Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  Burnham was oddly but powerfully equipped for the task in hand. The son of a British Catholic emigrant to Chicago, he made a partial return to his English roots by becoming a Balliol man and specializing in English literature. He spent the 1930s classically enough: engaging with T. S. Eliot on modernism and aesthetics in the pages of The Symposium, polemicizing with the Partisan Review crowd, foreseeing the Hitler-Stalin pact, and writing a spirited critique of Leon Trotsky (then his only point of similarity with Churchill, whose own piece on the old revolutionary was published at about the same time in Great Contemporaries).

  Burnham’s biographer, Samuel Francis, makes the excellent point that his ideas, “unlike those of virtually any other major American conservative thinker in this century, were profoundly modernist and at the same time counter-revolutionary.” His transition from Marxism to conservatism was most powerfully expressed in The Managerial Revolution, which John Kenneth Galbraith ranks with Keynes’s General Theory and Berle and Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property as one of the three great economic texts of the prewar period. The book was an unquestionable influence on C. Wright Mills (who wrote a long critique of it) and on George Orwell (who also wrote a long critique of it and clearly evolved some of the lineaments of his 1984 from its predictions). When it came out, it was reviewed over three days in The New York Times and earned its author a photograph in Time. From then on, everything Bumham wrote won him attention. In 1945, for example, he contributed a famous article called “Lenin’s Heir” to Partisan Review. He employed a form of Platonism to describe how

  the Soviet power, emanating from the integrally totalitarian center, proceed[s] outward by Absorption (the Baltics, Bessarabia, Bukovina, East Poland), Domination (Finland, the Balkans, Mongolia, North China, and tomorrow Germany), Orienting influence (Italy, France, Turkey, Iran, Central and South China) until it is dissipated in the outer material sphere, beyond the Eurasian boundaries, of momentary Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States).

  This “geopolitical vision” existed in Burnham’s mind perhaps more vividly than it did in Stalin’s; nevertheless, it was an example of the potency of strategic generalization—a tendency which, with Burnham’s help, was utterly to vanquish isolationism as the real ideology of American conservatives.

  It is not possible to say with absolute certainty that Churchill read him, but the Prime Minister was a voracious consumer and might well have interested himself in an author with such a following in wartime American opinion. If, for example, he had read The Managerial Revolution, published in March 1941, he would have been very much impressed to read the following:

  For the United States to try to draw back into a national shell bounded by the forty-eight states would be fairly rapid political suicide. Suicides are committed by nations as well as by individuals. But there is not the slightest reason to suppose that the United States will accept suicide.

  This would have given Churchill satisfaction, since it was precisely what he hoped for and was urging on Roosevelt. A later passage in the same vein might have caused him to grunt a little, since it was precisely what he strove to stop Roosevelt from thinking:

  The first great plan in the third stage is for the United States to become what might be called the “receiver” for the disintegrating British Empire. (We are not, of course, interested in the propagandistic terms that are used in current references to this action.) The attempt is to swing the orientation of the Empire from its historical dependence on Europe to dependence on and subordination to the American central area. Success in the case of the English Dominion (Canada) and possessions located in the Americas is already at hand. . . . Along with the United States’ receivership plan for the British Empire go still broader aims in connection with the rest of South America, the Far East (including conspicuously the Far Eastern colonies of formerly sovereign European states) and in fact the whole world.

  This passage also raises the intriguing possibility that Roosevelt might have been reading 1941’s political best-seller. So does the following paragraph:

  It will be seen that I take herein for granted that the United States will be in the war. This, also, is not much of a speculation. By earlier standards of the meaning of war and peace, the United States has been in the second world war almost from its start. . . . Factories making belligerent airplanes in New York or New Jersey or California are as much a part of the total war machine as those located in Coventry or Southampton or Manchester.

