Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  Colonel Ward knew that Jews were anathema to the autocracy of Russia, the particular party he was supporting, and by this false statement he was trying to curry favor with his associates in Siberia. Colonel Ward’s chapter on American Forces in Siberia is filled with mis-statements of alleged facts and occurrences, all of which showed a bitterness of feeling and resentment against our troops.

  I have previously stated enough to show that this bitterness and resentment was due to the fact that I would not permit the British to dictate to me what I should do.

  Another American eyewitness to this fascinating and forgotten episode in warfare was Ralph Albertson, an American journalist who was at that time coordinating the relief efforts of the YMCA. His book Fighting Without a War was published in 1920, after he had been the last American to leave Archangel. He related his story from the “grunt” point of view, conveying extreme distaste for the way in which Churchill’s policy had downgraded American soldiers. The average soldier was uncertain even of the purpose of the war:

  His officers could not tell him. They had never been told. They wanted to know. What they did know was that at every town, in every position, on every piece of work, in every detail of responsibility, an English officer stood over them telling them what to do.

  Albertson found the doughboys very exercised by the absence of the Stars and Stripes from the scene of operations. He described a Christmas service in Shenkursk where, though “Americans predominated in numbers,” “a British chaplain read the service, concluding naturally with ‘God Save the King.’ As we filed out an American private was heard to remark: ‘Who ever heard of the Star-Spangled Banner anyhow?’ “ Albertson disliked the British habit of referring routinely to Russian civilians as “swine,” and he was astounded by the tone of their propaganda, which was obsessed with boasts about the British Empire as well as

  the charitableness of British royalty, and lately the severity of terms demanded of Germany. Great piles of sheets of old war pictures with Russian captions were scattered broadcast upon a war-bored population, and Russian editions of a transparently over-censored news communiqué which told who dined with the King, who got the Order of the Garter, who was responsible for the Great War, how bad the Bolsheviks are, and how the great international game of cricket is getting on . . .

  This brief but intense military fiasco, which marked the first time in history that anybody had tried to invade Russia from the north, is memorable for other reasons. It was yet a further tentative step by American power into the quarrels of old Europe. It was the first official declaration by the United States that it regarded Communism as an enemy in general, and Russia as an enemy in particular (in this respect making a good match with the anti-Bolshevik and anti-immigrant convulsions going on simultaneously in America itself).

  If today you visit the White Chapel Cemetery in Detroit, Michigan, you can see the Polar Bear Monument, erected in memory of those who lost their lives in the American expedition to Russia. The ambivalence of the survivors about the war they had fought is expressed by the inscription, which is from Stephen Decatur but which oddly recalls Churchill’s 1900 exchange with Mark Twain: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” This unknown monument to unknown soldiers predates the celebrated Vietnam Memorial by sixty years, and greatly exceeds it in the ambiguity and irony which it expresses. In the fighting of undeclared wars against godless Communism, Winston Churchill was America’s mentor almost thirty years before his “Iron Curtain” speech.

  In the revulsion from foreign entanglement that overtook the United States after Versailles, Winston Churchill was a figure almost of demonology. The revulsion itself was a compound of petty isolationism, of anti-war sentiment, of anti-imperialist principle, and of ordinary self-interest. Its most eloquent and principled spokesman was Senator William Borah of Idaho, a former Shakespearean actor who emerged as the conscience of “Americanism.” Borah was able to touch a number of chords in his dramatic and finally successful campaign against Wilson and the League of Nations. The Irish-Americans were still seething about the British repression of the Easter Rising in 1916, and demanded to know why Ireland was not included in the grand Wilsonian design of “self-determination” for the smaller nations. Supporters of the Monroe Doctrine argued that a League of Nations would dilute American freedom of action in the expansionist cause. Others, taking a more sanctified liberal line, invoked Thomas Jefferson’s lapidary warning against “entangling alliances.”

  Borah opened his campaign, in the first of three great senatorial interventions, on September 5, 1919. His subject was the perfidy of Winston Churchill in the matter of Russia. The speech could be the pattern for every later dissenting statement on undeclared wars and political adventures through Senator William Fulbright to our own day;

  Mr. President, we are not at war with Russia; Congress has not declared war against the Russian government or the Russian people. The people of the United States do not desire to be at war with Russia. . . . Whatever is being done in that country in the way of armed intervention is without constitutional authority. . . . Our boys are being sacrificed to satisfy the sinister ambition of other powers.

  Turning to the villain of the piece, Senator Borah swiftly identified “a member of the English government and the head of one of its departments” as the author of the tragic policy:

  When Churchill speaks of it he defines it in his speech as being a policy based on military intervention to put down a certain force in Russia and establish a government satisfactory to the allied powers. It is plainly a policy of military intervention, first to establish a government such as we think a proper government for those people, and secondly to bring about a situation where Japan will secure further interests in Siberia. This is the plan in all its concealed but hideous truth, and every boy who dies in Russia is a sacrifice to the unlawful and intolerable scheme.

