These extend, according to the breathless report in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, from Betsy Bloomingdale to Walter Annenberg. They sit, this evening, around a vast orange bombe, made in the shape of a crown. Some way east of the city, near the junction of Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra Drives in Rancho Mirage, Mr. Annenberg keeps his unrivaled collection of oil paintings and displays them to selected visitors in a naïve, unsorted fashion, turning from a canvas to show off his Christmas cards from the Queen Mother. (“They come special delivery, insured,” he boasted to the art critic Paul Richard.) The mutual reinforcement of tycoonery and aristocracy, economic royalists and monarchists, requires some rough-and-ready manipulation in the cultural field, but it can be done, and those who can do it regard it as money well spent.
How else, after all, could the Reagan entourage hope, after eight years of scandal and deficit and unanswered questions, to be invested with the pomp and glory and honor that Prince Philip has been dispensing? When Reagan claimed the moral authority of the Founding Fathers for his Nicaragua policy, he made one of his few miscalculations of the public mood. There were murmurs of distaste at this too promiscuous borrowing of America’s dearest idols. The comparison with Churchill is no less grotesque, of course, but if Prince Philip makes it, then who can complain? A vicarious legitimation is offered by a respected, traditional ally.
The occasion draws to a surreal close with the singing of Rosemary Clooney, whose evocations of Killarney and Cloghamore have reduced many a St. Patrick’s night to maudlin and lachrymose demonstrations. The Irish-American community has been the slowest to succumb to the general insipid Anglophilia (being one of the few ethnic American groups polled, for instance, that did not instinctively side with Britain in the Falklands conflict). But tonight Ms. Clooney eschews the green in favor of what looks like a jacaranda tent, and when she does sing of Cloghamore there is nothing in her rendition to discompose the Crown. Faced by an alliance between “the quality” from both sides of the Atlantic, even Fenianism succumbs to sentimentality.
That very morning, the newspapers had been full of a high-level disagreement within the NATO alliance. The ostensible disagreement concerned the deployment of nuclear weapons, but this in turn posed the question of differing responses to political change in the Warsaw Pact states. In the dispute, only Downing Street had taken the American side. In briefings and interviews, West German and French spokesmen referred quite unironically to “the Anglo-Saxon bloc”; the alliance within the alliance. If these spokesmen had been present at the Beverly Hilton they would have had no cause to think of their shorthand as a simplification.
Introductions ought to state a purpose frankly. My purpose has been to see what underlies this kinship, and to see if any sense can be made of the widely different ways in which “England” informs the mind of America. The “special relationship” is something that is supposed to elude definition; supposed to be protean and vague. It was not even given a name until Winston Churchill sought to encapsulate it, for now forgotten short-term reasons, in 1946. It is neither a political alliance, a strategic consensus, an ethnic coalition, nor a cultural and linguistic condominium—yet it is all of these.
Its real roots and character are to be sought in the grand triad of race, class, and empire—the trivium upon which the relationship rests. These are the three words which, still, evoke the most nervousness and denial and equivocation in everyday American discourse. If you dig for the roots of this ambiguity, you will come repeatedly across the traces of a small archipelago that was once a great maritime empire. No, I do not mean Greece—though the comparison has been attempted.
[1]
Greece to Their Rome
Much can be divined about any individual, however outwardly complex, from his or her explanation of the decline of the Roman Empire. A thousand schools of thought contend, and those who attribute the eclipse of ancient glories to lead poisoning, homosexuality, polytheism, monotheism, incest, the appeasement of barbarism by mercenarism, or the malign influence of steam baths upon testicles are all, in the final result, revealing their own peculiar and general theories of history and evolution.
Those who wish to avoid these critical judgments usually take refuge in theories of transition, whereby one age simply melts slowly into another, and whereby chance does little, in sapient retrospect, that was not prepared beforehand. An undoubted fact— the replacement of the British Empire by American power—can thus be presented very much according to taste. It may have been the happy result of a common heritage. It may have been the outcome of a grand design by one party or another. It may have been determined by forces of which both parties were only gropingly aware. Still, the resulting synthesis—the “special relationship”—is an important modern fact.
Seeking, however arbitrarily, to assign some point in time when this fact, not yet accomplished, became visible and palpable, one is continually returned to a moment in North Africa in 1943. Harold Macmillan, son of an English father and an American mother, was then serving as Winston Churchill’s personal emissary to General Eisenhower. British dependencies were being wrested back from German occupation, but only with the aid of enormous American subventions. Macmillan, who had the fondness of his class for classical allusion, was discoursing with Richard Crossman. Crossman, a leading British social democrat and wartime propagandist who was later to be the co-editor with Arthur Koestler of The God That Failed, made a note of Macmillan’s pensée:
We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American Empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Forces Headquarters as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.
