Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  A year ago Great Britain attacked a few thousand obscure peasants in Central Africa. To the bewilderment of mankind her armies were defeated, her troops fled in rout, her choicest regiments surrendered. London was plunged in dismay; for the first time in her history the Kingdom seemed to lose confidence in herself, and leaned upon the Colonies. Then the world, actuated by one common instinct, closed upon the enfeebled giant.

  Brooks Adams was indulging his weakness for generalization here, but he was right about the dependence upon American finance that the Boer War created in English war-making circles. He quoted The Economist as pointing out that while “in 1891 the Bank of England could draw gold from New York” in forced settlement, it was now forced to borrow not only American capital but American gold as well. It was not, then, the “insolent” institution Henry Adams had seen in 1858.

  Brooks did not waste time, as his brother was wont to do, in composing elegies for a departed English glory. Having decided that “England is relatively losing vitality, that the focus of energy and wealth is shifting and that, therefore, a period of instability is impending,” he went on confidently to say:

  Should this supposition be true, no event could be more momentous to America; for, if the western continent is gaining at the expense of the eastern, the United States must shortly bear the burden England has done, must assume the responsibilities and perform the tasks which have within human memory fallen to the share of England, and must be equipped accordingly.

  “Burden” again. The last point was addressed, as was most of what Brooks Adams wrote, to Roosevelt and Mahan. Like them, he held the view both that America should combine with England and that America should supersede or transcend England. “Should an Anglo-Saxon coalition be made, and succeed,” he wrote in The Spanish War, “it would alter profoundly the equilibrium of the world. . . . Probably human society would then be absolutely dominated by a vast combination of peoples whose right wing would rest upon the British Isles.” In a final flourish, he predicted that the oceans could thereby be dominated “much as the Romans encompassed the Mediterranean.” For this purpose, naturally, the Philippines, “rich, coal-bearing and with fine harbors, seem a predestined base for the United States.” But even as he preached collaboration, for the practical reason that “England and the United States combined could easily maintain a fleet which would make them supreme at sea; while as rivals they might be ruined,” he wrote, in England’s Decadence in the West Indies, that “the British Empire in the Western tropics is disintegrating.” And this prospect meant “expansion for America, and corresponding decline for England’ (italics mine). This was the element in the grand design that Chamberlain failed to notice and Kipling failed to hymn. It contains, also, a presentiment of the later writing of Arnold Toynbee and James Burnham.

  Anglicized though they were in their different ways, the Adams brothers were extremely un-English in their attachment to determinisi, “scientific” philosophy. They were also very inconsistent about it, especially as regarded England herself. Returning to London in the hinge year of 1898, Henry Adams noted “at each turn how the great city grew smaller as it doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its wealth; less influential as its empire widened; less dignified as it tried to be civil.” This seemed rather like a transference of his feelings about America, which had, as he showed in his novel Democracy, revolted him in just this way. He also wrote, in The Education, that to him the Boer War was “almost a personal outrage” and that if the British ever tried to treat Canada as they had treated the Boers, the United States would be obliged to intervene. Yet his letters tell a different story. To his brother Brooks, in one of the private exchanges of theirs which never seem to have omitted an attack on Jewry, he wrote that “the impossible has happened and the Boers have shown their incapacity to run the machine by running it off the track. This is the first strong evidence I have seen that the English are in the right.” Moreover, he wrote that the lessons of the Spanish-American War were “staggering for Europe. To Germany they seem to me almost a coup de grâce. They give England enormous confidence . . . Chamberlain’s foreign policy will doubtless take the conscious direction of a war which is indispensable to its ends.”