  Having made the obligatory reference to “boys” and extended himself so far as to describe “the imperialistic maw of a despotic power,” Borah cited a recent Churchill speech which had said:

  The uplift of Russia from her present situation will be the first duty of the League of Nations, and it is a vital interest of the allied powers. . . . The League of Nations is on its trial in regard to Russia. If the League of Nations cannot save Russia, Russia in her agony will destroy the League of Nations.

  “This,” thundered Borah to the chamber, “is not original with Mr. Churchill. That is precisely the principle and the policy announced by Metternich in 1822.” There was much more in the same, actually rather sub-Churchillian vein.

  A few weeks later, on November 19, 1919, Senator Borah gave an epic speech opposing the confirmation of the Versailles Treaty and the endorsement of the League of Nations Covenant. The speech is credited with having catalyzed every kind of misgiving about Wilson’s foreign policy and to have led to that policy’s defeat and eclipse. The Vice President, Thomas Marshall, sent Borah a note after the debate which said that “even a mummy on a pedestal could not remain silent after such a speech.” The acting British ambassador, Viscount Grey, who had stood in after the death of Spring-Rice, said gallantly that he had “watched this debate most carefully and in all my experience I have never heard a debate on a higher plane than that conducted by Senator Borah.” Actually, the viscount was muttering polite obsequies over Spring-Rice’s hopes and, for the time being at least, his lifetime’s aspiration.

  As anti-British reaction set in more decidedly, there were to be two further rebuffs to the Churchillian conception of Anglo-American relations. The first of these was at the Washington Disarmament Conference, where a debt-ridden British delegation was compelled to listen in astonishment while a foreign power dictated terms about the size of the British fleet. The conference, also held at the instigation of Senator Borah, was convened in November 1921. Secretary of State Charles Hughes put forward a moratorium on the further construction of
warships, proposing an eventual ratio of 5, 5, and 3 as between America, Britain, and Japan. He was so bold as to give the names of twenty-three warships that the Royal Navy would have to put out of commission.

  A second and related move was the exertion of American pressure to break off the Anglo-Japanese naval treaty. Colonel House notwithstanding, the United States had come to suspect Japanese intentions and to suspect the British of nurturing these. By seeking to limit the size and capacity of the British fleet, while simultaneously isolating Japan, Hughes and others were indirectly consummating the Mahan scheme of a graduated American maritime supremacy, following British footsteps and challenging the Yellow Peril but doing so in such a way as to gain eventual primacy. In all of these graduated steps—the rejection of Versailles and the League, the limiting of the power of the British Admiralty, and the attempted dissolution of Anglo-Japanese ties—the United States was striking at the figure of Winston Churchill, who embodied all these causes in their most John Bullish interpretation.

  It also went without saying that the German-Americans, however newly circumspect they had become about their identity, hated Churchill and that the Irish-Americans had not forgotten his long attachment to the Unionist cause. These considerations, allied to the general reaction, made it easier to present the British as ungrateful and rather cynical. In the 1920s, Navy Department war-fighting contingency plans called for “preparedness” in a struggle against England at sea. “Preparedness”—the very term coined by the wartime Anglophiles in order to coax the United States into war on the British side. Admiral H. M. P. House, who had been a member of the American naval staff at the Versailles conference, called for open discussion of the possibility of war with Britain and Japan. He urged the construction of a United States navy equal to “any other two navies in the world.” And the suspicion was mutual. Churchill feared that the United States had designs upon the British Empire and upon the system of Imperial Preference. In July 1927, in his capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he told his Cabinet colleagues:

  No doubt it is quite right in the interest of peace to go on talking about war with the United States being “unthinkable.” But everyone knows that this is not true. However foolish and disastrous such a war would be . . . we do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States. We cannot tell what they might do if at some future date they were in a position to give us orders about our policy, say, in India or Egypt or Canada, or any other great matter behind which their electioneering forces were marshalled.

  Churchill in this period was the champion of the gold standard and the imperial system, and fiercely opposed any rival hegemony from any quarter. His alarmism and obduracy—especially about Indian independence—reduced his usefulness as a warning voice against Nazi ambition, because he was suspected of demagogy and warmongering. If this was true, as it was, even in the British Conservative Party, it was much more true in the American heartlands. When Churchill later strove to engage the United States in war once again, he had to overcome the accumulated mass of distrust that he had earned on his own behalf in much less noble causes.

  The particular story of that great battle—to overcome the isolationism and neutralism that he had helped to encourage—is told in the next chapter. It is ironic that the final precipitation of America into the Second World War came as the result, not of Churchill’s exhortations, but of an assault from the Japanese empire against which Senator Borah had been warning.

