2.) Many countries and territories not part of the British Empire were far more profitable markets for British goods than those within it.
3.) Many British territories were dollar countries but were still profitable markets.
In addressing Imperial defence, the report forcefully made the point that the Empire was extremely vulnerable if attacked simultaneously by a coalition of two or more hostile great powers and would have some difficulty in supporting widely separated campaigns. This had been recently underlined by British losses to Italian opportunism in the War of 1940. While admitting that the Dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand had raised substantial forces to fight alongside the British in The Great War, it also noted that many of Britain’s territories had provided only a paltry contribution to Empire defence while remaining wholly reliant on Britain for their own safety. The same pattern had been repeated in the War of 1940.
The Mosley Report was particularly scathing about India, noting that “… in no other part of the Empire has the transition from commerce to charity been so marked.” India was unprofitable. It could be made profitable, but the independence movement was clamorous and its activities would almost certainly be bad for business. Worst of all, India’s British educated middle-class were politicised, strident and disinclined to undertake commercial endeavour. (In this respect it closely resembled its British academic middle-class teachers!) The report noted also that; “Mohandas K. Gandhi is a consummate politician” and; “…a shrewd political operator, pretending to be an innocent.” it further noted that; “Gandhi has no grasp of economic realities, his blueprint for the future of India, in so far as he has considered India’s economic future at all, will cause regression rather than advancement.”
The failure to initiate wide development or even adequately survey almost all of the territories of the British Empire was also noted. This observation was particularly acute in the case of India, part of the report read:
“If India had been exploited with even half the ruthless vigour that it is commonly supposed that the British Empire exploits its subject territories, India would by now possess one of the largest and strongest economies in the world.”
By the time the report was ready to be printed however, India was too far along the road to dominion status for any brake to be applied. It is certainly true that the British failure to stimulate the Indian economy into industrial and commercial growth was one of the reasons that India remained an economic backwater for the rest of the 20th century.
In conclusion, the only territories which the report recommended that Britain should retain were those that were, or might swiftly become, profitable. Those that were worth retaining for strategic reasons and those whose defence and upkeep presented little prospect of difficulty as well as minimal expenditure.
There was a secret appendix to the report that was not widely circulated outside the British Parliament. This pointed out that in almost all of Britain’s possessions and territories overseas there was some form of opposition to colonial rule and the arguments presented by those who sought independence from Britain could be effectively used to permit Britain to wash its hands of unprofitable territories and leave them to make their own way in the world. A minority report to the secret appendix opined that this would amount to a dereliction of Britain’s duty to safeguard the peoples of the Empire and held that most of the territories to which such ruthless treatment might apply were quite incapable of political or economic independence.
In sum, the Mosley Report recommended the setting down of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ post haste. In that respect, it was quite shocking to the widely-held, over-romanticised opinion of the day. The government certainly did not contemplate a disorderly withdrawal from Empire, in part to ensure that former British territories did not fail as independent nations to the embarrassment of Britain, or fall into the hands of Britain’s rivals. It was noted that the mere act of leaving a territory might not mean that Britain could remain uninvolved in its future development. In any case, the government considered that most of the findings of the report could not be implemented immediately due to the world situation and the necessity of maintaining the most advantageous strategic position possible.
It was noted by the Government that the Mosley Report took very little account of invisible trade such as shipping and banking and the effect implementing the report’s recommendations might have on that sector. It was also noted that after the War of 1940, India had become a net creditor to Britain – previously she had always been a debtor. Nevertheless the report eventually served as a guiding light to the Empire’s future progress and development. The British Commonwealth and The Third British Empire would have developed very differently without it. [107] India attained dominion status in 1942. [108]
CHAPTER 22: 9TH JULY 1967
The following is composed of extracts from the text of a series of interviews conducted by Dominic Walton Hartnell with President Harry S. Truman, President of the United States from1945 to 1952. They were originally broadcast on ‘Voice of America Radio’ on the 23rd of October 1967. The interviews touched on many issues concerning President Truman’s time in the Oval Office.
DWH: What was your first concern when you were sworn in to office in January 1945.
HST: To put it simply, the Germans and the Japanese. Wendell Willkie’s Administration confirmed what Roosevelt already realised, which was that Germany and Japan were the principal threats to the United States. He had been reluctant to really force the issue of oil supplies to Japan from the Netherlands East Indies, but I wanted to make a foreign policy statement right off the bat. The Japanese were still digesting their conquests in Far Eastern Russia; Amur, Southern Khabarovsk, Sakhalin and Primorsky. It was important to show them right away that we weren’t going to be trifled with. I simply wasn’t willing to let the oil issue go. Almost weekly there were new stories of atrocities coming out of China, out of Far Eastern Russia. I was determined to take a strong line with both Germany and Japan.
I was very concerned by the expansion of the Japanese, Italian, Spanish and German Navies, and of course the Argentine-Chilean war that started in ’43. It bought the issues into sharp focus as far as I was concerned. It’s no secret that I saw the German supply of arms to Argentina as a direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine.
