Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  On the other hand, as Henry Pelling put it:

  There was much to appeal to all types of British Radical: Benthamites approved of the liberal constitutions of the states; dissenters and free thinkers acclaimed the absence of a religious establishment; land reformers noted with favour the abundance of cheap and undeveloped land; working men found in America a paradise of high wages and social equality.

  Even Charles Dickens conceded, at the opening of Martin Chuzzlewit, the hold of America upon the imagination of the English poor. And as late as 1889, the great English radical publication Reynold’s Newspaper wrote that “anything that adds to the power and authority of the United States among the nations of the earth is to the advantage of all mankind.” William Clark, Sir Anthony Eden’s disillusioned press secretary, once wrote an emollient book on the “special relationship” in which he said that not until the British Daily Worker wrote about Russia in the 1930s was any London newspaper as much in thrall to a foreign power as Reynold’s Newspaper had been to the United States. The comparison is inexact to a fault. On the occasion quoted above, the paper had been intervening in the debate on Irish Home Rule and ridiculing the then fashionable idea that Ireland should be federated to the United Kingdom in the same fashion as Canada. The very notion, it said, should be repudiated by “all good Radicals, whose cue it is to look to the Great Republic for their precedents, and not to the corrupt and snobbish Dominion.” The editorial went on, in heroic defiance of paltry colonial half measures, to advocate the annexation of Canada by the United States.

  Labor and radical enthusiasm for America underwent a declension as the “expansionist” movement took hold across the water, and as more overt collusion between British and American imperial maneuvering became evident. This tendency was accompanied by the rise of the great trusts and the “robber baron” fortunes, which also diluted pro-American feeling among English workers and artisans and gave them the uneasy feeling that a plutocracy was in the making. There was also an increasing “aristocracy of labor” within the ranks of the organized workers; this aristocracy being expressed on the American side by Samuel Gompers and the AFL, which defended the rights of native, American, white, skilled toilers, and on the British side by the cautious and craft-dominated TUC. In 1915, Ernest Bevin attended Gompers’s convention in San Francisco, taking time out on the visit to admire the exhibition of the opening of the Panama Canal. After making his fraternal delegate’s speech, which implored American help against the Kaiser, Bevin was given a presentation. It was a heavy gold ring, embossed with the figure of an undraped woman. As he fought to place the gift on Bevin’s dockland fingers, Gompers exclaimed: “What’s that you got? A bunch of bananas?” Bevin wore the ring through the General Strike, the betrayal of the socialist cause by the Ramsay MacDonald government, and his own tenure as Churchill’s Minister of Labor in wartime. As Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1949, he used it as a signet with which to put the British seal on the NATO Treaty in 1949. Labor, too, has its mutated version of the “special relationship.”

  Even as Ernest Bevin was settling into the role of America’s junior but more experienced partner, there were Conservative voices raised plaintively against the unwisdom of the new superpower. These political plaintiffs were much stronger then than is now remembered, and although they approved the idea of an “Anglo-Saxon” world order, they were by no means content with an outright second-rank position. In a collection of essays entitled What Europe Thinks of America, which was edited by James Burnham and distinguished by the work of such hands as Raymond Aron, there was outright nervousness about the fitness of America for global command. The British contributor was Julian Amery, whose father had been a close friend of Kipling’s and had, at the crucial last minute, humiliated Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons in 1940. Amery spoke pithily and as follows:

  It was the United States which prevented the reassertion of Dutch power and influence in Indonesia. It was the United States, in the first flush of post-war liberalism, which gave the Viet Minh party in Indo-China their chance. More indirectly, American influence has fostered and nourished the Arab nationalist movements in French North Africa. European leaders have reluctantly to admit that if the Soviet Union is the greater danger to their national and imperial interests, the greatest injuries so far inflicted on them have come from the United States.

  Even though Amery was to fill every last ditch between Suez and Rhodesia in the subsequent years, resigning from Margaret Thatcher’s front bench over southern Africa in 1979, it is still a surprise to find him being so plainly suspicious of American anti-British imperialism in 1953. Yet the reader who looks up the debates in the Commons and Lords over Suez and Cyprus in the middle and late 1950s will find no shortage of sulfurous anti-American feeling emitted by the British right. It is probably no coincidence that Amery’s war service included a stint with Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in Chungking. This gave him an intimacy with those Americans like Burnham who also thought of the postwar period as a liberal American “stab in the back.”

