Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  With long arrears to make good

  When the English began to hate.

  He even made the extraordinary claim:

  It was not preached to the crowd

  It was not taught by the state

  No man spoke it aloud

  When the English began to hate.

  Which would have come as a surprise to the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organisations, among others, who joined with the government and the Church of England and Rudyard Kipling in spreading every kind of hatred of things and people German. Still, James was in love with a “genius” not a policy. He evidently felt the incompleteness of his position, and decided to become a subject of His Majesty. On the day on which he did so, after formally renouncing his American passport and incurring much bitter criticism from “back home,” James proudly announced: “Civis Britannicus Sum.” Here was a Latin tribute, and a Roman gesture.

  The second example concerns Winston Churchill (who had met James in Kent in early 1915 and rather snubbed him, as well as offended him by persistent use of slang). Almost thirty years later, Churchill was engaged in the most desperate struggle of his life, this time to convince the United States to rescue not just the British Empire but Britain herself. He failed in the first and succeeded in the second and was prepared to pay any price to secure American support and sympathy. On more than one occasion, he proposed joint citizenship between Britain and the United States, a common currency, a common trading area, and a common use by American and British forces of British bases and facilities worldwide. None of this was surprising for a man in his political extremity. What was surprising was his willingness to surrender the English language itself in order to cement the new concordat.

  In the 1920s, a Cambridge academic named C. K. Ogden had evolved the idea of “Basic English.” This reduced the language to 850 necessary words, with some allowance made for the import of neologisms and new coinages in specialized areas such as science and technology. (It is almost certain from internal evidence that George Orwell derived his bleak and arid invention of “Newspeak” from this source.) One might have thought that Churchill would be revolted to the core by such a proposition, but he saw it as a means of further dissolving the British and American peoples into one another. He first mentioned it at a summit meeting with Roosevelt in Quebec in August 1943. In April 1944, having heard nothing from Washington, he returned to the theme, writing to Roosevelt:

  My conviction is that Basic English will then prove to be a great boon to mankind in the future and a powerful support to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon people in world affairs.

  Having apparently received the impression from their Quebec meeting that Roosevelt was taken by the idea, Churchill had appointed no less a person than Leo Amery to chair a Cabinet committee on Basic. Amery, one of the most stout imperialists in the British government, was then Secretary of State for Burma. He had been a close friend and correspondent of Rudyard Kipling, and had in 1940 summoned the magnificent words of Oliver Cromwell dismissing the Long Parliament in order to urge the resignation of the discredited Chamberlain front bench. It is hard to think of a man less likely to acquiesce in the reduction of English to 850 words. Roosevelt seems to have been less enthused by the scheme than either Churchill or Amery. He did not reply for several weeks, and was rather flippant when he did so, even teasing the great man on his strongest point and strongest subject:

  Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only “blood, work, eye water and face water,” which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words.

  Meanwhile, he mandated Cordell Hull to look into the question, to sound out some experts and to talk to Congress. At least in the published letters, nothing more is to be found on the matter. Hull, as Secretary of State, was known as the leading exponent of Wood-row Wilson’s style of pious internationalism. He appears to have let the project expire in committee, since his few notes on it express little more than distaste.

  It is mistaken to imagine that these controversies about the proper relation of language to ethnicity belong only to the past. As late as the election campaign of 1988, there was a noticeable recrudescence of themes that had been familiar in Woodrow Wilson’s time. The racial and religious composition of the United States is again a very crucial and strongly felt issue, with attitudes toward it probably running far deeper than the political class cares to admit. Not only did the Republican victory in that election make skillful use of what might be called Mayflower imagery in the presentation of George Bush and his family, but the opinion makers found themselves surprised by the success of the most blatant elements in that appeal. Governor Michael Dukakis’s evocation of the Emma Lazarus myth and the immigrant version of the American dream was a failure to an extent that astonished his advisers. Not all of this could be attributed to the subliminal influence of black-white hostility which also surfaced in the campaign under the more restrained and tasteful (and suggestive) rubric of “crime and the underclass.” Television advertisements featuring a notorious black criminal named Willie Horton also showed Michael Dukakis without a shave and looking distinctly swarthy.

  Commentators who declared themselves either surprised or depressed by the reserve strength of the nativist instinct in 1988 could with profit have paid more attention to a proposition that succeeded in getting on the ballot in seventeen states. With variations in wording and provision, all these propositions called for English to be the official language, and all of them passed. This was a response to the newest and perhaps the most important wave of recent immigration, legal and illegal, which has brought millions of Asian and Hispanic settlers to the cities of the United States.

  Certain features of this immigration made it different in kind and degree from its predecessors. Most of the new arrivals were from states and cultures to which they still possessed a loyalty— very unlike the Ukrainian Jew or even the Irishman of the 1890s. Most were able to retain touch with their countries of origin, and were not abandoning all connection with a heartless and persecuting homeland. None were white. None were Protestant.

