Blood, Class and Empire by Christopher Hitchens

Author:Christopher Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781843545101
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

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FDR’s Victory; Churchill’s Defeat

Reviewing the American reaction to the aftermath of the First World War, Professor Selig Adler identified a predominant strain of what he called “disillusionist” thinking. Many in the British Establishment were slow to appreciate the depth and extent of this phenomenon. When Lloyd George boasted in 1921 that “the people who govern America are our people. They are our kith and kin. The other breeds are not on top,” he was uttering a serious foolishness. The United States might well value its claim to an English bloodline, and had certainly not turned pacifist or squeamish (as the war in Nicaragua was to demonstrate with particular vividness in 1927). But the idea that it had been “played for a sucker” by the British until 1918 was almost an orthodox belief. “Isolationism,” which is a weaker term for “disillusionism” and a rather misleading version of it, took the form not of a retreat into a fortress America but of an extreme reluctance to engage once more in a European war. There were several strains in this isolationism, many of them powerfully strengthened by Churchill himself, and his battle against them was of necessity an uphill one.

For the general public, it was probably the hearings of the Nye Committee that did most to materialize suspicion about “entangling alliances.” Named for its astute and cunning chairman, Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, the committee held a rather indiscriminate investigation into the role of fat cats in First World War profiteering, the mendacity of bankers, and the “Daddy War-bucks” method of cartelization. The easy populist term for this concert of interest and profit between imperial Britain and domestic American robber baronage was “economic royalism”—a handy encapsulation that further implied the idea of a British and monarchic upper crust. Even Roosevelt became fond of this useful term.

More fastidious isolationists could turn to Charles A. Beard, doyen of American historians, who also had a considerable journalistic audience. Beard was hagridden by the experience of 1914-18, and felt that the United States had been eased into war in order to recover the enormous and promiscuous loans she had made to the Allies. He spoke of the corrupting effects this had had on the American polity and inveighed against the “Atlas load” of “moneylending and huckstering abroad.” The British, in other words, were to pay dearly for having had J. P. Morgan as their wartime broker and patron.

On the right, of course, was the America First movement with its tinge of chauvinist and Fascist sympathy. The young Charles Lindbergh had watched his father run for the governorship of Minnesota in 1918 on a platform which decried the effects of “Mr. Wilson’s war” and had seen how crowds could be stirred. Still, the generally nativist timbre of the America First propaganda did not prevent some liberals, including some distinguished future Establishment Anglophiles such as Kingman Brewster and Blair Clark, from enlisting in its undiscriminating ranks.

Among liberals, there was a quasi-isolationist culture which could be justified in terms of anti-imperialist and anti-war feeling.

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