Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  For Mahan, there was a special significance in the applause of England. He seems to have been particularly moved by the toast to him and his fellow officers proposed at the aforesaid Lord Mayor’s banquet by Lord Roberts, who was already the holder of the Victoria Cross for his efforts in the desperate subjugation of the Afghans and was known almost universally as “Bobs.” This great veteran, who had one extraordinary campaign still before him, expressed the hope that Mahan would one day write a book about the army. This hope was to be requited in the most handsome way.

  Before quitting English waters, Mahan went to the Cowes regatta, where he was again feted by royalty and the aristocracy. The Queen’s nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, put in an appearance on his yacht, having just opened the Kiel Canal, and pronounced himself also to be a student of The Influence of Sea Power. Nobody was ill bred enough to make anything of this coincidence, and Mahan was able to repay some of the hospitality he had enjoyed by receiving the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and Earl Spencer (ancestor of the present Princess of Wales) aboard the USS Chicago.

  The year 1899 saw the various threads, spun with apparent independence by Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Adams, John Hay, Cecil Rhodes, and Kipling, drawn together in a web of “manifest destiny.” It was the year of the consolidation of American power in the former Spanish possessions of Cuba and the Philippines, gained in a near-bloodless conflict. It was also the year of intense British difficulty with the Boer farmers in South Africa. Mahan was equal to both emergencies, since he saw in them the vindication of his theories of sea power, the common interest of the two countries, and the opportunity for American ascendancy. The first precept had been easily demonstrated by Admiral Dewey’s contemptuous rout of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and (with the exception of the loss of the legendary Maine) by events in Havana harbor also. So, quoting the second of these three precepts in support of the third, he turned to Sir William Wilson-Hunter, an English author and friend of Kipling’s, who had written about the Philippine developments in the following terms:

  The Colonial empire of Spain crumbled to pieces at a touch from the youngest of the Christian governments. America starts upon her career of Asiatic rule with an amplitude of resources, and with a sense of moral responsibility which no previous state of Christendom brought to the work. Each western nation, as we shall find, has stamped on its eastern history the European ethics of the age when its supremacy was won. In the splendid and difficult task which lies before our American kinsmen, they will be trammelled by no Portuguese Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century, nor by the slave colonisation of Holland in the Seventeenth, nor by that cynical rule for the gain of rulers which for a time darkened the British acquisition of India in the Eighteenth. The United States, in the government of their dependencies, will represent the political conscience of the Nineteenth Century. I hail their advent in the East as a new power for good, not alone for the island races that come under their care, but also in that great settlement of European spheres of influence in Asia, which, if we could see aright, forms a world problem of our day.

  (Sir William shared President McKinley’s difficulty, which was that of not realizing that the Filipinos were Christian already.) Mahan, as his biographer put it, “rarely used other men’s words to convey his own thoughts,” but went so far as to reprint this piece of white man’s enthusiasm in a published letter about the Philippines. He continued to present the American occupation of that archipelago as—what else?—a necessary hinterland to the American policy of an “open door” to China.

  He did not confine his generalizations about the Philippines to the Far East. In the same year as his Kiplingesque defense of the Manila expedition, he embarked upon The Story of the War in South Africa, 1899-1900. Published as the century turned, this is perhaps the most eloquent apology for British empire and imperialism ever penned by a foreigner. It outran even the rather shamefaced defenses of their own actions that British patriots were able to devise. But it had in common with them a sense of calling and destiny, perhaps fresher and more naïve for being newly adopted:

  The naval battle of Manila Bay [wrote Mahan] will to the future appear one of the decisive events of history, for there the visions of the few, which had quickened unconsciously the conceptions of the many, materialized as suddenly and unexpectedly into an actuality that could be neither obviated nor undone. What Dewey’s victory was to the over-sea expansion of the United States, what the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861 was to the sentiment of Union in the Northern States, that Paul Kruger’s ultimatum was to Imperial Federation. A fruitful idea, which the unbeliever had sought to bury under scoffs, had taken root in the convictions of men, and passed as by a bound into vigorous life—perfect, if not yet mature.

  This expression of the world-spirit, even if it tended to overlook the fact that at Fort Sumter the British Empire had been on the other side, was still very serviceable for the present as Mahan saw it, and for nascent American as well as Anglo-American ambitions.

  “Perfect, if not yet mature.” Mahan was perhaps overly impressed by the ability of the British to call upon, not colonial troops, but English-speaking allies as far apart as could be: “as far apart, geographically, as the British Islands, Canada and Australia.” Mahan was sober in deciding the importance of this factor:

  After making allowance for mere racial sympathy, which in the present context has had even in the neutral United States so large a share in determining sympathies, the claim of an English newspaper is approximately correct, that the universal action of the colonies, where volunteering far exceeded the numbers first sent, “indicates what is the opinion of bodies of free men, widely separated by social and geographical condition, concerning the justice and necessity of the quarrel in which we are now engaged.”

  In seconding this emotional and self-justifying appeal to blood, and in slightly reprobating the British government’s slowness to act upon it, Mahan pressed his case with almost reckless solidarity. When one reflects on the continued political survival of the Boers, and upon the avowed principles of the Union in the American Civil War, one wonders how prudent it was of him to write of

  the sentiment of the unity of the Empire, an ideal which under different conditions may well take to Imperial Federation the place that the Union occupied in American hearts and minds in 1861. Alike in breadth of view and in face of sentiment, nothing exceeds the power of such an ideal to lift men above narrow self-interest to the strenuous self-devotion demanded by great emergencies. Should this be so in the present case, and increase, Imperial Federation and expansion of the United States are facts, which, whether taken singly or in correlation, are secondary in importance to nothing contemporaneous. [Italics mine.]

  This was putting it pretty high. Even though news of British boneheadedness in the field had reached him, as it had every newspaper reader, and even though reports of British swinishness to the civilian population must have penetrated at least as rumors, Mahan chose to ignore the second and say of the first:

  In so far, that element of stupidity which has been somewhat lavishly attributed to the British officers’ too simple-minded attention to their end to the exclusion of care for their own persons and those of their men, has a military value not only great, but decisive. The quality needs direction and control, certainly; but having been reproached for now two centuries, the question is apt—where has it placed Great Britain among the nations of the earth?

  This was Anglophilia with—for once the old phrasing has its point— a vengeance. Mahan had so far committed himself to Lord Roberts of Kandahar, soon to be immortalized again as “Roberts of Pretoria,” as to repay, and more than repay, Roberts’s desire in 1894 that Mahan should write a book about the British army. A few years later, Lord Roberts was to join the Tory rebellion against Home Rule for Mahan’s Irish cousins. But all that, along with the Somme, lay in the future. For the present, Mahan could find glory even in British military and imperial folly. As for Lord Roberts, Mahan
found words that G. A. Henty himself could hardly have penned without blushing:

  It is not by such affairs that contests are decided—on the playground or in strategy. Lord Roberts proceeded with his preparations undisturbed by the mosquito buzzings about his ears or on his trail.

  But in spite of this part-vicarious and part-genuine enthusiasm and comradeship, Mahan had a shrewd sense that the alliance could only be temporary. To this day in the Operational Archives in the Division of Naval History at the Washington Navy Yard, there reposes a document, written by him, dated December 1890 and entitled “Contingency Plan of Operations in Case of War with Great Britain.” It is a generally pessimistic study, imbued with a wholesome respect for British maritime strength. In general, he thought, the best that the United States could hope to do was to fight a defensive war. However, in one instance there might be a chance for an initiative. “No attempt can be made to carry the war to the other side of the Atlantic, or against a fortified island in the West Indies. In the latter quarter, maritime raids may be attempted under favorable circumstances.”

  Ten years later, in 1900, he was to write with more confidence that “Great Britain’s interests elsewhere are so great that she must now unload herself of responsibility for the Caribbean.” A matter of a decade or so after that, Theodore Roosevelt was to warn Kipling about his too boastful attitude toward the United States and “the lee of the British Fleet.” Not long after that, the United States was to limit the size of that fleet and to express displeasure at a British naval treaty with Japan. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt, who was trained on Mahan during his years at the Navy Department, was to lend Britain some old destroyers in exchange for the cession of British colonial power in the Caribbean. The relationship of water to blood, in other words, was to prove rather more ambivalent than Commander Josiah Tattnall, or those who lauded his high spirit, could have supposed.

  Neither Theodore Roosevelt nor Alfred Thayer Mahan was of sufficiently Anglo-Saxon “stock,” as the saying goes, to make very much of the bloodline element in the new alliance between London and Washington that burgeoned from 1898. But racial kinship was a strong and continuous theme of that period, and steps were even taken to extend and deepen it by marriage and amalgamation.

  In his book The Protestant Establishment, where the word WASP made its acronymous appearance in the American language, E. Digby Baltzell spoke of the year 1901 in slightly exaggerated tones:

  In that year a British-American, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant (WASP) establishment, consolidated through family alliances between Mayfair and Murray Hill, involving many millions of dollars, authoritatively ran the world, as their ancestors had done since Queen Elizabeth’s time.

  This might have been putting it high, though as Baltzell says, it was the year when “the Protestant patrician Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House and J. P. Morgan, leading layman of the Protestant Episcopal Church and unrivalled czar of our business civilization, formed the first billion-dollar trust, the United States Steel Corporation.” It was also true that at that period the Senate was dominated by WASPs (or brahmins as they have sometimes been known) of the sort typified by Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson W. Aldrich.

  This might have happened anyway, without any great production being made of Anglo-Saxon bloodlines, if it were not for “expansionism.” The expansionist cause meant that there was no further need to downplay an English connection, as sturdy Americans had been wont to do during the middle decades of the century, especially during Britain’s perfidious Civil War policy. Expansionism had also helped to heal that wound in American life, by employing the Southern-dominated officer corps in the glorious campaigns in Cuba and the Philippines. Finally, a wave of Jewish and Catholic immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as Ireland had contributed to a WASP self-consciousness in reaction. Faced with what even quite tolerant figures described as “mongrelization,” those who could claim a purer “stock” made haste to do so. There were even nativist reasonings in which this could be dressed up. There was the continuity with the first settlement of the country, sometimes known as the Mayflower complex. There was the language. There was the ever-present yearning for an ancient and honorable history. And for those who aspired to gentrify themselves and to dignify the possession of land and property, there was a natural model just across the ocean, which had (as Tocqueville pointed out) avoided going the way of the French aristocracy by its genius for adaptation. This genius for adaptation now took the form of intermarriage with “American cousins.”

  When Henry James wrote An International Episode in 1878 (publishing it with Daisy Miller) he was able to make deliciously skillful use of the mutual incomprehension that obtained between the mansions of Rhode Island and the town houses of London—to say nothing of the castles of the Home Counties. But by the turn of the century, and in the years preceding the outbreak of the Great War, the familiarity gap had closed with hectic—some thought indecent—speed. On the boat to America, Henry James’s Count Otto Vogelstein (admittedly not a conspicuous Englishman) was reflecting: “There appeared to be a constant danger of marrying the American girl; it was something one had to reckon with, like the railway, the telegraph, the discovery of dynamite, the Chassepot rifle, the Socialistic spirit; it was one of the complications of modern life.” Later he wrote: “For a Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less stirring, I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a Boston nymph.” This was progress of a sort, and involved two commodities with a very different consistency from blood and water—capital and class.

  Wealthy though many English aristocrats undoubtedly were, the flow of money in exchange for title could really go only one way. The two most famous and emblematic marital alliances—that of Jennie Jerome to Lord Randolph Churchill and of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, Jennie’s nephew by marriage, illustrate the point. English primogeniture tribalism meant that money “settled” on a bride became the property of her husband. Self-made American tycoons were inclined to kick at this idea when it came to their own daughters. Leonard Jerome was compelled to write to Randolph’s father in the most unsentimental terms:

  In the settlement as finally arranged I have ignored American customs and waived all my American prejudices and have conceded to your views and English custom on every point— save one.

  This one point was an allowance in her own name to his daughter. And when another Marlborough sued for the hand of Consuelo Vanderbilt, he received after laborious negotiations a block of shares in the New York Central Railway Company with an income guaranteed for life—happily for him in view of the brevity of the marriage.

  The Vanderbilt-Marlborough vows were solemnized by Bishop Henry Codman Potter, the embodiment of white Protestantism and sometimes dubbed “the First Citizen of New York.” He represented a high synthesis of the Episcopal and the social, and was proud of being on terms with J. P. Morgan as well as with more roughly hewn elements such as Samuel Gompers. The relative delicacy and restraint of the match between two great clans was not always echoed in the rest of the marriage market. An advertisement placed in the encrusted Tory pages of the London Daily Telegraph in February 1901 read: “Will any dukes, marquesses, earls or other noblemen desirous of meeting, for the purpose of marriage, young, beautiful and rich American heiresses communicate with . . .” There followed the name and address of a broker in New Orleans. A New York newspaper had earlier published a marriage guide which explained the ropes to the aspiring American noblewoman:

  Dukes are the loftiest kind of noblemen in England. There are only twenty-seven of them in the whole United Kingdom. Of these there are only two available for matrimonial purposes. These are the Dukes of Manchester and Roxburghe. The Duke of Hamilton is already spoken for, the Duke of Norfolk is an old widower, and the Duke of Leinster only eleven years old.

  Viceroys, of course, were even rarer since there was only one at any given time. How clever, then, of Mary Leiter to land Lord Cur
zon, the great potentate of the British Indian Empire, and to add the fortunes of her father’s partnership with Marshall Field to his broad acres. (Decades later, when Ian Fleming summarized the Cold War aspects of the “special relationship” in James Bond’s warm male bonding with a CIA agent, the agent also bore the name of Leiter. Fleming was a terrible snob.)

  There were more than a hundred such weddings between American money and British nobility in the period before the onset of the First World War, and one of them was to give birth to Winston Churchill, the most famous son the “special relationship” ever produced. The great chronicler of the period, George Dangerfield, has a masterly cameo moment in his book The Strange Death of Liberal England. The occasion was a ball given in fancy dress at the height of the 1911 House of Lords controversy. An embattled Liberal government had threatened to swamp an obdurate Tory upper house with the creation of five hundred new peers:

  On Empire Day, Mr. F. E. Smith and Lord Winterton gave a fancy dress ball at Claridge’s. In the middle of the ballroom floor among the Junos and Ceres’ and the Cleopatras and the Louis Quinze duchesses and the pink tulle ballet girls and the young politicians in velvet with jewelled snuff boxes, stood Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour, dressed in ordinary evening clothes. At midnight a way was cleared through the room for the figure of a peer, wearing robes of state, and bearing on his coronet the legend “499: just one more vacancy.” It was Mr. Waldorf Astor. This delicate allusion to the Royal Prerogative was greeted with rounds of applause from Mr. F. E. Smith in his eighteenth century white satin, and Mr. Winston Churchill in his scarlet domino . . .

  From its inception in the new century, then, the Anglo-American relationship was an affair between military, diplomatic, and social elites. But this did not automatically limit its appeal. The ideology of “Anglo-Saxondom,” based as it was on blood, could infuse the meanest in station with a sense of superiority. Admittedly, the Anglo-Saxon Review, popular at the time in the better circles, was managed by Jennie Jerome in her capacity as Lady Randolph Churchill. But in resistance to the melting pot and in anticipation of empire, there was a populist Anglo-Saxonism at work also. In a very widely circulated and influential book called Our Country, published in 1885, the Reverend Josiah Strong had intoned mightily. “It seems to me,” he said, “that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come . . . If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.” This prophecy was seconded by a leading pro-expansionist demagogue, Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, who cried, even as Congress was moving to annex Hawaii: “We are Anglo-Saxon and must obey our blood and occupy new markets and, if necessary, new lands.” Discoursing about these “new lands,” which were “shores hitherto bloody and benighted,” he saw no option but “Anglo-Saxon solidarity . . . an English-speaking people’s league of God for the permanent peace of this war-torn world.”