  These considerations had not escaped the framers of the “English only” proposition, or the national lobby that was organized to promulgate it. Entitled innocuously but interestingly “U.S. English,” this establishment grouping in Washington had been founded by the former California senator S. I. Hayakawa and a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton. Its advisory board reflected the genteel aspect of the English question, being adorned by such reassuring figures as Walter Cronkite and Alistair Cooke, Saul Bellow and Bruno Bettelheim, Norman Podhoretz as an intellectual makeweight, and such lesser functionaries of the government of the tongue as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Walter Annenberg.

  Ostensibly, the U.S. English lobby sought to make English, the existing lingua franca of business, tourism, entertainment, and air traffic control, into the national language. It appeared to offer all newcomers the chance to learn it. However, it transpired to have another purpose in mind.

  It had been noticeable that the Washington offices of U.S. English were the same as those for FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which campaigned for very much tighter borders. But only upon an investigation by James Crawford, author of a study of bilingual education, did some other, more traditional connections and filiations become evident.

  U.S. English, it emerged, was a project of “U.S. Inc.,” a tax-exempt body which underwrote a number of other groups, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, Americans for Border Control, and Californians for Population Stabilization. There was no mistaking the timbre of this joint output, which had little to do with the teaching of “the Queen’s English” except as this bore upon the connection between that English and certain inherited conceptions of race and tribal security. Dr. John Tanton, the originating author and patron of this cluster of groups and initiatives, was himself in no doubt tha
t “the question of bilingualism grows out of U.S. immigration policy.”

  So much might have seemed to be obvious, at least until Dr. Tanton wrote a paper which, phrased in the poor and affected English which is often found among the language’s more ostentatious upholders, created a crisis for his hitherto blue-chip WASP and Jewish campaign. As he coarsely put it:

  “Gobernar es poblar” translates as “to govern is to populate.” In this society, will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren’t controlled?

  Having rather clumsily Latinized or Romanized his argument, Tanton moved to a more demotic style. He warned sternly of such alarming cultural imports as “the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs,” and Roman Catholicism with its tendency to “pitch out the separation of church and state.” He continued to skirt around these aspects of the problem—the most conspicuous opponents of church-state separation in the 1980s having been fundamentalist Protestants—making an excursion through allegedly low “educability” before returning with relish to his main theme, which was, as ever, sex and fertility:

  Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down. As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night. Or will there be an explosion?

  This piece of inadvertence—the shift to “white” as the key word speaks volumes in the extract above, as well as showing the secondary significance of ideas like “culture” and “language”—led to the resignation of many of the U. S. English board members, among them Walter Cronkite and the neoconservative Hispanic Linda Chavez. It also led to closer scrutiny of the network of which Dr. Tanton was the convenor. The chairman of the Florida English campaign, for example, had advocated the elimination of emergency telephone services in Spanish in order to supply what he called “an incentive” to the learning of the tongue of Shakespeare and Dickens. His Dade County equivalent had warned that “the United States is not a mongrel nation.” Rusty Butler, an aide to Senator Steven Symms of Idaho, had forwarded the senator’s call for an English-language amendment to the Constitution by saying that “the language issue could feed and guide terrorism in the U.S.” Finally, it was discovered that among the donors to Dr. Tanton’s network was the Pioneer Fund, established in the un-propitious year of 1937 to proselytize for what it then called “applied genetics in present-day Germany.”

  All of these rather dank connections had something inevitable about them, redolent of the old paranoid connection between immigration and subversion as well as between immigration and racial/religious purity. More interesting was the group for which Dr. Tanton had prepared his revealing paper. It was a private organization calling itself WITAN. The title, which mystified many reporters, is taken from the dim past of Anglo-Saxondom, when the Witenagemot, or conclave of wise men, would meet under the oak tree to consider the good of the folk. It was instructive to learn that, at the root of an apparently open but complex national argument about language and identity, there lay the imagined counsels of an obscure post-Roman tribal synod, attempting to impose Anglo-Saxon attitudes upon the most variegated and pluralist society in history.

  But, like the migration of Shakespearean birds, Anglo-Saxon attitudes are able in the United States, in some sense, to cut with the grain. The multiple influence of history, literature, language, and kinship is very strong, and has in the past and the present run deeper than ad hoc British attempts to manipulate it for political purposes.

  These opposed and separated instances help form the parentheses within which, in this century, the British and the Americans have existed in one another’s imaginations. At one pole, the WASP identity can only confirm and reassure itself by an almost excessive reliance on England and things English. At the other, the British elite makes an instinctive but shrewd determination that its own survival necessitates a metamorphosis of the “Anglo-Saxon” into the “Anglo-American,” with the American element grudgingly admitted to predominate. In between came the eclipse of British power by the United States, the consequent decline of Anglophobia, and the instatement of Anglophilia as a matter of fashion rather than of class or political affiliation. The residue of Anglo-Saxondom lives on in the debate over immigration, now rekindled for a new generation. But in the numerous and popular newspaper columns which presume to advise Americans on matters of pronunciation, etymology, and lexicography, it is the Oxford English Dictionary that is the final court of appeal. Even at this great remove from the original “Swarming of the English,” the subtle and latent connections between race, social standing, sophistication, education, and even religion remain traceable. Though they are often represented innocuously as something merely “cultural,” these same latent connections are an endowment from a prolonged engagement with empire, war, and nationalism.