  Neither Adams could quite decide what to think about Wilhelmine Germany, the prime supporter of the Boers. At times, they thought the growth of the Kaiser’s power had “in twenty years effected what Adamses had tried for two hundred years in vain— frightened England into America’s arms.” Later, Brooks was to write of how America was drawn into the First World War “by the resistless attraction of the British economic system.” So much for determinism. But they agreed on the rough symbiosis achieved by John Hay’s adroit diplomacy in London and Washington. Henry Adams, who took the view in retrospect that “every step” taken by his ancestors “had the object of bringing England into an American system,” now wrote immodestly:

  As he sat at Hay’s table, listening to any member of the British Cabinet, for all were alike now, discuss the Philippines as a question of balance of power in the East, he could see that the family work of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand perspective of true empire building, which Hay’s work set off with artistic skill.

  How this sat with his private view—that “the Anglo-American alliance is almost inevitable. The idiocy and tomfoolery of the Kaiser Willy have given an impulse to the Anglo-American business which seems already beyond control. You know what an Anglo-American alliance means to gold bugs, and what an ocean of corruption we shall sail into”—is for his admirers to say. It does seem certain, though, that, like Mahan, Adams regarded war and expansion as an insurance against the sickly virus of socialism. Adams considered the growth of this idea to be inevitable, detestable, and avoidable, depending on whom he might be addressing. He had no love for Jews or capitalists, but, as he said, he preferred them to the masses. This was perhaps a poor return for the solidarity of Cobden and Bright. But men of that stamp were not to be included in the plans for a great new world empire of Anglo-Saxondom.

  An Adams had been prominent in every phase of the Anglo-American evolution: in the revolution against George III and the proclamation of a Continental Congress and Constitution; in the expansion and consolidation of the United States (in alternate concert and conflict with Britain); in the Civil War and in the adoption by the Union of the “expansionist” dreams once nourished by the South. The ambivalence of Henry Adams about the alliance of 1898 had to do with residual suspicion of British “stupidity” and unease about the Anglo-German war which he could often see was coming.

  In the decision about America’s side in that conflict, a decision which many Americans believe to have been the first and last loss of innocence, the Adams “set” was also to find itself heavily engaged. One of its members, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, provides a convenient and fairly exact register of the fluctuations in temperature and interest that eventuated in what American critics called “Mr. Wilson’s war,” but which was really the next and most violent stage in the Romanization of the United States via the British connection.

  Spring-Rice had a knack and talent for friendship and an easy way with Americans. He was also rather a deft and rapid worker. In August 1886, as a young Foreign Office clerk, he was returning from America by sea and made an effort to be agreeable to a politician who was making the same voyage. As he wrote to his brother: “I came over with Roosevelt, who has been standing for the mayoralty of New York against H. George and who is supposed to be the boss Republican young man.” By November, Roosevelt was writing to Spring-Rice from Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, accepting an invitation to dine at the Savile Club. On December 2 of the same year, when Roosevelt married Edith Kermit Carow at St. George’s, Hanover Square, Spring-Rice was best man. Roosevelt’s sister, Mrs. Cowles, wrote in a letter: “Dear Springy was so delightful and like himself when I went to put on Edith’s veil. I warned Theodore to start immediately for the church as it was a foggy day, and they were intensely preoccupied
in a discussion over the population of an island in the Southern Pacific.”

  Probably bad news for the Hawaiians, if they had but known it. In the same month, “Springy” applied to exchange posts with a secretary at the British legation in Washington. Until the 1890s, the United States neither appointed nor received “ambassadors” as such, and some of Spring-Rice’s superiors felt he was making a mistake. One of them, Sir Lionel Sackville-West (later Lord Sack-ville), wrote to him in puzzlement, saying:

  I hope you may get your exchange, though why choose Washington which is out of all politics? Of course it is interesting in a way, and West’s a charming chief. But still it seems so off the line.

  There, in a phrase or two, was the traditional British mandarin’s continued refusal to get the point of the United States. Spring-Rice was perhaps better off for this indifference, and freer to pursue his acquaintance and inclination than he would have been at a European embassy. The Education of Henry Adams, recalling Springy’s time in Washington between 1887 and 1895, noticed:

  Whatever one’s preference in politics might be, one’s house was bound to the Republican interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay and Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all, and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety.