Germany was a nation that seemed to have lost its mind. The way they were treating Jews, of course we didn’t realise then just how completely evil it was, but we did notice the weird Aryan race cult they were starting. They believed the concept of race was something to worship. They were building temples, inventing rituals and they even named some warships after the old Norse gods for heaven sakes! I know the British had a habit of naming some of their warships after Roman gods but this was something much deeper, much more disturbing.
The Russians too seemed to have got religion in a big way, they had turned back to Orthodoxy and even as they fought to put their country back together their leaders didn’t try to re–impose the atheistic aspects of communism.
DWH: Your Administration was instrumental in negotiating an end to the Argentine-Chilean War which was also one of your first foreign policy concerns.
HST: Well, I’m inclined to say that common-sense broke out, but we did have to crack some heads. It was an absurd squabble over three tiny pieces of rock in the Beagle Channel [109] started by some sealers and whalers and Latin American machismo did the rest.
DWH: Both regimes were quasi-fascist though, and very much a part of the Sterling trading bloc.
HST: Nevertheless, the Monroe Doctrine applied, which is why we needed to crack heads. We were very concerned about the way the Germans were trying to cuddle up to Argentina. Brazil also had a fairly questionable regime in power but we were able to keep them on side.
*
DWH: It’s been said that as a young man you were ‘a typical rural bigot’. How would you respond to that?
HST: Well, I d
on’t know as I should even dignify it. We all make mistakes when we’re young, I think my record on advancing the civil rights movement speaks for itself.
DWH: You ran into a lot of opposition for your policy on completely desegregating the army.
HST; Yes I did, but it was the right decision on every level. That process was started under Wendell Willkie’s administration but we saw it through. Black regiments have fought in American armies since as far back as the Civil War. It makes no sense to exclude a man from the duties and responsibilities of citizenship based on his colour. The armed services should represent the whole country and the integration of the military was a top priority. Besides, all that segregation was inefficient.
HST: Which of the services did you have the most difficulty with?
DWH: The Army without a doubt. Not the Army Air Force so much as the regular soldier’s Army. The Navy and Marine Corps didn’t give me nearly as much trouble, but the Army tried to evade both the letter and the spirit of my programme. It was really the war and the need for manpower that put a stop to all that.
*
DWH: Mr President, you have been criticised for basing the Fair Deal policies you espoused in the presidential election campaign of 1944 too closely on those of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. How would you respond to that?
HST: Economic recovery was the central aim of both policies, but the New Deal didn’t really work. It didn’t generate prosperity in part because it was regarded with hostility by the Supreme Court, by Congress and by big business. Trying to imitate the New Deal would have failed, so what we were going to try to do was avoid the confrontation and stalemate that characterised the New Deal years.
DWH: Despite that, your relations with the business community weren’t always good.
HST: That’s true, but on the whole, the emphasis of my Administration was less confrontational than that of FDR’s. I guess the FDR years kind of hung over us, we did everything we could to try and avoid the imagery of capital and labour locked in a permanent struggle over the distribution of wealth. In that sense we were mediators rather than reformers. Unlike FDR and his people, we weren’t trying to change the existing structure of the economy and we were willing to concede economic leadership to the corporate sector, but we weren’t as ‘hands-off’ regarding business as the Republicans certainly.
DWH: So the ‘Fair Deal’ was a continuation of your predecessor President Willkie’s policies?
HST: We certainly rounded out a process that he started. I’ve got to hand it to Wendell and his advisers, they got the economic basics right. It’s a shame that he didn’t live to see the economy come out of the recession the way it did. Where we parted ways with the general outlook of the Willkie Administration was that we tried to take more care of the American people; at times the Republicans almost seem to be saying ‘Devil take the hind most.’
DWH: During your presidency you were often in conflict with your generals.
HST: Well, not all of them. I got on very well with Omar Bradley and with Dwight Eisenhower but you must remember that I served as an officer in the artillery in the Great War and I came away from that with a very low opinion of high military office. Eisenhower and Bradley did a lot to change my opinion. They were good soldiers and loyal servants of this country and its people.
DWH: You’ve been accused of trying to be all things to all men, it’s been said that as president you were a political pacifier. Is that fair?
HST: The point is that the world is neither perfect nor perfectible. We live in it and we do what we can to preserve our own sense of honour, but human nature is mixed. There’s nothing we can do about that and it’s always easier to work with people than against them. Compromise is essential in politics. I was reared as a moral absolutist; but politics in America, especially in the 1930s and 40s, was an arena where if you wanted to be successful you had to learn to function in the shadow world in which honest public service coexisted with graft, organised crime, electoral dishonesty and all kinds of vice. Compromise was the only way to keep the Democratic Party together.
Under both FDR and Wendell Willkie, the patterns of jurisdiction that characterised the administration were quite chaotic. There were few clear lines of authority, very little issue jurisdiction, it was messy, piecemeal. American government is decentralised by design, and I believe that’s a good thing; but what I tried to do was to introduce some structure. I tried to get rid of the disorderliness of the executive branch. For instance, where FDR had relied on a network of unofficial advisers I tried to introduce more responsible cabinet government as well as bring the Washington bureaucracy under some sort of control. One of the reasons for FDR’s failure was that he never did that. Any legislation the executive branch passed would be modified on its way down through the administrative layers of government, sometimes to the point where it became unrecognisable .
DWH: Do you see yourself as a manager rather than a leader?
HST: Yes I think that’s a fair comment on my style, but a good manager is a leader. Both know when to delegate authority and both should back up their subordinates.
DWH: What formed your foreign policy?
HST: I believe that America has a mission in the world, a mission to make it a better place and I believe that totalitarianism, whether its origins are from the left or from the right, is a threat to world peace, to the American way of life and therefore had to be opposed.
*
DWH: I’d like to ask you about relations with the British at this time, which of course were absolutely crucial during that period of history.
HST: That’s about right, though I have to say the relationship was pretty fractious at times it was generally a close one.
DWH: What was the cause of the disputes?
HST: The British had this idea that we Americans were ruthlessly hard-nosed negotiators and inclined to sharp practice. They felt that our business methods were predatory and so I think they were trying to outdo us at our own game. The British had a bit of a problem at the time, most of their Governments during the 1920s and early 1930s were quite utopian in their outlook. When I say utopian, I mean in the sense that they seemed to think that the world was a nice place where everyone could be friendly and reasonable. When Oswald Mosley came along that changed. He had a much more realistic view of the world; that it was an arena of contest, a place of struggle. He was quite comfortable with the notion of business being about competition, but this didn’t sit well with much of Britain’s governing class who regarded commerce as something sordid, something whose chief function was to provide jobs for the British working class. So the British working class wouldn’t do away with them the way they did in Russia. I think their confrontational attitude was because they were overcompensating for what happened in 1940.
DWH: Could you expand on that?
HST: My perception of it is that over the course of the 19th century, Britain’s governing class went from being composed mostly of pragmatic realists, businessman, soldiers and the like. But it went to being composed mostly of liberal romantics; academics, intellectuals, what have you. That’s a good part of the reason for Britain’s industrial decline from about 1870 up to about 1935. As I say, Mosley did a lot to reverse this, but when he crashed out of British politics in 1938 and Clement Attlee took over, Britain again went back to having the romantics in charge rather than the realists. Sinclair was a realist with romantic leanings.
DWH: What did you think of Britain’s Prime Ministers at this time?
HST: I thought Attlee was patronising and naïve; Dalton was a decent man and good technically but couldn’t inspire people. I found Sinclair easier to deal with, though he could be pompous.
DWH: It was under Sinclair’s administration that the Tizard mission came to Washington.
HST. Yes, it was around Christmas of ‘45 and as I hardly need say we were right on the back foot at that time.
DWH: What was the American attitude to the British?
HST: We we
re looking for their help quite frankly but we were also disappointed that they threw in the towel in 1940. That rankled with me personally, because it made Joe Kennedy look like a prophet, which he wasn’t. So there was a real question mark over how much spine they had, over whether they really had the stomach to get back into the fight and worse than that, they seemed intent on blaming us for them giving up in 1940.
DWH: Is that fair comment?
HST: Well if Franklin Roosevelt had won the 1940 election he would have found some way to help the British out. We didn’t know it at the time but money was their principal problem, they were just about broke. They were telling us that, but we didn’t believe them. You see, that’s another example of the difference between a country governed by a romantic class and one governed by a realist class. The British were just being honest with us when they said they were out of money, but honesty, complete honesty, is as rare as hen’s teeth in international diplomacy. Not least because international diplomacy is a cutthroat game and honesty can be the mark of a fool. Mark Twain said that “...the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strictest truth.”, so we didn’t believe them because it looked suspiciously like they wanted to find a way to get us to pay for their war again. We looked at them as any businessman would look at a competitor. But overall, no it’s not a fair comment, if you have to ascribe blame on that issue it has to go to the British themselves, they underestimated the Germans plain and simple.
DWH: Was bringing the British Empire to an end a policy goal of the Roosevelt Administration?
HST: Well, bringing down the British Empire wasn’t something they were going to pursue actively, but it also wasn’t something they were going to make an effort to stop, let’s put it that way. There were many individuals within the Roosevelt administration who would have liked that, the under-cover Communists and such like, but it wasn’t policy. Willkie had a more pragmatic approach, he grasped the fact that the British did an awful lot behind the scenes in the world. The Royal Navy policed the seas, British diplomacy oiled the wheels of international relations, many of the territories they controlled weren’t capable of self-government and some of them were in our backyard. So they would have become our responsibility if we didn’t want to see them sliding into chaos.
The Peace of Amiens Page 22