  [6]

  From Love to Hate and Back Again

  Bombastic though he was, Sir Gilbert Parker had been right to say that the Monroe Doctrine, that first stirring of an American imperium, would have been unthinkable without the British fleet. But of course his tribute was a consciously one-sided one. While they could, the British fought tenaciously against the expansion of the United States across North America. But they also had an interest in limiting the penetration of other European imperial powers when it came to South America. This is, in effect, the paradox expressed by Canning when he boasted of having “called the New World into existence in order to redress the failure of the Old.” Canning may have phrased this in such a way as to flatter the Americans, but he had another agenda in mind. True, he favored the recognition of new self-governing Republics in formerly Spanish America, if only because, as he put it, British investment interests in Colombia and Mexico were so considerable as to exceed “mere commercial speculations.” Still, he showed another kind of calculation in a document that was unknown until H. W. V. Temperley uncovered it in the British Museum in the early part of this century:

  The other and perhaps still more powerful motive is my apprehension of the ambition and ascendancy of the U.S.A. It is obviously the policy of that Government to connect itself with all the powers of America in a general Transatlantic League, of which it would have the sole discretion. I need only say how inconvenient such an ascendancy may be in time of peace and how formidable in case of war.

  Just as Canning was a hypocrite when it came to overseas possessions and rivals for them, so was President Monroe’s Secretary of State, the celebrated John Quincy Adams. He also tried to fight on two fronts, consolidating the American state as a continental power and excluding foreign intervention from its periphery. In other words, both London and Washington (not for the first time) thought they were being clever at the expense of the other. Richard van Alstyne puts it neatly in his history of the Monroe Doctrine moment:

  Adams made no headway against Britain in his notions of preemptive right over North America. And it is one of the great ironies of history that, while he was trying to aggrandise the United States in the Northwest at her (Britain’s) expense, he was gambling on her protection against the intervention of the continental powers in Latin America.

  This odd combination of rivalry and alliance, collusion and suspicion, was to be the pattern of Anglo-American relations for many years—until the entente of 1898 in fact—and in some reminiscent forms even after that. Take the matter of Cuba. Canning was convinced that Adams and Monroe coveted the island. He also thought that the French had designs on it. The French suspected that the British wanted Cuba for themselves. Adams felt that if the United States did not preponderate in Cuba, it would fall into the clutches of Britain or France. As is usually the case when empires compete, each side was amply justified in its suspicions. Adams actually wanted Cuba to become a state of the Union. We know from the memoirs of Chateaubriand, then French Foreign Ministe
r, that France was also casting languorous glances in that direction.

  Viewed in this perspective, the Monroe Doctrine was really an early compromise with European imperialism rather than a repudiation of it. Both sides thought they had been cleverer: Adams got Monroe to drop a naïve amendment stating that the United States had “no intention of acquiring any portion of the Spanish possessions for ourselves,” while Canning wrote to a colleague just one year after the Doctrine’s promulgation to say: “The deed is done, the nail is driven, Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English.”

  In point of fact, the British did mismanage their affairs very sadly. Hoping to keep the long-sought route to China for themselves, they struggled long and hard to deny the Pacific Northwest to the nascent United States. Canning wrote to Lord Liverpool in 1826 concerning the possibility of a concession in this area:

  Think what a task it will be to justify this transaction to Parliament, if upon this transaction we rest our justification for abandoning the whole NW Coast of America to the Yankees. I feel the shame of such a statement burning on my face by anticipation.

  The Yankees shall not have America! Even Temperley, Canning’s great chronicler and admirer, italicized that last sentence.

  Whenever they could afford to try, the British opposed the consolidation of the United States as a continental power. And whenever they could not inhibit the extension of American power into Mexico, the isthmus, and beyond, they tried to take a share in it. This policy was reflected in American tactics and attitudes. Victor Kiernan puts it deftly when he says, of the period before the Civil War: “In short, while America picked up imperial manners from Britain beyond the seas, beyond the mountains it was hurried into imitation of them.”

  The name of Adams recurs in this narrative because it was John Quincy Adams who operated the balance between rivalry and collusion in Anglo-American relations, first as Secretary of State and then as President, and because it was his son, Charles Francis Adams, who became Lincoln’s envoy to Britain during the Civil War. It is from Charles’s son, Henry, that we have a seminal account not just of Anglo-American relations but of the swing of the pendulum between Anglophilia and Anglophobia and of the alterations in imperial context which dictated the rhythm of this love-hate relationship.