  Springy, in fact, was the glass of fashion and the mold of form for generations of British diplomats who have come after him and sought, with varying degrees of success, to get on a similar Washington footing. He had the right sort of eccentricities (of which chronic untidiness was the most endearing), the right sort of lightly worn Balliol classical education, and the right poise between distinction and democracy in his manners. He made tremendous headway with the then just-emerging breed known as the Washington hostess; getting himself practically adopted as the perfect bachelor by Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Lodge. The British have sent some tailor’s dummies, some overwrought charmers, and some sycophants to Washington since then; none of them the equal of Springy because all of them swam in the tepid stream of the “special relationship.” When Spring-Rice was first in Washington, there was no such thing. England was still puissant, and still looked upon with great suspicion.

  Canadian officials were impounding American fishing boats for poaching. American opinion of the British handling of Irish Home Rule was distinctly jaundiced. It took remarkably little to arouse anti-British feeling in the growing United States electorate. That electorate’s choice of Cleveland in 1893 was a blow to Springy, who wrote gloomily to his brother:

  For England the Republican administration is the best; for though unpleasant to the last degree, it was capable and certain under Harrison; under Cleveland it may be anything— and Cleveland is bound to show that he was not elected by British gold, by being as disagreeable to us as possible.

  As if to spite Springy, there was a prompt partisan tussle over Hawaii, with the Democrats withdrawing their protectorate over the islands and the Republicans shouting that if the United States did not annex, Great Britain would move to fill the vacuum. But he was right about Cleveland, though the crucial metal was silver and not gold.

  Seeking to draw upon the reservoir of anti-British sentiment, and in general “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” Cleveland made a tremendous issue of the dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the placing of the latter country’s boundary. This, although it involved him in the possibility of a direct confrontation with the unsmiling regime of Lord Salisbury, had the advantage of domestic popularity. “It is time we act for ourselves and not be consulting England,” cried the aspirant Congressman William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, who was to make the call for “free silver” his own. A timely invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, in which until that time he had shown little interest, was an excellent way for Cleveland to put himself at the head of this powerful movement, and to attach to himself all the populist resentment engendered by the British banks and British gold. During the contest over silver repeal, Senator Francis Cockrell of Missouri had asked the dangerous question: “Shall we bow the knee to England?” Once this question had been asked, it took a tougher politician than Cleveland to risk giving the impression that the answer was “yes.” The free-silver faction, ranging from William “Coin” Harvey to the Nevada Republican William Stewart, actually welcomed the idea of war in their rhetoric; Harvey so far forgetting himself as to say that war with England would be “the most just war ever waged by man.”

  The British, slightly to their own surprise, announced in early 1895 that they were prepared to arbitrate the line of the Venezuelan border. In a foretaste of the mentality that would in time leapfrog Anglophobia and result directly in the safer idea of a Spanish-American War, the Democrats and Republicans combined to say that this was not good enough. Henry Cabot Lodge wrote a pamphlet on the relevance of the Monroe Doctrine, and Attorney General Richard Olney, he of the suppression of the Pullman strike, took up the populist cry with a brief that said: “Today, the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” This kind of talk—the revenge for British arrogance in 1862—got him the Secretaryship of State. The fact that London waited for a long and contemptuous time before replying to the demarche did him no harm. War fever infected both parties, both houses, and most newspapers. The Hay-Adams circle were, as usual, not sure whether they quite liked this saber-flourishing and mobocracy. After Cleveland had told Congress on December 17, 1895, that he was prepared to fight England over the border with Venezuela, arousing the wildest passions thereby, Henry Adams put it down to “the bitterness excited by the silver struggle,” and John Hay spoke meaningfully of the President’s being in “a disturbed state of mind.” Spring-Rice took Kipling in person to see the deliberations of Congress at this time, which impressed him as sordid and dangerous both, and, as we saw, shook him powerfully with the horror of a possible war between the two cousinly powers.

