Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  In England, Joseph Chamberlain made speeches that were woven from the same rhetorical thread, while in South Africa Cecil Rhodes was also meditating on an Anglo-American world dominion. It was also at this time that elements of what might be called the WASP aesthetic began to take shape. The old established College of New Jersey took the opportunity, in the late 1890s, to change its name to Princeton, a title more in keeping with the culture of aspiration. The tortured Anglophile Woodrow Wilson, who inaugurated a faculty at the university, once wrote that everything rested upon the selection of men who were “companionable and clubbable. . . If their qualities as gentlemen and as scholars conflict, the former will win them the place.”

  There was a hunger for academic “tradition” and for a more ivy-infested context for the incubation of elites (which can still be seen in the hilarious quadrangles of Yale and the sherry parties of Charlottesville). In 1901, two Chicago entrepreneurs purchased that special treasury of English imperial and anthropological learning, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As they sought to invest their new property with ever-greater prestige and respectability, they turned to two irreproachable Anglo-Saxon institutions—the London Times and Cambridge University. The Times was persuaded to take considerable advertising from the Britannica and to act as its sponsor. In 1910, Cambridge University was induced to become, for the look of the thing, the publisher of the eleventh edition. At a lavish dinner given in London to celebrate this new synthesis, the eleventh edition’s editor, Hugh Chisholm, made a self-criticism. The Britannica, he said,

  put too narrowly the British point of view in a great number of subjects. You will often find in its articles the use of the phrase “in this country,” meaning England; and the phrase really represents a certain mental attitude on the part of the contributors.

  The intended scope of any broadening of this mental attitude was ringingly expounded by the next speaker, Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, who represented the United States at the Court of St. James’s. He evoked

  the undivided and indivisible English-speaking race; that race which is united in its history, in its language, in its pride in the past, in its hopes and in its aspirations for the future, whose kindred flags engirdle the world . . .

  The new edition was a distillate of colonial thinking, full of eugenics and optimism. It bore, on its title page, the following;

  Dedicated by permission to His Majesty George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the British Dominions beyond the seas, Emperor of India. And to William Howard Taft, President of the United States of America.

  The new harmony could not have been expressed with greater felicity, or to the greater satisfaction of the British end of the axis. For the moment, Chicago’s new wealth was paying the price of deference to the dearly bought cachet of royalty and tradition. But an order of precedence based on the idealistic notion of blood was not to survive the shedding of that blood on the scale that in the boom year of 1910 was only four years away.

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  Vox Americana

  In 1890, as the era of Anglo-Saxon revivalism was dawning in the United States, a whimsical little ceremony was enacted in Central Park. A group of American Shakespeare enthusiasts gathered, nets and cages in hand, and released a carefully taxonomized collection of birds. Their aim was to introduce to the continent all of the avian species mentioned by the bard that were not already native. There are more than fifty kinds of bird cited in Shakespeare, including ostriches and peacocks, so the aim of the enthusiasts was a decidedly quixotic one. Like many such enterprises, it had a chiefly banal result. Instead of an American boscage enlivened with skylarks, nightingales, and (remembering Julius Caesar) “the bird of night” sitting “even at noon day, upon the market-place,” what the country got was the European starling. This bird, long the bane of London cornices, preys upon vermin while being a pest in its own right. It also displaces other birds with cuckoolike callousness, and in this instance lost little time in deposing the New York State bird, Sialia sialis, or Eastern bluebird, from its traditional treecavity nesting places.

  Nobody in that epoch was keener on human and cultural imports from England than Woodrow Wilson, who had since boyhood been enthralled by the images of English and Scottish chivalry and custom. But when he wrote his chapter “The Swarming of the English” in his now neglected History of the American People, he meant to summon a much more healthful, bucolic, and replenishing image than that of the ravenous and proliferating starling.

  Hymning the cheerful, thrifty, and staunch Anglo-Saxons who had peopled the Eastern seaboard, Wilson gave full rein to the never-absent dimension of sentiment in his personality:

  It was this self-helping race of Englishmen that matched their wits against French official schemes in America. We may see the stuff they were made of in the Devonshire seamen who first attempted the permanent settlement of the new continent. For a time all that was most characteristic of the adventurous and sea-loving England was centered in Devonshire. Devonshire lies in the midst of that group of counties in the southwest of England in which Saxon ancestry did least to destroy or drive out the old Celtic population. There is accordingly a strong strain of Celtic blood among its people to this day; and the land suits with the strain. Its abrupt and broken headlands, its free heaths and ancient growths of forests, its pure and genial air, freshened on either hand by the breath of the sea, its bold and sunny coasts . . .