  It is now officially and generally forgotten that there was ever a pro-American left or an anti-American right in Britain. The intense, homogenizing pressure of the Cold War has divided British politicians and intellectuals into the simplified herds of “pro” and “anti” American. Or at least it has done so until recently. The “special relationship” became a renewed topic of controversy in the mid-1980s and is likely to remain one. Nonetheless, the high ground in Britain has been held for some considerable time and for good historical reasons by a party which has admitted and recognized American hegemony, and which regards this admission and recognition as an indispensable part of the political consensus. In early 1989, with a deep division in NATO over the requisite response to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost/perestroika revolution from above, The New York Times described the British response—an almost automatic endorsement in advance of the skeptical position taken by Washington—as “an Anglo-Saxon alliance” of the U.S.A. and U.K. versus the rest. This development would have been unsurprising to any scholar who had followed the internalization, by the strategic majority of the British political class, of the values of the “special relationship.” Existing as far as it can above partisan struggle, this consensus and its epigones from Encounter to The Economist have come to deserve the title “the American Party.” Not the least of the virtues of this party is that it does not formally exist.

  The phrase “the American Party” belongs to Professor Norman Birnbaum of Georgetown University, who named it in January 1987:

  I once heard a senior official in the State Department explain how the Soviet Union maintained control in Central and Eastern Europe. In the nations it dominated, academics, bureaucrats, officers, managers, politicians and publishers were in continuous contact with Soviet institutions from the beginning of their careers. They remained deeply rooted in their own countries, of course, but for them dual loyalties were practically instinctive. The explanation seemed convincing, the more so as it is perfectly applicable to our own mode of rule . . . What is striking about Western Europe is the way an American party, very visible in the old world’s elites, does our empire’s work.

  In Britain, went on Professor Birnbaum, there was

  a syndrome that may be termed vicarious imperialism. Their own nations have lost world power; the United States offers a substitute imperial homeland. Political advantages accrue to those who can defame adversaries by intimating that “anti-Americanism” (which may range from criticism of Ronald Reagan to a dislike of fast food) is their motive.

  Almost exactly a year before, Neal Ascherson had published an essay in London entitled “A Dumb-Bell World,” in which he wrote about the unstated assumptions of the “special relationship” in these terms:

  Up to about 40 years ago, those who governed the British and told them what to think inhabited a blob-shaped mental world. It comprised the Home Counties, London south of the Park, Westminster and the Inns of Court. Now, afte
r decades of Fulbright grants and academic exchanges, their descendants inhabit a world shaped like a dumb-bell. At one end, the Home Counties, etc., then a long, thin bit, then another blob consisting of Washington, D.C., and some habitable bits of Manhattan and New England.

  The rest of the world, outside this “civilised” dumb-bell, is dark and potty. It speaks foreign languages; it suffers rather disgustingly; nobody can spell its statesmen. Dumb-bell people feel as uneasy in Prague as in Glasgow. When they say “Europe” they mean Dorset, Tuscany and Vermont.

  Ascherson described this boldly as “Atlantic provincialism.” His view of the myopia of “American Party” members about their own countries was nicely counterpointed by Professor Birnbaum’s diagnosis of their myopia about America. As they imbibe “the last free drink at the Aspen Institute . . . none of them could endure for more than five minutes the chaos of our multiethnic and pluralistic politics. They prefer not to notice the anti-authoritarianism, the irreverence and the pacifism of many of our people. Their America consists of the clubs, foreign policy conferences and Ivy League Universities at which their masters are pleased to receive them.”

  Empires need classes, and the virtue of both these complementary essays lay in their recognition of the undiscussed bonding between these two unacknowledged facts. The “special relationship” rests in many respects on mutually sustaining elites in the two countries. Out of a possible plethora, I select three examples: the Rhodes Scholarships, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Ditchley Park.

  The Rhodes Scholarships are a form of bonding of the sort often found in the “special relationship”; at once impossible to quantify and very difficult to overstate. If they have played any part in preserving the ideas of Anglo-Saxondom or of vicarious imperialism, at least it can be shown that such was their founder’s intention. According to his closest friend and collaborator, W. T. Stead (who later perished with the Titanic), Rhodes placed the dream of Anglo-American union far above any other ideal. He was even, if Stead can be believed, willing to see this union accomplished under the American flag rather than not accomplished at all.

  Rhodes himself never went that far in print, but in the first of the weird “Seven Wills” in which he made his bequests, did write as follows:

  I have felt that at the present day we are actually limiting our children and perhaps bringing into the world half the human beings we might owing to the lack of country for them to inhabit, that if we had retained America there would at the present moment be many millions more of English living. I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable of human beings, what an alteration there would be in them if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.

  Since Rhodes was one of the few Oxford philosophers who ever had the chance to put his precepts into practice, it is worth giving his noteworthy ambition in full, as he stated it himself. It was:

  The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candía, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire. [Italics mine.]

  This document can be read in Rhodes House, Oxford. Rhodes proposed, in ancillary documents and letters, that a form of secret society be formed to prosecute the enormous scheme, which did, after all, allow him to name two countries after himself before he had done. The secret society should be modeled, he thought, on the Society of Jesus. About the “recovery” of the United States for the Empire he was prepared to compromise in a way which he was not in the cases of Cyprus, say, or Malaya. In one of his papers he proposed that the “Imperial Parliament” should sit for five-year periods, alternating between London and Washington.

  The scholarship scheme began, of course, in South Africa. It was originally conceived as an entire university, to be built with funds generated, as Rhodes put it with his customary lack of hypocrisy, “out of the Kaffir’s stomach.” But by 1899, even with the astounding profits from the Kaffir Compound System, forerunner of apartheid, operated by the De Beers diamond mines, such a scheme seemed, if anything, too limited. Those who remember the Anglo-American “understanding” that was developing in that year, under the combined and related pressures of the Philippine and Boer wars, will not be surprised that it was in 1899 that Rhodes mandated a doubling of his scholarships for students from the white British dominions, and added the stipulation that there should also be two for each state in the American Union. (The number of white dominion scholarships was only 60, which has led several of Rhodes’s biographers to record that he believed there to be only thirteen American states. A learned contribution from Sir Francis Wylie in The American Oxonian for the month of April 1944 shows, however, that Rhodes knew perfectly well that he was allowing for—then— at least 90 scholarships from the United States. In other words, and in imperial terms, he was giving a vast precedence to America.)

  In practice, Rhodes’s ignorance of the distinction between state and state was to be troublesome to his executors. An amendment made in 1928 by the trustees is worthy of note because it demonstrates the extraordinary influence attained by the Rhodes Scholarship system by that relatively early date. Voting to change the selection procedure by grouping the states into eight “districts” were the members of the Association of American Universities, the Association of Urban Universities, and the Association of American Colleges. The official historian of the Rhodes Scholarships, Frank Aydelotte, also records the active participation in the argument of the presidents and secretaries of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kahn Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carnegie Corporation, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and the General Education Board. The question of Oxford and America, and the availability of one to the other, was already very important to those who held the purse strings of the vital grant, fellowship, and foundation systems.

  “The function of the college in the University of Oxford,” wrote Mr. Aydelotte helpfully in his 1946 history, “is in some respects similar to the function of an American Greek-letter fraternity.” (He spared us the thought that there might be any Rome looming over this pure Greece.) However, he felt it important to avoid or counter the charge of uncritical Anglophilia. “The fears which were widely expressed when the Rhodes will was made public, that three years at Oxford would make British subjects, or at any rate Anglomaniacs out of our American boys, have proved to be without foundation.” Still answering the question that had not been asked, Aydelotte hurried on to say: “The largest single group living abroad are those who have become American missionaries in China, and perhaps no Rhodes Scholars are better placed to serve their country than are these,” which was not bad for 1946.

  In a concluding burst of the Anglophilia against which he had been warning, Aydelotte counseled against the idea of the German university (and the related idea, perhaps, of hyphenation). “In the two decades before 1900 the United States learned much from the flourishing German universities of the time. Valuable as were the lessons we learned from Germany, they were, so far as concerns undergraduate work, often misleading . . . the undergraduate college of liberal arts does not exist outside of the Anglo-Saxon world.”

  The notion of a Rhodes bequest to reconquer America now seems entirely absurd. The subliminal influence of the Rhodes Scholarship is rather like the subliminal influence of the etchings in the men’s room at the Harvard Club in New York, which happen to be of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Ely and Durham cathedrals and the West Highlands of S
cotland. They act as a reinforcement of English taste and manners upon the American condition. Or, in the opinion of some, they provide a sort of reserved and restrained context in which that condition may be considered. Writing on the decline of the “special relationship” in the American Oxonian for Fall 1987, the political economist Robert B. Reich (New Hampshire and University College 1968) said of the English in the post-1945 period:

  Here was a people whom Americans could trust: friends and confidants in an unfriendly and confusing world, who provided another perspective, and thus helped America overcome its chronic tendency towards parochialism. Although the evidence is scattered and anecdotal, there is little doubt that during this era American officials often sought the counsel of their British counterparts, and obtained the sort of frank and confidential advice that one can only get from an old and trusted friend whose judgement is deeply valued.

  This certainly contains a truth, if the recollections of Senator J. William Fulbright are anything to go by. In his book The Price of Empire, the senator describes his boyhood in the Ozark Mountain town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the shock of being translated from this context to Oxford:

  I was invited into various clubs and societies . . . The intellectual sophistication of these young Englishmen astonished me. I was embarrassed by my own inadequacy. The literary clubs met once a month to present papers on prominent authors. I was astonished by the intellectual maturity of these seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys.