palestine to both nationalisms. Kipling had witnessed some of the rioting occasioned by Balfour’s legacy.

  In other respects, the poem might easily be termed Zionist in tone. But that raises an unsuspected difficulty. What about verse fourteen?

  For ’neath the Rabbi’s curls and fur

  (Or scents and rings of movie-kings)

  The aloof, unleavened blood of Ur,

  Broods steadfast on Jerusalem.

  Up until then, true, the lines are German-hating rather than Jewhating, and recall Kipling’s sanguinary letters to Teddy Roosevelt in 1914-18, as well as Eliot’s posthumous 1943 defense. (Remember Kipling writing to Roosevelt that he often hoped that, by the end of the Great War business, “there will be very little Hun left.”) But what a poor return for the solicitude of Hollywood is contained in line two! It is possible that Churchill asked Roosevelt to keep the whole poem to himself out of consideration for Sam Goldwyn and Alex Korda, both of whom had certainly heard worse but neither of whom might have cared for this line of talk from the foremost British imperial rhymer at a time when they were being teased for being uncritical about the Brits.*

  Another possibility occurs to me. Throughout the preceding year, Churchill had been fending off suggestions from Roosevelt, some of them couched in rather definite language, that Britain should give point to the agreed terms of the Atlantic Charter by liberating India from colonialism. In August 1942, Churchill had replied to these promptings with some asperity, writing from Cairo that any such concession would be a highly dangerous precedent:

  Here in the Middle East, the Arabs might claim by majority they could expel the Jews from Palestine, or at any time forbid all further immigration. I am strongly wedded to the Zionist policy, of which I was one of the authors. This is only one of the many unforeseen cases which will arise from new and further declarations.

  Roosevelt did not reply to this letter either, but he did drop the subject of Indian independence for quite some time. Is it then thinkable that Churchill sent him some minatory Kipling in order to remind him that anti-imperial gestures did not come cost-free? Was he, in other words, prepared to shoulder the burden and accept the bizarre ingratitude of the natives?

  “A Chapter of Proverbs,” however, contains no warnings against light-mindedness where imperialism is concerned. Indeed, though Churchill obviously meant it to resonate with warnings to nations, it is intended by Kipling as an admonition to individuals along the lines of “If ” or “Something of Myself.” Verses three and six might conceivably possess a certain irony in view of Churchill’s poorly concealed bitterness and sarcasm about the terms of Lend-Lease. And verse twenty-four appears to be a conscious echo of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, itself mildly fatalistic about the great schemes and doings of potentates. Otherwise, the poem is a skillful exercise in the deceptively difficult enterprise of emulating Biblical English. Churchill did have a tendency to send Roosevelt cryptic messages from the Bible, or hortatory extracts from Shakespeare. In fact, in the month after he sent the secret Kipling poems, he cabled the White House with the one line: “See St. John, chapter 14, verses 1 to 4.” These verses contain a (presumably unintended) blasphemy: “Ye believe in God, believe also in me,” before going on to make the famous reassurance about “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” In the context, the message seems to refer to security and other arrangements for the Churchill-Roosevelt summit in Cairo. But in more general terms, it conforms to Churchill’s taste for impressing America with his literary and rhetorical command.

  If one could decide on a hinge moment, when power and decision passed finally from British to American hands, the fall of 1943, when Macmillan made his “Greece to their Rome” remark in North Africa, would probably be the date assigned by any objective historian. Ironic, then, that Churchill’s confused and emotional last stand should have involved the invocation of Kipling. Conceivably, he was not even sure of his own motives; was, perhaps, looking for some talisman with which to impress Roosevelt and with which to make a claim of English right and duty. If so, he fell short of the mark.

  Ironic, too, that it should have been Kipling for whom he reached in an extremity. More than most Englishmen, Kipling had worked to inculcate the idea of empire in the American mind. He had written and spoken in such a way as to stifle misgiving about conquest, and to replace misgiving with a sense of mission—of “burdens” solemnly shouldered. He had done so in order to prevent Britain from being shorn of her possessions either by those who inhabited them or by imperial Germany. When the time came for those colonies to be disburdened, they were mostly taken into the trusteeship of the United States. This was not the outcome Kipling had anticipated, unless you count “The Roman Centurion’s Song,” in which an old soldier begs the imperial Legate not to recall him. His last duty to Rome, he says beseechingly, is that of “staying on”:

  Let me work here for Britain’s sake—at any task you will— A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill. Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep, Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep.

  For Kipling, at least, Britain had been Roman, not Greek. While he thought of torches being passed or burdens laid down, he could still imagine the island race somewhere in the game. Perhaps, given the transmission of British imperial notions to the Legates of the new Rome, he was not so quixotic a figure as Churchill’s gesture makes him seem.

  *It might have reminded them of Kipling’s venomously anti-Jewish poem “Gehazi” (1912), in which he excoriated Attorney General Sir Rufus Isaacs for holding shares in an American company named Marconi.

