Most striking of all was the issue of Venezuela. In late 1902, and in order to impress on the Venezuelans the necessity of paying their debts, Britain joined with Germany and Italy in blockading and bombarding the Venezuelan coast. This time, there was no anti-British fervor in the United States to rival that of 1895. But, sensitive to the Monroe Doctrine, the British government withdrew its claims, officially regretted the collusion with Germany, and declared an end to the use of force. Roosevelt later claimed that he had been readying Admiral Dewey and the fleet to dissuade the Kaiser. Kipling wrote a poem, “The Rowers,” which breathed contempt for any alliance with “the Goth and the shameless Hun.”
With a number of false starts and failures of synchronicity, then, a general pattern of collaboration was emerging. Britain would give the United States a more or less free hand in Central America and the Caribbean; allowing Roosevelt, for instance, to amputate the national territory of Colombia in order to Americanize the Panama Canal Zone and indeed to create Panama in the first place. This blind eye to “the big stick” permitted the British Admiralty to recall its naval squadron from Bermuda and to leave only a skeletal presence in the West Indies—thus vindicating the predictions of Mahan and Brooks Adams. In general, British priorities were being reordered to deal with Germany, and her alliance with America against lesser breeds everywhere else allowed her to hope that America might come to see Europe through British eyes as well.
In coaxing this perception into life, Spring-Rice had to be rather silky. The golden opportunities of the Lusitania and the Zimmermann Telegram lay in the future; in the meantime he confronted a public opinion that was generally hostile to embroilment in a European quarrel between crowned heads. Moreover, of the minority who did take a partisan view, not all by any means took a pro-British one. In 1913, more than 8 million of America’s 105 million inhabitants either had been born in Germany or had at least one German parent. And there were 4.5 million Irish-Americans as well, most of whom had no love for England. Neither of these national minorities fell within Woodrow Wilson’s definition of the “sordid and hapless elements,” the sweepings of Eastern and Southern Europe, and both had substantial political representations and a lively and popular press.
Springy’s first task was to get the Mexican difficulty out of the way. American official and demotic opinion inclined (not without justification) to the view that the British had recognized the Huerta regime, which came to power over the dead body of Diaz’s successor, Madero, because of the great interests held by the Pearson-Cowdray family. Spring-Rice rather confirmed this in an ingratiating letter to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge in August 1914:
[Sir Edward] Grey was pressed by all the financial people to do something, and so spoke privately to [U.S. Ambassador] Page to ask him to find out what were the views of the US as to this policy and if they were inclined to adopt it. I subsequently wrote to [William Jennings] Bryan [Secretary of State], telling him that the press was publishing alarming news about Mexico, and that British subjects might very well suffer if the U.S.G. took violent measures. (The Greasers can no more distinguish between a Britisher and an American than between a crocodile and an alligator.)
This was the Mexican power, supine before foreigners, against which Britain would shortly warn America in the drama of the Zimmermann Telegram. Meanwhile, Springy wrote to Roosevelt anxious to renew old solidarities:
Oh, T.R., how I wish I could see you. I nearly wept in Rock Greek Park at the rock. I could hear you—the flowers are indeed beautiful now. How lovely it all is.
Few envoys could hope to enjoy this kind of intimacy, and even if not all the Adams circle could be counted on all the time, they were generally a staunch phalanx of allies in the interventionist and English cause. Meanwhile, Wilson had repealed the offending Panama tolls and thereby recruited British support for the upstart Pancho Villa. In the March before the outbreak of war in Europe, Spring-Rice found an unintentionally apt metaphor for the situation:
There are not nearly so many attacks against Great Britain as there used to be, although we are reminded that the young American eagle lined his nest with the mane of the British Lion.
Indeed. Once war had begun in August 1914, Spring-Rice immediately began to draw the lines of battle. These involved the precise identification of two objectives—American public opinion and American sea power. Considerations of race, nation, and class soon became salient. Having quoted his friend Roosevelt to the effect that:
England’s consistent friendliness towards us for decades past, and Germany’s attitude during the Spanish War and in South Africa, have combined to produce a friendliness in the U.S. for England as against Germany and a general apprehension of German designs,
Spring-Rice continued, to Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office, in a less optimistic frame of mind:
This seems the feeling of the native American; but there are other elements, and the influence of the Germans and especially the German Jews is very great, and in parts of the country is supreme. We must not count on American sympathy as assured to us. A very little incident might change it, and there are the cleverest people in the world at work with large sums at their back who will let no opportunity pass to do us mischief. [Italics mine.]
This letter, with its slightly John Buchan-ish undertone, showed the tone of British self-pity that was to recur throughout the conflict. It seemed very bad form, to Spring-Rice, that the Germans had any rights on the high seas at all. As he went on:
Another matter is the question of the transfer of the flag to the Hamburg Amerika ships. It is not a very pleasant business. The Company is practically a German government affair. The ships are used for Government purposes, the Emperor himself is a large share-holder, and so is the great banking house of Kuhn & Loeb of New York. A member of that house has been appointed to a very responsible post in NY, though only just naturalized.