  Burnham went on to say confidently that “it is plain that the United States will join the war in all respects during 1941,” and that this would rapidly make England “secondary.” His book is also notable for an early usage in the equation of Fascism with Communism—the employment of the term “fifth column” to describe the Western Communist parties. “Fifth column” had until recently been a descriptive term to denote hidden sympathizers of Franco among the population of besieged Madrid, and covert supporters of Fascism in general.

  This latter term, in particular, was taken up by Churchill in his Fulton speech. So were a number of Burnham’s apocalyptic flourishes. There is a striking similarity between Churchill at Fulton and Burnham in The Struggle for the World, which was published a few months later. This book was the fruit of Burnham’s labors at the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, and had actually been partially written as a briefing for the American side at Yalta. (This engagement of Burnham’s was not merely a wartime one. According to E. Howard Hunt’s memoirs, Burnham was a consultant to the covert action staff of the CIA—the Office of Policy Coordination—”on virtually every subject of interest to our organization.” Hunt also described Burnham as “professorial in the best sense of the word. He wore tweed jackets and British shoes and a nice foulard.”)

  JB

  Even France, under the pressure of her huge Fifth Column, is permitted to sabotage a reorientation. France, freed from internal Communists, could be a great friend and bulwark to the United States and Western Civilization in the struggle for the world.

  WSC

  Again, one cannot imagine a regenerated Europe without a strong France. All my life I have worked for a strong France and I never lost faith in her destiny, even in the darkest hours. I will not lose faith now. However, in a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist Fifth Columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience . . .

  JB

  In August 1945, communist domination, though not yet fully consolidated, extended in the West to a line from Stettin south to the Dalmatian coast.

  WSC

  From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

  Burnham, of course, was a near-paranoid writer who detected consistent patterns where Churchill rather sketched grand designs. In 1963, he was to denounce President Kennedy’s nuclear test ban treaty, comparing it to Munich and citing A. L. Rowse’s book All Souls and Appeasement. But, like Churchill, he enjoyed roaming the known world in his utterances. And, like Churchill, he saw the future as an Anglo-American condominium, without, however, any sentimentality about a “special relationship.” He took Churchill’s Harvard speech and Washington memo of 1943, which had proposed joint American-British citizenship and sovereignty, and extended them into a more systematic proposal. Nor did he shrink from using a term that was still distasteful to Americans.

  The reality is that the only alternative to the Communist World Empire is an American Empire which will be, if not literally world-wide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control.

  Driven on by his own logic, Burnham continued:

  The supreme policy formulated in this chapter would, I believe, dictate an immediate proposal by the United States to Great Britain and the British Dominions: common citizenship and full political union.

  Burnham went on to point out that Churchill had proposed a modest version of this
idea already, only to be greeted (as Burnham noticed and as most people have forgotten) with quite strong Anglophobic and anti-American reactions on both sides of the Atlantic. “We may grant,” he added in the light of this, “that the union could not take place through an altogether spontaneous birth. The forceps would have to be used, or at least kept at hand. However, enough of the historical premises hold to make union possible. Historical origin, language, literature, legal principles, form of government are a single heritage.”

  Burnham did not hesitate to spell out the implications, and to forecast what would, in fact, prove to be the decisive obstacle:

  Such a union would mean that Britain, her Dominions and the United States would become partners in the imperial federation. In the first stages, Britain would necessarily be the junior partner. This fact, which follows not merely from popular prejudices, but from the reality of power relations, is the greatest obstacle to the union. It is harsh to ask so great a nation, which for three hundred years led the world, to accept a lower place than the first, especially when the claim comes from an upstart whose only superior qualification— unfortunately, the deciding qualification—is the weight of material might.

  But in seeking to mollify this potential British objection, Burnham made a significant proposal that could have been designed to woo Churchill personally. In order to strengthen the international front against Communism, he argued, India should be kept within an Anglo-American orbit with a quasi-independent standing analogous to that of the Philippines. Here, especially with the Filipino parallel, was the white man’s burden being shouldered with a will. With one year to go before India proclaimed independence, Burnham audaciously argued that continued stewardship would be preferable and that “India’s share could be large enough to reconcile her people, perhaps, to some adjustment of their ideal hopes.”

  With that hefty “perhaps,” Burnham’s grand structure collapsed about him. But The Struggle for the World nonetheless represented a high synthesis of all its predecessors. Less racial than Brooks Adams, less sentimental than Andrew Carnegie, less romantic than Rudyard Kipling, more ruthless than Theodore Roosevelt, more rigorous than Arnold Toynbee, more logical than Winston Churchill, the argument was doomed to be shelved. Or most of it was. With its near-harmony with Churchill, who had after all been prepared even to bastardize the English tongue in the interest of Anglo-American unity, and with its evocation of a global common foe, Burnham’s gloss on Fulton provided (and provides) an important substratum of the grammar of the Cold War and the “special relationship.” And if his proposal for a grand union of the two nations and their dominions was too frankly imperial and too obviously impractical, his earlier idea of an American empire taking the British Empire into “receivership” was neither.

  Since they could neither oppose receivership nor take it kindly, the British managed after an undignified struggle to get much of the worst of both worlds. By the time that Churchill died in 1965, James Burnham’s patron and successor William F. Buckley felt able to write of him:

  It is true that at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, Churchill focussed the attention of the world, as again only he had the power to do, on the deteriorating situation. But he seemed thereafter to have lost the great engine that fired him ten years earlier to force the recognition of reality. . . .

  He turned over the leadership of the world to the faltering hands of Americans who were manifestly his inferiors in the understanding of history and the management of human affairs, and contented himself to write dramatically about decisive battles won for freedom on the soil of England centuries ago. . . .

  (Residual Anglo-American solidarity and pudeur caused this obituary to be one of the few Buckley columns that were not syndicated.)

  This is a nice example of the superiority/inferiority complex of the “special relationship” at work. Buckley, of course, had as a youth followed the majority of American conservatives who opposed aid to Britain in 1940. And he had wished for Fulton to translate into a full-dress “roll-back” of Soviet power in Europe. For him, as for most imperially minded Americans, Churchill is a mere thesaurus of quotations for “standing tall,” invested with a literary muscle and moral sinew that the cause in question would not merit of itself. Here, for example, is a 1987 National Review editorial on United States policy in the Persian Gulf, comparing either Iran or Iraq (or perhaps both) to the Axis before Munich:

  These Democrats are in a fairy-castle world where defense spending is wasteful and foreign policy an indulgence. Winston Churchill watched Britain sink into that delusion in the 1930s: “I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf.” Defend the Persian Gulf, or descend into Churchill’s gulf. The former is painful, the latter is worse.

  As an envoi, we may consider Clark Clifford’s reminiscence of the train ride to Fulton. Instructed by Harry Truman to make much of the recently deposed Churchill, Clifford was attentive as the presidential club car (the Magellan, furnished and upholstered like a gentleman’s den) moved across America from Union Station to its rendezvous at the aptly named Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Later to be the confidant of successive Presidents and Secretaries of State, Clifford played poker with Churchill every evening and took care not to win too much or too often lest this arouse bitter jests about Britain’s indebtedness. On one such evening, he recalled in an interview with Sidney Blumenthal of The Washington Post, the hour was late and Churchill was nursing a scotch. “The fact is,” said this rather reduced but still intimidating figure, “that America has now become the hope of the world. Britain has had its day. At one time we had dominions all over the world. . . . But England is gradually drying up. The leadership must be taken over by the United States. You have the country, the people; you have the democratic spirit, the natural resources which England has not. . . . If I were to be born again, I’d want to be born an American.”

  On the eve of his best-received and best-assimilated American speech, Churchill seems to have given way to resignation. The response to the speech certainly took him up on this implicit surrender. It is another way of illustrating what can be found in other areas of American culture and politics—that the reverence and affection for things English has increased in direct proportion to the overshadowing and relegation of real British power.

