It turns out that, whether as empire, partnership, or civilizing mission, the two peoples were not destined to be the lords of humankind. Their main inheritance in the coming polycentric century will be the English language—even if as a final irony this is transmitted through American cultural media and artifacts. Meanwhile it will be a splendid thing if, showing that countries can after all learn from history, the United States decided to become less Roman, and the British decided to become more Greek, and both rediscovered republican virtues in a world without conquerors.
Bibliographic Note
1. GREECE TO THEIR ROME
Juvenal’s Satires have been edited and introduced by Peter Green in such a way as to instruct the nonclassicist and are available in Penguin. For continuous examples of the lost art of Anglophobia, with much good general reflection on the English besides, Edmund Wilson’s Europe Without Baedeker should be read, as should his reflections in The Forties. André Visson’s The Athenian Complex was written in order to sweeten Europeans for the bitter pill of American hegemony in 1948, and is long out of print, but it did not avoid some of the salient difficulties of the emerging new order especially as they touched upon cultural aspects. The late Sir Ronald Syme gave a wonderful Brademas Lecture entitled Greeks Invading the Roman Government, published by the Hellenic College Press in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1982. Michael Grant’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: A Reappraisal was written at the instigation of Ambassador Walter Annenberg and published by the Annenberg School Press in 1975. It bears the marks of its conception, and I consider it in a later chapter, but it does set out to address the latent analogies discussed in this one. Garry Wills, who may dispute with Gore Vidal the latter’s claim to be America’s official historian, was very suggestive about the Roman republican tradition in his Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment. Of the innumerable books on Harold Macmillan, Alistair Horne’s biography in two volumes (1988 and 1989) is certainly the most exhaustive, though it treats all matters affecting the “special relationship” as if they were too important for the gaze of the profane.
2. BRIT KITSCH
This subject is preeminently a matter of taste, and it’s therefore worth consulting Harold Nicholson’s Good Behavior: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility (1955), which has some quite feline discussion of Anglo-American distinctions. Martin Green’s Transatlantic Patterns: Cultural Comparisons of England with America (1977) has dated and has a tendency to be solemn but is one of the few attempts to consider the subject entire. Stephen Spender’s Love-Hate Relations (1974) has a literary bias and deals as far as possible with the safer aspects of the past. Paul Fussell’s Class (1983) was given the more emollient title of Caste Masks when it was published in the United States, thus neatly reinforcing the point he set out to make in the first place. The Friends of Irish Freedom National Bureau of Information long ago closed its door, but some archives possess its most famous pamphlet, published in May 1920 and called Owen Wister: Advocate of Racial Hatred: An Unpatriotic American Who Seeks to Destroy American Tradition, Edward Marsh’s memoir A Number of People (1939) gives the flavor of feeling about the American cousins at least as evinced by the British diplomatic elite between the wars. Marcus Cunliffe’s The Literature of the United States, first published in 1954 and reissued in an updated form by Penguin in 1986, is a delightful labor of love by an English scholar smitten with America in the proper way. Nelson W. Aldrich’s Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class (1988) is among other things an object lesson in how to handle and disclose family secrets. It skillfully depicts, even if only as a secondary purpose, the English texture of America’s blue bloods.
3. THE BARD OF EMPIRES
The letters between Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling can be found in the Library of Congress. Almost all studies of the man and his life and work discount the influence he exerted on American expansionism, or else seem unaware of it. A partial exception is Lord Birkenhead, whose Rudyard Kipling (1978) contains much good material on the correspondence with Roosevelt and related matters. Lord Birkenhead was hampered in the publication by the late Elsie Kipling, Mrs. George Bambridge, whose epilogue piece to Charles Carrington’s Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (1955) is nonetheless full of interest. T. S. Eliot’s introduction to A Choice of Kipling Verse (1941) preserves the conservative decencies without too much panache. In John Gross’s collection of essays Rudyard Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World (1972), there are especially fine contributions from Leon Edel, Philip French, and Nirad Chaudhuri. Angus Wilson’s The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977) is a highly enjoyable book which often stresses Kipling’s interest in America while never synthesizing said interest into any general discussion. Kingsley Amis’s Rudyard Kipling (1975 and 1986) is a witty defense of the author from the familiar charges of racism, sexism, imperialism, etc.