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  FDR’s Victory; Churchill’s Defeat

  Reviewing the American reaction to the aftermath of the First World War, Professor Selig Adler identified a predominant strain of what he called “disillusionist” thinking. Many in the British Establishment were slow to appreciate the depth and extent of this phenomenon. When Lloyd George boasted in 1921 that “the people who govern America are our people. They are our kith and kin. The other breeds are not on top,” he was uttering a serious foolishness. The United States might well value its claim to an English bloodline, and had certainly not turned pacifist or squeamish (as the war in Nicaragua was to demonstrate with particular vividness in 1927). But the idea that it had been “played for a sucker” by the British until 1918 was almost an orthodox belief. “Isolationism,” which is a weaker term for “disillusionism” and a rather misleading version of it, took the form not of a retreat into a fortress America but of an extreme reluctance to engage once more in a European war. There were several strains in this isolationism, many of them powerfully strengthened by Churchill himself, and his battle against them was of necessity an uphill one.

  For the general public, it was probably the hearings of the Nye Committee that did most to materialize suspicion about “entangling alliances.” Named for its astute and cunning chairman, Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, the committee held a rather indiscriminate investigation into the role of fat cats in First World War profiteering, the mendacity of bankers, and the “Daddy War-bucks” method of cartelization. The easy populist term for this concert of interest and profit between imperial Britain and domestic American robber baronage was “economic royalism”—a handy encapsulation that further implied the idea of a British and monarchic upper crust. Even Roosevelt became fond of this useful term.

  More fastidious isolationists could turn to Charles A. Beard, doyen of American historians, who also had a considerable journalistic audience. Beard was hagridden by the experience of 1914-18, and felt that the United States had been eased into war in order to recover the enormous and promiscuous loans she had made to the Allies. He spoke of the corrupting effects this had had on the American polity and inveighed against the “Atlas load” of “moneylending and huckstering abroad.” The British, in other words, were to pay dearly for having had J. P. Morgan as their wartime broker and patron.

  On the right, of course, was the America First movement with its tinge of chauvinist and Fascist sympathy. The young Charles Lindbergh had watched his father run for the governorship of Minnesota in 1918 on a platform which decried the effects of “Mr. Wilson’s war” and had seen how crowds could be stirred. Still, the generally nativist timbre of the America First propaganda did not prevent some liberals, including some distinguished future Establishment Anglophiles such as Kingman Brewster and Blair Clark, from enlisting in its undiscriminating ranks.

  Among liberals, there was a quasi-isolationist culture which could be justified in terms of anti-imperialist and anti-war feeling. This, too, had a “Never again” tone to it. Bruce Bliven of The New Republic was not atypical when he wrote, in 1939:

  I remember when a country that did not want to go to war was tricked and bullied and persuaded into doing so . . . and so I feel, as I watch the motion picture of events unreeling on the screen of time, that I have seen it all before. This is where I came in.

  It was the singular achievement of Churchill and Roosevelt between them to overcome this widespread mentality. Roosevelt’s genius lay in seeing the opportunity for America that was presented by the rivalry between the European empires and fascism. The Neutrality Act of 1937 more or less secured him the best of both worlds in future negotiations with the British. The Act effectively prohibited economic entanglement with any belligerent in any war and thus preempted the use of the American flag as an insurer or collector of debt. But it did permit the President to make exceptions at his own discretion if the goods were paid for in advance and if they left America in foreign vessels.

  Certain naïve objections were made to this combination of policy options, known to the idealistic as the “cash and carry” exemption. The New York Herald Tribune wittily described the Act as “an Act to Preserve the United States from Intervention in the War of 1917-1918.” This was quite near the bull’s-eye, but not as near as Senator Borah, who commented high-mindedly: “We seek to avoid all risks, all danger, but we make certain to get all the profits.” He spoke, perhaps, more perceptively than he knew.

  After the war, Churchill was to say: “No lover ever studied the
whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.” Roosevelt was perfectly ready to be seduced, but only on certain conditions, for which he was quite prepared to ration his favors. Inscribed in the Churchill-Roosevelt wartime correspondence is the germination of United States postwar supremacy and of the inheritance of conditions and responsibilities that would challenge and undermine that supremacy. In his English History, 1914-1945, A. J. P. Taylor made the judgment that “of the great men at the top, Roosevelt was the only one who knew what he was doing: he made the United States the greatest power in the world at virtually no cost.” This opinion might have to be qualified over the longer term, but the record of the correspondence shows the Romanization of America at the point of its zenith.

  The exchange of letters and cables and afterthoughts between these two men is an incomparable trove. It affords an unprecedented occasion for the study of Anglo-American relations at their critical point—the point of definitive, unarguable replacement by the United States of Great Britain as the supreme maritime, military, and economic power on the globe. It is also a highly revealing emotional dialogue and a minor but distinct literary accomplishment. Those who read and reread it with care can scan almost the entire register of differences, from the stylistic to the diplomatic, which had been on view before and which have been salient since. Above all, the archive of correspondence is the authentic corrective to the romantic gloss laid on the subject by later memoirs and narratives. The great contributor to this romantic or idyllic version was in fact Churchill himself. Setting a tone which has informed all British official and semi-official history since 1945, he wrote to Dwight Eisenhower in March 1953 about his own History of the Second World War, saying: