Pantheon
Page 37
The American milieu in which James Zennor finds himself in late July 1940 is, I hope, also faithful to the facts. At that time the United States in general, and the Yale campus in particular, were riven by debate over US involvement in the war. The university chaplain, the Reverend Sidney Lovett, was a pacifist; others were strongly in favour of coming to Britain’s aid.
In Washington, there certainly were senior politicians aiming to discredit Roosevelt, both to sabotage his re-election in November 1940 and to thwart his advocacy of military action. Hans Thomsen, the then Charge d’Affaires at the German Embassy, actively sought to influence US domestic politics, backing vocal isolationists and even covertly paying for newspaper advertisements making the case against war.
It is also well-documented that the Chicago Tribune was the leading mouthpiece of the America First movement, formally launched in September 1940, while Time magazine under its campaigning editor Henry Luce, was a loud advocate for US intervention.
The novel’s earlier action is also grounded in fact. Barcelona did indeed host an alternative Olympic Games, the People’s Olympiad, in 1936 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. The battles I refer to during that conflict are anything but fictitious, with James Zennor’s war experience tallying in part with that of the real-life Esmond Romilly, in whose story I was educated by the excellent Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly by Kevin Ingram.
Preston McAndrew is entirely fictitious and based on no one. And yet his notion of war as a cleansing fire is, I believe, no more than the idea of eugenics taken to its logical conclusion — an idea that was utterly mainstream in the pre-war period. Painful though it is to admit, a veritable pantheon of British and American intellectual heroes believed in a theory that today would make most of us shudder.
Three generations on, we take pride in the belief that the Second World War was fought out of moral revulsion at the ideas embodied by the Nazis. The awkward truth, however, is that intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply in thrall to a set of principles we would now regard as horribly close to Nazism. This fact, one of the last great secrets of the Anglo-American elite, has lay buried for more than seventy years. It may be time to exhume it and give it proper examination.
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