4. BLOOD RELATIONS
Michael Hunt’s Ideology and United States Foreign Policy (1987) and The Making of a Special Relationship (1983) are excellent in their tracing of the “British effect” on American diplomatic discourse. Ruth Brandon’s short history, The Dollar Princesses (1980), gives excellent gossip and anecdotes about the commingling of the respective upper crusts at the fin de siècle. E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment is an indispensable starting point for all students of the subject, The Rising American Empire by Richard W. Van Alstyne (1960) fully deserves the admission of indebtedness that it drew from Victor Kiernan in his America: The New Imperialism (1981), which is in its turn a trove of research, analysis, and suggestive comparison. The best way to study Mahan is to read him in the original, beginning with The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, which is his classic statement. But in order to appreciate his thinking on the potential of empire and the pros and cons of an explicit Anglo-Saxonism, one should also read The Panama Canal and Sea Power in the Pacific, with its chapter “The Importance of the Canal to Anglo-Saxon Influence.” His article “Possibility of an Anglo-American Reunion” in the North American Review for November 1894 is also of great interest, as is his Lessons of the War with Spain (1898, 1899). Types of Naval Officers (1893) and The Story of the War in South Africa, 1899-1900 (1900) show his deep attachment to English models of seafaring and soldiering. Le Salut de la Race Blanche et l’Empire des Mers, edited by Jean Izoulet (1906), is a real imperial curio that breathes the spirit of its time. W. D. Puleston’s Mahan: The Life and Work of Captain A. T. Mahan (1939), with its loving preface by Duff Cooper, supplies numerous clues to Mahan’s contemporary importance. M. B. Young’s The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy 1895-1901 (1968) shows the close coincidence between British and American justifications of conquest. For those who want to read the important but now forgotten Reverend Josiah Strong in the original, his once famous Our Country may be found in Readings in American History, edited by Oscar Handlin (1957).
5. VOX AMERICANA
Woodrow Wilson’s A History of the American People (1901 and 1902) is one of the essential texts of Anglophilia in its mode of historical expression and its social and racial assumptions. The Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott (1988), is a trove of actual and potential filiations between the two languages and literatures. H. L. Mencken’s The American Language is amusing and instructive about both the assumptions of Englishness and some of the attempts at challenging these. Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language by Dennis E. Baron (1982) helps illustrate the connection between style and class. Thomas F. Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963) helps illuminate the ever-intriguing subject of WASPdom. On the political front, Henry Pelling’s America and the British Left (1956) shows unintentionally that the current form of the “special relationship” rests upon the defeat of radical forces in both countries, which used to enjoy a forgotten “special relationship” of their own. Of the myriad books which treat England’s efforts to engage America as a brotherly power in the First World War, I ha
ve found Walter Karp’s The Politics of War (1979) very helpful. Northcliffe: An Intimate Biography by Hamilton Fyfe (1969) shows how some part of the trick was worked. Henry James’s England at War: An Essay. The Question of the Mind can be found, as far as I know, only in the Library of Congress. Stanley Morison’s “Personality and Diplomacy in Anglo-American Relations,” which deals with the noncultural side of the war bargain, may be found in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, edited by Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (1956).
6. FROM LOVE TO HATE AND BACK AGAIN
America’s Economic Supremacy by Brooks Adams was published by Macmillan in 1900 and is very helpful in recalling some part of the spirit of that age. Macmillan also brought out a posthumous volume, edited by Brooks, of the work of Henry Adams. In 1919 this consisted of The Tendency of History, A Letter to Teachers of American History, and The Rule of Phase Applied to History, with a long preface by Brooks. Reprinted as The Tendency of History in 1928, it appeared with the preface removed. Henry Adams and Brooks Adams: The Education of Two American Historians by Timothy Paul Donovan (1961) is very good on the contrasts between the two and on the farouche ideas of the lesser-known one. Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters, edited by Harold Dean Cater (1947), shows the importance of the aside in the consideration of a mind, and has some distressing evidence of prejudice. Stephen Gwynne’s The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice (1929) is more lenient in that he omits from the letters some of Spring-Rice’s more self-righteous remarks about American wartime neutrality.
7. THE CHURCHILL CULT
The Churchill bibliography is too vast to be attempted here, but in its lesser-known aspects can be augmented slightly. For Churchill’s devious role in the war of intervention, America’s Siberian Adventure 1918-1920 by Major General William S. Graves (1931) is an eye-opener. So is Fighting Without a War: An Account of Military Intervention in North Russia by Ralph Albertson (1920). Room Forty: British Naval Intelligence 1914-1918 by Patrick Beesly (1982) is one in what threatens to become a British genre of intelligence histories that put the assumptions of their authors into conflict with the demands of truthfulness and see veracity win. Churchill’s My Early Life is a bombastic account of just that, and is astonishingly unreflective about the United States in view of his later reputation for prescience. On the odd years of Churchill’s career in the 1920s and 1930s, Captain Stephen Roskill’s Naval Policy between the Wars (1968) is a careful but nonetheless startling account of imperial antagonism. In their otherwise highly orthodox and mid-Atlantic book An Ocean Apart (1988) David Dimbleby and David Reynolds also deal with this period of Anglo-American estrangement. Brian McKercher, in “Wealth, Power and the New International Order: Britain and the American Challenge in the 1920s” (Diplomatic History, Fall 1988), fills in considerable background. “The World War and the Cold War,” John Bagguley’s essay in Containment and Revolution (1967), argues well about the relationship of the one to the other.