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  Imperial Receivership

  If James Burnham’s concept of “receivership” had ever been made explicit, with the British being asked to disburden themselves of empire in a planned and graduated fashion and the United States moving to assume the said burdens with coordination and consent, there might have been some impressive results. The same is true for the recurrent but always ill-timed proposal for a merger of citizenship and sovereignty between the two countries (though the price of Basic English might have been too high to pay). But in the event, the displacement of Britain by America as a world gendarme and guarantor was a chaotic, brutal, and dishonest process. On the British side there were residual commitments to a continued imperial role, and on the American side a repressed reluctance to actually seem to be seeking one.

  As a consequence, the history of receivership is a mixed history of improvisation, secret diplomacy, covert action, inter-Establishment jealousy, and military disaster. There was, under the affectation of Anglo-American solidarity, a continuation of the old politics by other means. Elements of this mutual suspicion, though seldom stressed, endure to this day. They arise from the original lack of synchronicity and from the British habit of only giving up where they had to. As a result, the United States very often was compelled to pick up where a sudden British scuttle had left off, and very often that scuttle was in a country or region where the British had insisted on sole consideration until the last moment. This had two undesirable results. It ministered to the American sense of a painful duty selflessly shouldered—a parody of Kipling’s original appeal over the Philippines—and it meant that the United States very often i
nherited the direct instruments and attitudes of the British style of rule.

  This disordered transition actually began while Roosevelt was on his deathbed, at the supposed high noon of the Anglo-American “special relationship.” The first steps toward America’s least happy entanglement were taken in 1944-45 as a result of British policy in Vietnam. As in the precedent case of Russia in 1918, the moving spirit was Winston Churchill.

  Actually, the American involvement in Indochina represented a posthumous victory of Churchill over Roosevelt. Although Churchill had largely gone along with Roosevelt’s attempts to undermine de Gaulle politically, he had never shown any enthusiasm for Roosevelt’s opposition to the French Union, as its empire was grandly called. On general principles of solidarity with the principle of empire, he had held out for the maintenance and the restoration of European rule in Asia wherever and whenever possible. He was particularly satisfied when, at Potsdam on July 23, 1945, the decision was taken to place southern French Indochina under the command of the British. The rapid Japanese collapse in the following month meant that the British, in the ironic shape of the 20th Indian Division of the Fourteenth Army, became the masters of Saigon et ses environs. The commander, Major General Douglas Gracey, was one of those British generals—like Dyer of Amritsar, Scobie of Athens, and Percival of Cork and Singapore—who are not made much of in English school history books but who make history all the same.

  According to Bernard Fall, Roosevelt’s dislike of the French empire was intense. “His preoccupation amounted almost to a fixation.” He once told Cordell Hull that “France has had the country [Vietnam] for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were in the beginning. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China deserve something better than that.” He put the latter sentiment in formal terms to the State Department, ordering that, war exigency or no war exigency, “no French troops whatever should be used in operations in Indo-China.” And before his death he told the Chiefs of Staff that he “favored anything that was against the Japanese, so long as the United States is not aligned with the French.” It is worth noting that Sir Anthony Eden himself told Roosevelt that his wartime proposal for “trusteeship” of colonial states was “rather hard on the French.” He meant, by analogy, hard on the British, but his words could have come back to haunt him if statesmen were ever to be haunted in that way. Eden also saw, at least when it suited him to do so, that “Roosevelt’s dislike of colonialism, while it was a principle with him, was not the less cherished for its possible advantages.” How true, and how Kiplingesque in its hypocritical want of insight. Roosevelt was no less shrewd about British “principle” in the matter, commenting after Yalta of his trusteeship proposal that “the British didn’t like it. It might bust up their Empire, because if the Indo-Chinese were to work together and eventually get their independence, the Burmese might do the same thing.” How true, and how Teddy Rooseveltesque in its apparent altruism.