  [4]

  Blood Relations

  In 1858, as British and French “expeditionary forces” were trying to push their way to Peking, they met with a doughty rebuff from Chinese coastal defenses at the Barrier Forts. A number of British vessels were disabled by the fire of the defenders, and owed their survival to the action of Josiah Tattnall, commander of the supposedly neutral American squadron that was on hand. He intervened boldly both to shield the British ships from Chinese gunnery and to tow them to a place of safety out of range. When asked to account for his abandonment of neutrality, Tattnall replied simply: “Blood is thicker than water.”

  This famous and rather mysterious saying, which combines elements of cliché with elements of mixed metaphor, has been a standby throughout the “special relationship.” It was, in this place and time, a premonitory slogan for the events of 1898 and the rhetoric and poetry of Rudyard Kipling. The American penetration of China, which was a classic case of the Bible and the trading post in tandem, could never declare itself as explicitly colonial if only because America was explicitly anticolonial. But it did not scorn to follow the far more openly imperial path blazed by London, after the overthrow of the Canton system in what we crudely remember as “the Opium Wars.” As the coast of China became permeable to Westerners, so American residents and businessmen began to expect more in the way of support from Washington. In 1843 an American mission
was appointed by Secretary of State Daniel Webster and instructed to take advantage of the gains procured by Britain in the “very important marts of commerce” that were becoming accessible. The mission was charged to uphold “the commercial and manufacturing, as well as the agricultural and mining interests of the United States.”

  There were American diplomats in the succeeding period, Humphrey Marshall and Peter Parker among them, who wanted an independent policy for the United States. This, they thought, would position Washington to take advantage of any shift in Britain’s fortunes, and perhaps to supplant the cotton of Manchester with the commodity that was king in the American South. All such initiatives were overruled, and the United States continued to follow a course that became known, for obvious reasons, as “jackal diplomacy.” The British would dictate terms to the Chinese and incur their detestation for the drug trade. The United States would act as the junior partner, at once more scrupulous and less implicated. Proposals like those of Commodore Perry, that the United States should seize Taiwan as a counterweight to the British presence, were (ironically in view of future events) thought to be too risky to this enterprise. After the Tattnall affair in 1858, the American envoy William Reed was well placed to follow the British and French all the way north, to wait for them to extort the right of foreign embassies to reside in Peking, to observe as they demanded free passage along the Yangtze, and to rejoice when they received a guarantee of the protection of missionaries and their converts. After Lord Elgin had accomplished all this (and had ordered the Imperial Palace at Peking to be obliterated by way of underlining his point) the new American chargé, S. Wells Williams, waited a month before calmly claiming the same rights and concessions for Americans.

  It was this ad hoc but ingenious method that incubated the desires of the “Open Door” lobby, which pushed for free trade and an American share and which in early 1898 was rewarded, principally because the Chinese authorities hoped to play on divisions among their foreign predators, with the concession for the southern extension of the main Chinese railway line. Elaboration of the main policy was postponed until after the war with Spain, by which time McKinley and Roosevelt had Guam and Hawaii at their disposal—island possessions effectively pointless except as “stepping-stones” to China. (The epoch in which metaphors of conquest and threat, such as “stepping-stone,” “ripe fruit,” “dagger pointed at,” and “strategic island,” were commonplace was just dawning in American life.)

  No sooner was the 1898 war over than John Hay, now Secretary of State after that instructive sojourn at the London embassy, began to review his Chinese options. Immediately before the conflict with Spain, Hay had doubted the wisdom of a formal British approach, which had called for an Anglo-American front against other Western powers who might seek exclusive rights in China. The administration was ever wary of the dormant but easily roused anti-British feeling in Congress; a reserve of emotion which always inclined Hay to the “informal alliance” preference that, ever since, has been a condition of the “special relationship.” However, he continued to help thicken the layer of American missionaries and American men of enterprise that was growing by accretion under the Union Jack. In March 1899 he said solemnly that American opinion deplored “the great game of spoliation now going on,” adding thoughtfully that the U.S. government had “great commercial interests” and (in a phrase he must have picked up along with Kipling’s “the great game” while at the Court of St. James’s) would not consider its “hands tied for future eventualities.” By then, also, the United States had a Pacific navy, proved in combat if only at Manila Bay, and could do better than Josiah Tattnall had done at the Barrier Forts. “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,” Admiral Dewey had said to his subordinate as he found the Spanish fleet at his mercy in Manila. Parasitic on British power in the Pacific though they had been, other American admirals could recognize that they held an initiative, and that their own day was only a matter of time.

  The extent of American sea power is perhaps second only to its nuclear capacity as a symbol of the country’s world standing. Any study of the origins of either phenomenon shows the British influence to have been inescapable.

  At Yorktown on October 19, 1781, General Cornwallis ordered his troops to pile their arms and sent his sword to George Washington. As the redcoats offered the formalities of surrender, an American revolutionary band played “The World Turned Upside Down,” a song which originated in the English Puritan revolution.