  It would have been ghastly and fascinating to see what might have happened next. What actually happened next was a telegram from Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to Paul Kruger, praising him for repelling a British raid on the Transvaal. At that message, which was transmitted three weeks after Cleveland’s minatory address to Congress, Lord Salisbury made shift to forget about the Venezuelan boundary and to advocate conciliation all round. The danger had passed, but it left America in possession of a new and more strenuous claim to apply the Monroe Doctrine without scruple, and it left the British with a strong sensation that here was a formidable enemy not to make.

  Just as Kipling seems to have decided “never again,” so does Spring-Rice. Posted shortly afterward to the highly relevant embassy at Berlin, he kept up his Washington friendships and his American correspondence. His relief—that American belligerence was now transferred to Spain—was palpable. As he wrote to Hay, after Admiral Dewey’s walkover in the Philippines:

  We have just received the glorious news from Manila. How curious it is—the continuity of history, the struggle that began 400 years ago of which we are seeing the last chapter. How the historians criticise Cromwell for siding against Spain! It was the divine instinct ingrained in the race which has brought us to where we are.

  That was on May 7, 1898, and one can only guess at the emotion which made Springy reach for the unaccustomed symbol of Cromwell. To Henry Cabot Lodge on July 8, he was so unctuous as to be practically servile:

  I can’t tell you with what pleasure I see that Hawaii is at length to be annexed. The pleasure is selfish and has in one sense nothing to do with the real or permanent advantage to America which I believe will result from the step. I think that there can be no doubt that there is an intention (and a natural one) to depose English civilization (I mean yours as much and more than mine) from the Pacific. The new order of things which is to replace it may be better; but it isn’t ours, it is absolutely and wholly different from ours, and we have the right and duty to defend what we most certainly have fairly
won on the American, Australian and Chinese coasts. I don’t believe that England, the island, is strong enough, or will remain comparatively strong enough to defend English civilization alone—and I have no sympathy whatever with the people who believe that English institutions, literature, language and greatness are courtiers at the throne of London. I believe they are common possessions, to be defended, as they were won, in common—and to be enjoyed in common too. And I welcome any step which America takes outside her continent because it tends to the increase of the common good.

  I need not say how excited we all are at the very welcome proof you have given that people who talk English can still fight.

  Springy’s last compliment was quite rich, given that Lodge had shown every sign of advancing his political career, not three years earlier, to prove that America could still fight England. The urgency of Spring-Rice’s friendliness is probably explained in a letter he wrote to his old companion Roosevelt at about this time, giving the Berlin perspective upon Manifest Destiny:

  I have been very much interested in watching the view taken here about Cuba. As far as I can judge, the feeling in official circles is as follows. To begin with, there is the feud that every official German has with America, which is regarded as a huge machine for teaching Germans English and make [sic] them Republican.

  Spring-Rice did not return to the United States until 1913, when he did so as His Britannic Majesty’s ambassador. Woodrow Wilson had been elected, more or less as a consequence of the split between Springy’s old friend Roosevelt and his less intimate acquaintance Taft. Once again, those Englishmen who desired closer and warmer relations with America were confronted by ever more promiscuous interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine. There was a lingering dispute over the Panama Canal and the rights of its users, where the British felt that the United States was acting highhandedly. And the United States was determined to overrule European opinion about Mexico, then in the throes of revolutionary turmoil after the end of the long rule of Porfirio Díaz. Wilson managed to get British support for the second policy by making well-timed concessions on the first. The British jurist Lord Montrose, for example, consistently took Roosevelt’s interpretation of the Canadian-Alaskan border dispute; helping to settle it in a manner which put the new alliance with America above sentimental considerations of the “Old Dominion.” The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty on the Panama Canal saw the British abandon the claim of equal privilege in Panama that they had felt able to insist upon at the time of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850. Henceforth, the United States was recognized as possessing the right to “construct, maintain and control” the Canal, and the British reserved their right only to oppose discrimination in rates: the issue which Wilson composed.