Decidedly unpleasant, that the King’s cousin, who had been an honored guest at Cowes on his yacht during Admiral Mahan’s triumphant visit, should presume so far. The renunciation of German titles by the British royal family, the transformation of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha into Windsor and Battenberg into Mountbatten, lay ahead. So did a comparable and related anti-Hun hysteria in America. For now, Springy and others had served notice that those “only just naturalized,” such as Mr. Warburg of the Federal Reserve, who had been a business partner to Mr. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury and son-in-law to President Wilson, were not really kith and kin in the proper sense at all.
A few months later Spring-Rice was writing peevishly to his old friend Sir Valentine Chirol. On this occasion, he felt that it was the American toiler who was letting down the side, by giving an ear to Wilson’s canting (as it turned out) about “strict neutrality:”
George Trevelyan had an admirable study in his Bright on the attitude of our working classes to the North during the cotton famine. I wish that the Americans would take a similar view of their obligations. They signed the Hague Treaty. That Treaty has been shamefully and repeatedly violated. They never protested and have not once raised their voice against these violations or on behalf of the weak and suppressed. When the Jews in Romania were touched they howled loud enough, because the Jews in New York had votes. When Jew bagmen were turned out of Russia, they broke off their treaty with the one country which had uniformly been friendly to them in the hour of their greatest need.
Here, Springy sounds more like Sapper than Buchan. His diatribes against the eternally troublesome Hebrew (who would care about him when he could thrill to the King of the Belgians?) are of a certain recognizable type and period. His invocation of Bright is less usual and more suggestive. Was there, perhaps, a residual conscience at work? The British Establishment had scorned and pelted Bright and his plebeian supporters for their support of the Union side. Now they saw them as the great model of selfless and ethical conduct; almost as an example for an ungrateful America to emulate. Spring-Rice chose to forget the role of Palmerston and Gladstone and
Russell in forwarding secession and slavery in the American Civil War. He also forgot the terms in which Bright had upheld the Union cause. On March 26, 1863, young Henry Adams had attended, as part of his education, a workers’ meeting at St. James’s Hall, London. There he heard Bright denounce the surreptitious and cynical British policy, recording the speech himself in these terms:
“Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American contest” he began in his massive, deliberate tones; “... and every morning with blatant voice, it comes into our streets and curses the American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty million of men happy and prosperous, without emperors— without king (cheers)—without the surroundings of a court (renewed cheers)—without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and virtue—without State bishops and State priests, those vendors of the love that works salvation (cheers)—without great armies and great navies—without a great debt and great taxes—and Privilege has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if this great experiment should succeed.”
An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed, in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than Bright struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed artifice and hurt his oratory . . .
Springy, if he had ever read his old and dear friend’s memoir (he often addressed him in correspondence as “Uncle Henry”), must have been impervious to the irony.
[7]
The Churchill Cult
How and why is it that the name and prestige of Sir Winston Churchill are so easily appropriated by Americans of the kind I described in the Introduction: Americans who are generally identified with privilege and conservatism to an extent that Churchill himself never was?
The Churchill cult in the United States, as currently practiced, makes its association with such aspects of American life practically inevitable. The figure of the grand old man is the summa of “special relationship” politics and emotions. Invested with the awesome grandeur and integrity of the 1940 resistance to Hitler, and gifted as few before or since with the power to make historic phrases, Churchill is morally irrefragable in American discourse, and can be quoted even more safely than Lincoln in that he was never a member of any American faction.
Given the universality of his standing and appeal, Churchill is an icon of which jealous use is made by the political and military conservatives to whom the “special relationship” is a potent source of reinforcement. But he also occupies an unrivaled place in the common stock of reference, ranging from the mock-heroic to the downright kitsch.
On the western reach of Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., hard by the Naval Observatory, which houses the vice presidential mansion, there stands an imposing bronze statue of Sir Winston, cigar in hand, making his instantly recognizable gesture of victory. (He is rooted to the turf outside the attractively proportioned residence built by Sir Edwin Lutyens, designer of New Delhi, rather than the adjacent biscuit-factory-style edifice which houses the public parts of Britain’s largest overseas mission.) On as many mornings as not, the cigar-holding hand of the sculpture has a bouquet or a posy placed in it, though no one, according to local lore, has ever seen the flowers being placed there. There is no reason to disbelieve the British embassy staff, who deny responsibility for these garlands and tributes. They insist that the floral salute is a spontaneous thing, the tradition of the neighbors and inhabitants. This is a prosperous and political suburb of the town, with multiple “special relationship” connections, and there seems no harm in believing that the Washington Establishment regards the statue as its personal property.
Can the same be said of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City? Here, in the center of the shopping area, there stands an enormous bronze of Sir Winston and his wife, Clementine. It is entitled Married Love, and it inescapably reminds one of what happened to the Graham Sutherland portrait which Churchill did not like. (“It makes me look stupid, which I ain’t,” he said, before ordering it to be fed into the family boiler.) Adjacent to the statue is a speaker which, if requested by the press of a button, will emit a version of the “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” peroration. The likeness is based on a smaller sculpture by Oscar Nemon. It is the joint conception of a dentist named Joseph Jacobs and a local real estate operator called Miller Nichols, heir to the shopping center itself, who agreed some years ago that the youth of Kansas City were in need of “symbolism” to encourage “traditional values.” Kansas City, no great foe of traditional values, already possessed one of their exemplars in the form of the Hallmark greeting-card company. This pervasive organization, which markets the children-and-pets motif across the continental United States in times of anniversary, nuptial, and bereavement, had already established a lien on the Churchill cult in the 1950s, when it successfully promoted a tour of the grand old man’s watercolor paintings.
Examples of the high and low manifestations of the cult can be found in the most improbable places. In New Orleans, the least English of all American cities, tourists threading their way to the river in order to take a Cajun-style cruise to the battle sites of the War of 1812 must pass an immense statue of Churchill hard by the waterfront, at the approach to a monstrous Hilton Hotel whose suites are named Windsor, Newbury, Rosebery. It might be too much to say that this statue eclipses the gilded Joan of Arc sculpture a few blocks away, but it is certainly on something like an equal footing.
In the public realm, there is an almost unappeasable demand for Churchillian invocation. The decline of direct Soviet-American confrontation has slightly lessened the intensity of the Munich analogy, which is the most salient form in which Churchillism lives on. But any issue of principle, or any confrontation with a lesser power than Russia, can also bring the “lessons of Munich” tripping off a speaker’s tongue. Very few occasions upon which the call for strength and resolution is made can be counted as free of this garnish, and they are a staple of “special relationship” summits as well.
Oddly enough, the second principal strain of Churchillism has to do with the gentrification of political weakness. An easy resort to a Churchillism can be a safe indication that the speaker is in a tight corner. A politician detected in lying, bullying, or antisocial conduct is unusually apt to reach for his glossary of bulldoggery.
Examples of the first kind were especially easy to come by in the early years of the Reagan epoch, and of the second kind as those years drew to their close. Shortly after taking office, Ronald Reagan gave instructions that a portrait of Churchill be hung at the center of the White House “situation room.” The intention was to invest the crusade against the then “Evil Empire” with the moral aura of Dunkirk and the Blitz. Caspar Weinberger, later knighted by the Queen for his services to the “special relationship,” and the chief designer of the military half of this crusade, was and is the possessor of a large personal library of Churchilliana. He seldom exempted the great man from his speeches on strategy, and is a frequent attender at Churchill dinners and Churchill commemorative occasions. When the time for his retirement came, he was given a vale by President Reagan in which the Leader of the Free World said: “I’ve occasionally called Cap ‘my Disraeli.’ But as I think of him and the service he’s given the nation in the cause of freedom and peace, more than anyone else it’s Churchill who comes to mind.” Borrowing freely from Churchill’s rhetoric, Reagan cited him on the call of “great causes, beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spell duty.” When there was a doubt about the feasibility or the desirability of the notorious “Star Wars” contrivance, and when this doubt began to make itself felt in the Pentagon, enthusiasts for the scheme framed and mounted a Churchillism and gave it to Mr. Weinberger to hang in his office. It read: “Never give in, never, never, never, never—in things great or small, large or petty.” (This rather unsafe injunction, made by Churchill to the schoolboys of Harrow on one of his few return visits to an academy he had thoroughly disliked, was also ta
ken as the motto of G. Gordon Liddy, most unrepentant of the Watergate convicts, during his post-prison book tour.)
Although Harold Wilson once gave his critics a laugh by saying of Britain that “our frontiers are on the Himalayas,” and although Sir Anthony Eden had his moment of tragicomedy in the Suez Canal Zone having waited too long in Churchill’s anteroom, and although Margaret Thatcher proved able in a pinch to move a fleet to victory in the South Atlantic, Winston Churchill was the last British Prime Minister who really possessed an Imperial General Staff and who really enjoyed a panoptic grasp of affairs. This, in alliance with his high oratorical style and his generally conservative growl, makes him an ideal fetish object for American “hawks.” One thing more is necessary for this speechwriter’s heaven to be complete. Churchill is no longer alive. And his greatest purpose, the maintenance of British world power, in which he expended all his mighty breath, is safely whimsical and antique. He is therefore meet to be celebrated by the political descendants of American conservatism, which in his lifetime oscillated between collecting on the British war debt and upholding the banner of “America First.”
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