  On April 19, 1988, I flew to Patrick Henry Airport and went from there to Yorktown, at which highly appropriate embarkation point I joined the USS Iowa. This enormous Second World War battleship, named for America’s most pacifist and isolationist state, had been recommissioned by the Reagan-Weinberger rearmament administration and was returning from a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf. The morning’s newspapers gave a graphic account of a battle in those waters during which American naval vessels, supported by British ones, had destroyed two Iranian oil platforms and sent three Iranian ships to the bottom. Every man on board the Iowa was cursing the luck that had brought them home with their tremendous sixteen-inch guns unfired.

  Amid the Iowa’s array of martial features is one incongruity. The admiral’s quarters boast a large, luxurious sunken bath. This fitting, which is found on board no other ship, was installed for the comfort of the disabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In November 1943, he boarded the USS Iowa and steamed at top speed across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean to meet Winston Churchill. Their first place of rendezvous, ironically enough, was Tehran. In those days, Persia was a semi-colony of the British, and in 1944 it became the site of a squabble between Churchill and Roosevelt over competing British and American oil concessions. Later, in the 1950s, it became the site of an Anglo-American cooperative covert operation to overthrow a nationalist government and secure the Pahlavi dynasty. It was to deal with the direct consequences of that folly that the USS Iowa and her sister ships had again been seen in Middle Eastern waters. The USS New Jersey had spent some days off the coast of Lebanon in 1984, tossing shells as heavy as Volkswagens from her sixteen-inch muzzles at the supposed positions of Iranian sympathizers. I wasn’t the only person to be reminded, by this classic gunboat demonstration, of Joseph Conrad’s bizarre evocation in Heart of Darkness:

  Once, I remember, we came across a man-of-war anchored off the coast. . . . In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

  As if to quench any such misgivings, the USS Iowa calls itself “The Big Stick” and this Teddy Roosevelt phrase appears, with an appropriate silhouette, on its official papers and stationery. “Gunboat diplomacy,” a phrase readily understood in the America of the 1980s, is a British term invented in the piping days of Lord Palmerston (who once remarked that Great Britain “has no permanent friends, only permanent interests”). I am myself what the Americans call a “navy brat,” born in Portsmouth as the son of a long-serving officer and brought up in the environs of naval bases from Malta to Rosyth. I found this a natural advantage in conversations aboard the Iowa. The seaman who met me at the dock gates was named Burton, and he told me straightaway that he had made a pilgrimage to England, to see his ancestral town of Burton-on-Trent. The captain had a wooden blotter on his desk, made from the timber of HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Portsmouth. He spoke of Portsmouth as a “Mecca” for sailors of his generation, and called his colleagues to hear when I said that I had seen the last of the Royal Navy battleships, HMS Vanguard, being towed away for scrap in the early sixties. “She slipped her tugs and ran aground, didn’t she? Like she was protesting.” He knew the climax of the story before I could get to it. And his gunnery officer joined in, to say with considerable gravity that it was HMS Warspite, out of all British men-of-war, that he personally would have saved from the scrapyard. He seemed to know every engagement in which she had ever taken part.

  It was affecting and impressive to see the place held by
British naval lore. In the wardroom there was a photograph of Ronald Reagan, who had secretly sold weapons to the Iranian foe in order to finance his private war in Nicaragua. But there were also several prominent souvenir photographs of HMS York and HMS Battleaxe, which had kept the Iowa company in a passage through the Suez Canal: the same canal that had nearly had American and British ships firing on one another in 1956. (The British narrowly missed bombing American civilians as they were being evacuated from Cairo airport, and the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, told the State Department that his Sixth Fleet “can stop them [the British] but we will have to blast hell out of them. If we are going to threaten, if we’re going to turn on them, then you’ve got to be ready to shoot. We can do that. We can defeat them.”)

  Nothing of that unpleasantness; Britain’s last, mad resistance to the coming American hegemony, remained. On board the Iowa, the British were felt to be an exemplary study both in seafaring and in handling “hot spots” overseas. As the huge, beautiful ship cut its way through the water toward its new home port on Staten Island, I stood on the bridge to watch a few demonstration broadsides (saying a silent valediction to those faraway Druze villages, as the gigantic shells went screaming off toward the horizon) and talked with Seth Cropsey, Under Secretary of the Navy and an occasional defense essayist for Commentary, The Public Interest, and other organs of neoconservative reflection. “I think you’ll find,” he said, “that most of our people have studied and admired the British example. Once in a while someone like Eddie Luttwak says we should study the Germans instead. But that’d most probably be disastrous. “ (Luttwak’s most famous text is, of course, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire.)

  Secretary Cropsey’s recently retired superior, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who brought the Iowa and others out of mothballs, once said that his job took him to London twelve times before it took him west of the Missouri. Even in a period when America was widely held to be turning to the Pacific and away from the Atlantic—the Iowa had taken part in three deployments off the coast of Central America since 1984—the values of the “special relationship” still obtained. The forty-eight cruise missiles she carried were blood kin to the ones emplaced under the control of the USAF at the deceptively bucolic-sounding English villages of Molesworth and Greenham Common.