8. FDR’s VICTORY; CHURCHILL’S DEFEAT
Here again, the bibliography is more titanic than gigantic. The three volumes of Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (1984) are a tremendous record and have put us all in the debt of their editor, Warren F. Kimball. The titles, Alliance Emerging, Alliance Forged, and Alliance Declining, are artificial in point of their periodization and slightly misleading in that they show a continuous friction and decline throughout. They still merit the term “indispensable” and have exhaustive accompanying notes and references. Warren Kimball’s essay “Lend-Lease and the Open Door: The Temptation of British Opulence 1937-42” (Political Science Quarterly, July 1971) rehearses some of the themes that are to be found in the Correspondence. Special Relationships: America in Peace and War by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (1975) is a wonderful account, often unintentionally hilarious, of the class aspect of the “special relationship” and of the advantages of breeding in maintaining it. As It Happened, by William Paley (1979), shows the susceptibility of certain Americans to that sort of approach. In both cases, the apogee is that of the supposed high noon of wartime collaboration.
9. CHURCHILL’S REVENGE
On James Burnham, that now neglected figure, the literature is smaller than it should be. His The Struggle for the World (1947) bears re-reading, as does George Orwell’s critique of it in his Collected Essays (1969). Samuel T. Francis’s Power and History (1984) is an admiring account of Bumham’s ideas and influence. A special issue of the National Review, published on the occasion of Burnham’s death on September 11, 1987, lets some important cats out of the bag.
10. IMPERIAL RECEIVERSHIP
Ian S. MacDonald’s collection of documents and readings, Anglo-American Relations Since the Second World War (1974), is something to keep by you as you read D. Cameron Watt’s Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place, 1900-1975 (1985) and Imperialism at Bay by William Roger Louis (1978). The latter book, as its title implies, is more prepared to call things by their unambiguous names. Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy 1938-80, by Stephen Ambrose, also gives an idea of the scale of the process. For some of the lesser-known examples of receivership that I have discussed, Bitter Fruit by Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger (1982) is a brilliant account of the events in Guatemala, while Something Ventured the memoirs of C. M. Woodhouse (1983), contains a deceptively laconic account of the Anglo-American intervention in Iran. George Rosie’s The British in Vietnam (1970) comes as a surprise to most people. Selig Harrison’s articles in The New Republic for August 1959 (“Case History of a Mistake”) were extraordinarily farsighted about policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan and very illuminating about the British role in the hand-over of power.
11. DISCORDANT INTIMACY
The Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945, edited by William Roger Louis and Hedley Bull (1987), is a very representative collection of Atlanticist wisdom culled from the think tanks of both countries. The American Rhodes Scholarships: A Review of the First Forty Years by Frank Aydelotte (1946) is a solemn but informative account, taking the scholarships at their own valuation. Max Beloff contributed a heretical essay entitled “The Special Relationship: An Anglo-American Myth” to the volume A Century of Conflict: Essays Presented to A. J. P. Taylor, edited by Martin Gilbert (1966). Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation (1970) gives the game away at several points. Imperial Brain Trust, by William Mintner and Laurence Shoup (1977), took advantage of a brief self-critical moment in American foreign policy discussion to shine the spotlight on the Council on Foreign Relations. Ronald Tree’s memoir When the Moon Was High (1975) is another classic of American Anglophilia in a wartime setting. The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction by Selig Adler (1957) shows the contrasting influence exerted in America by suspicion of British motives. Less Than Kin: A Study of Anglo-American Relations by William Clark (1957) presents the issue from the point of view of a Downing Street flack but does so with some humor and honesty. Sir Harold Nicholson’s W. P. Ker Lecture, The Future of the English-Speaking World (1948), wavers interestingly between caution and optimism. Problems in Anglo-American Relations by H. V. Hodson (Ditchley Paper No. 1, 1963, Ditchley Park Foundation) is a straightforward conservative tract, full of worry about American disapproval of the British. Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh’s Descent to Suez (1986) is straightforwardly conservative but written by a Foreign Office mandarin who worried that the Americans might be taking Britain too much for granted. Richard Neustadt’s memoir on how Washington should handle the British Labor Party, pirated by New Left Review in its issue of September-October 1968, is a perfect example of the private language of manipulation employed by “special relationship” professionals.
12. THE BOND OF INTELLIGENCE
Robin Winks’s Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (1987) concerns neither God nor man but espionage at Yale, and wittily shows how the ethos of the English club and common room, as applied to intelligence, was applied in America.
Donald Downes’s The Scarlet Thread (1953) is essential for its intuitions about Anglo-Americanism. Nigel West’s The Friends: Britain’s Post-War Secret Intelligence Operations (1988) is part of the culture of the semi-official leak whereby most English people find out what little it is thought fit for them to know. My Silent War by Kim Philby (1968) was written before glasnost but has some amusing Washington anecdotes. The Quiet Canadian by H. Montgomery Hyde is a near-pure hagiography of William Stephenson but contains some handy indiscretions. The Real Spy World by Miles Copeland (1974) is oxymoronic in title but realistic about the “special relationship.” (Mr. Copeland also contributed a revealing essay on James Burnham to the National Review memorial issue mentioned above.) Peter Wright’s self-serving but suggestive Spycatcher (1987) should be read only in conjunction with David Leigh’s The Wilson Plot (1988), which has more reliable and extensive information. One day, British Security Coordination: An Account of Secret Activities in the Western Hemisphere, 1940-45 will be published, or will become available in the Public Record Office. The material for a revised history of the “special relationship,” however, has a way of falling foul of the Official Secrets Act.
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