  All this, and Drake and Raleigh, too. Wilson was not even trying to write history. But when he later fell in with Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of there being real Americans and “hyphenated Americans,” he could claim to have praised and documented the first cause of this conceit. Italian-Americans there might be; Irish-Americans and Jewish-Americans, too. But there is something axiomatically absurd, in the hyphenate moral universe, about the idea of an English-American. Thus the later need for a term like WASP. The yeomen and bowmen of the downs and the dales and the hamlets of England had no need of a hyphen. They were, when it came to America, original. They were first.

  Wilson’s entire History was infused with an almost automatic response to the calling of race. It was evident when he wrote about the “Peculiar Institution” set up by the Southern Christian Anglicized gentry for their special convenience:

  Domestic slaves were treated with affection and indulgence, cared for by the mistress of the household. The life of the southern planter’s wife was a life of executive labor, devoted chiefly to the care and training of her slaves. Social privilege and the proud esprit of their class bred in southern masters a sense of the obligations of station; and the spirit of the better men ruled the conduct of the less noble.

  Not even the hideous irruption of the Civil War into these chivalric property relations was enough to shake Wilson’s attachment to the idyll:

  No rumor of the emancipation proclamation seemed to reach the southern country-sides. No sign of the revolution that was at hand showed itself upon the surface of southern life. Gentlewomen presided still with unquestioned authority upon the secluded plantations. . . . Great gangs of cheery negroes worked in the fields, planted and reaped and garnered and did their lonely mistresses’ bidding in all things without restlessness, with quiet industry, with show of faithful affection even. . . . There was, it seemed, no wrong they fretted under or wished to see righted. The smiling fields . . .

  The future President’s attachment to the manorial style was an obvious consequence of his Anglophilia; his affection for the planters and their arrangements being at least as much a matter of class feeling as of racial solidarity. But he was capable of deserting the emollient and languorous style for something far more abrasive. In the same year as the planned release of Shakespearean birds, 1890, there was a national census which taxonomized the human population of the United States. Wilson studied this census and did not care for what he found:

  Immigrants poured steadily in as before, but with an alteration of stock which students of affairs marked with uneasiness. Throughout the ce
ntury men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country, or else men of the Latin-Gallic stocks of France and Northern Italy; but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.

  “Disburdening” here meant the assumption of another burden by—whom? It would not be precisely correct to say “the white man,” however swarthy some Calabrians or even Hungarians might prove to be. In any case, Wilson had already been extolling the virtues of the dusky tenantry on the Southern slave plantations. No, the objection was to the dilution of Anglo-Saxondom. This confusion, between America’s need for labor and the revulsion of the Protestant Establishment toward certain kinds of immigrant, has taken many forms down the years. But whether it is an objection to Jews, Catholics, Chinese, Japanese, lumpen elements, or fifth columnists, it has always had some bearing on the Anglo-American “special relationship.”

  Just as Kipling was to vanquish Mark Twain on the matter of the Philippines, so the nascent cooperation between Britain and America for the open door to China was to reflect itself (as Duff Cooper bluntly pointed out in his encomium to Admiral Mahan) in a campaign against Chinese immigration. Wilson viewed the Chinese incursion with special distaste, again drawing the satirical wrath of Twain, who, in a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in 1900, said: “Behold America, the refuge of the oppressed from everywhere—who can pay fifty dollars’ admission—anyone except a Chinaman.”

  As Democratic nominee in the election of 1912, Wilson found that his published attitudes on immigration were brought up against him with some bitterness. He had encountered the dilemma of many an anti-immigrant politician—that of having to conciliate newly enfranchised Americans. In the course of the election, he made a number of promises and commitments to the foreign-born, including a pledge that literacy tests would never be used to determine citizenship. In 1915, he vetoed an attempt by Congress to impose quotas on immigration by this means. But by 1915, an entirely new avenue of attack on “un-Americans” and “hyphenated Americans” was opening up.

  Prompted, as we saw, by Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt had impugned the loyalty of German-Americans. After the Lusitania sinking, with meetings of the jingoistic Navy League starting to draw large crowds, Wilson began to feel the need to accommodate to his former rival’s propaganda. In a number of addresses he called for “preparedness,” a useful code word for suggesting the enemy without and the enemy within, while yet not quite defining it. In another speech, this time to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that ideal vessel of the Mayflower spirit, he cheerily suggested that critics and faint-hearts be subjected to the fine old college practice of “hazing.” Who knows what Princetonian memories, or nostalgia for English public school stories, prompted this presidential endorsement of bullying and baiting? The speech was even more noteworthy for its coinage of a catchphrase or slogan. The question for the “hazers” to put to the doubters, said Wilson, was: “Is it America First or is it not?” Not for the last time in his career, Wilson was handing a weapon to those who detested everything he stood for. In later years the cry of “America First” was to become the combined cry of the chauvinists and the isolationists, and was to be directed principally at the Anglophiles and their allies. It’s interesting and important to remember that it was coined in England’s cause, at an ultra-WASP rally.

  In his annual message to Congress at Christmas the same year, Wilson developed the theme of Americanism and nativism even more bluntly. “The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” All this made his claim to “neutrality” in the Great War seem pharisaic. So did the intense profiteering in the name of the British war effort by J. P. Morgan and others of the Protestant elite, who treated the Neutrality Act with disdain and added considerably to the art and science of the dummy company in supplying the materials of war.

  The British Establishment not only benefited from the wave of chauvinism, but made it its business to encourage and generalize it. Sir Gilbert Parker, who headed the British propaganda effort in the United States, was imprudent enough to write an article for Harpers magazine in March 1918 in which he simultaneously boasted of his achievement in the manipulation of American public opinion and reinforced the ethnic undergirding of the “special relationship”:

  I wonder how many Americans know that all German-Americans are still Germans by law; and if they do know it, how they must resent the iniquity of the nation that makes of the law of naturalization a scrap of paper; to be torn up, like the sacred compact for the neutrality of Belgium!

  Seeking to relate this to the joint project of expansionism and empire, Sir Gilbert ingeniously reminded his audiences that George III had after all used “German mercenaries” against the heroes of the thirteen colonies, and rushed on from this revision to evoke the brave days of 1898:

  What was accomplished at Manila toward making America a world power was exceeded infinitely there by the splendid action of Admiral Chichester and Britain’s navy in threatening the German naval forces, which drew the two nations together in a spirit of comradeship.

  He added that “the British Empire” had been “the faithful friend of President Monroe, whose doctrine could never have become valid and continuous without the British navy.”

  Having stressed the aspects of race and empire, Sir Gilbert moved serenely on to the matter of class. He made large claims for the penetration of the American upper reaches by the British:

  I need hardly say that the scope of my department was very extensive and its activities widely ranged. Among the estimates was a weekly report to the British Cabinet on the state of American opinion, and constant touch with the permanent correspondents of American newspapers in England. I also frequently arranged for important public men in England to act for us by interviews in American newspapers . . . Among other things, we supplied three hundred and sixty newspapers in the smaller states of the United States with an English newspaper, which gives a weekly review and comment of the affairs of the war. We established connection with the man in the street through cinema pictures of the Army and Navy, as well as through interviews, articles, pamphlets, etc.; and by letters in reply to individual American critics . . . We advised and stimulated many people to write articles; we utilized the friendly services and assistance of confidential friends; we had reports from important Americans constantly, and established association, by personal correspondence, with influential and eminent people of every profession in the United States.

  The reaction to this conceited article in many quarters, particularly Midwestern ones, might have been summarized in the words “Thanks for telling us.” But it was true that American organs of mass and elite opinion had been uniquely permeable to the British approach, combining the affectation of patriotism with the invocation of anti-immigrant feeling and distilling both into a vague but palpable veneration of empire. A special symbol of the latter was the invention, by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, of the myth of “Lawrence of Arabia.” Thomas had been dispatched to the Middle Eastern theater by the Creel Committee, a super-patriotic front organization sponsored by Wilson and subsidized by the British press tycoon Lord Northcliffe. In a rather apt deployment of disdainful “Greek to their Roman” rhetoric, Lawrence himself described Thomas as “the American who made my vulgar reputation; a well-intentioned, intensely crude and pushful fellow.”

  The precursors of Hollywood also made their ma
rk, as they were to do thenceforward. D. W. Griffith made a film, very much in the spirit of his adaptation of A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, called Hearts of the World. This matched footage from the Western Front with fearsome scenes of Lillian Gish being flogged and otherwise ill used by bestial German soldiery. Anti-Hun feeling was further inflamed by Yellow Dog, a film which promoted itself by saying: “The yellow dogs of the nation are the Americans with German souls who seek to sow dissatisfaction and distrust. The picture shows how the evil may be stamped out.”

  The “stamping out” took the form of a crusade against political dissent, which was to climax after the war with the Palmer Raids and the Abrams trial and deportation.