On its own, the remark might have been no more than an occasional pleasantry. Crossman had already made a small name for himself at Oxford with the publication of Plato Today, a book which had traced the Athenian roots of the authoritarian state. What more natural than an exchange of tags between cultivated Englishmen abroad, surrounded as they were by boisterous American advisers and dependent as they grudgingly were on masses of American war materials? Yet the thought seemed to have occurred to Macmillan with regularity and continuity. On another occasion, addressing his staff, he said: “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”
Very much later in his life, after the British Empire had been humbled in North Africa by the Suez calamity of 1956, and after he had come to power as Prime Minister with undisguised American backing, Macmillan was to return to the theme again and again. According to Enoch Powell, a member of his Cabinet and a fervent opponent of the cession of British influence to the vulgarity of America, Macmillan had been much preoccupied with the idea that the “special relationship” would somehow allow the English ghost to pass into a new and vigorous body: “ ‘We are,’ he reiterated in a series of monologues late in 1956 and early in 1957, ‘the Greeks of the Hellenistic age: the power has passed from us to Rome’s equivalent, the United States of America, and we can at most aspire to civilise and occasionally to influence them.’ ”
Macmillan’s analogy is open to every kind of objection. For one thing, it was obviously not intended for American ears. For another, there were still British ears upon which it would have fallen very awkwardly. But it expressed, and still expresses, a metaphorical truth. Post-imperial Britain, during the arduous and sometimes embarrassing process of becoming post-imperial, leaned very decidedly toward the United States. Not without rancor, it appointed the United States its successor. Not without quibbling and reservation, the United States took up the succession. There had been, in both countries, those who saw a version of this accommodation when it was still a long way off. Their premonitions are part of the subject of this book.
How does it come about that the British still employ the words “class” and “empire,” w
hile in the United States these are facts but not concepts? How is it that the image of an English princess graces the cover of every American celebrity and sensation magazine? Why should it be that, as the rest of the world absorbs mass-produced American television output, the educated class in America itself prefers the diversion offered by the English country-house drama on its otherwise scantily financed Public Broadcasting System? Why is Winston Churchill the most quoted politician in American national life? Is it coincidence that, in repeated tests of American style and taste, the words “English” and “British” are synonymous with a certain elusive sense of the sophisticated? Is it of interest that the terms “East Coast,” “Establishment,” and “Anglophile” have been, at certain crucial points, effectively interchangeable?
This is only to brush the surface of the relationship, and to reconnoiter some of the apparent texture. Yet this very texture may be the direct and indirect result of a history so entwined, imbricated, and intimate as to form, in both cases, a version of the second identity. Like many apparently close kinships, this superficial sympathy may conceal as much as it discloses. In his third Satire, Juvenal reacted quite ungenerously to the Greeks who had made a cultural but not a political conquest of Rome:
Here’s one from Sicyon,
Another from Macedonia, two from Aegean islands—
Andros, say, or Samos—two more from Caria,
All of them lighting out for the City’s classiest districts And burrowing into great houses, with a long-term plan For taking them over. Quick wit, unlimited nerve, a gift Of the gab that outsmarts a professional public speaker— These are their characteristics.
This, of course, is by no means what Harold Macmillan meant the Americans to understand by his remarks. But it contains an unmistakable element of what he meant the English to understand. Why not, in exchange for the pains and humiliations of being superseded, at least exert the influence that the effete may always bring to bear upon the brash?
Macmillan was the most opportunist British politician since Lloyd George, and would probably have made no great claim to originality. But it is amusing and instructive to read his observations, and catch his tone, and measure both against reality. In Rome, Greeks became very influential, but Greekness in the sense of Hellenism did not. In modern America, very few English or British figures achieved influential standing except in their role as expatriates, with strong roots in an existent country. But certain British ambitions, precedents, designs, habits, and political patterns made, however metamorphosed, an extremely deep impress upon American life.
The literary mirror is often the most precise. Juvenal saw the Greeks as subtle and devious elements of corruption in a staunch Republic that embodied the manlier virtues, or that at least affected to do so. In our own time, English and American satiric writers have found themselves elaborating the same point from differing perspectives. Here is Evelyn Waugh, describing the exiled members of the Hollywood Cricket Club in his 1948 novella The Loved One (whose subtitle is An Anglo-American Tragedy):
For these the club was the symbol of their Englishry. Here they collected subscriptions for the Red Cross and talked at their ease, out of the hearing of their alien employers and protectors.
As if in answer, here is Tom Wolfe, wise in the ways of the Brits but resentful of their unearned cachet, in The Bonfire of the Vanities:
One had the sense of a very rich and suave secret legion that had insinuated itself into the cooperative apartment houses of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, from there to pounce at will upon the Yankees’ fat fowl, to devour at leisure the last plump white meat on the bones of capitalism. . . . They were comrades in arms, in the service of Great Britain’s wounded chauvinism.
Exactly forty years separate the publication of these two fictions. On the face of it, this seems a tribute to the way that cliché and stereotype outlive the events that formed them. During those four decades, however, the wheel turned in such a way as to confirm Evelyn Waugh’s prefiguration, and to leave the English with only the sorts of consolation rather cruelly delineated by Wolfe.
The reason for this, surely, is the masochistic inversion that made nonsense of Macmillan’s analogy even as it was being first uttered. England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, or what you will, had never been Greece to America’s Rome. It had always been Rome to America’s—what? The hesitation is a pregnant one. The original American revolutionaries, many of them drawn from an essentially English class of gentlemen, took the Roman ideal as the model of republican virtue, and tended to stress those Romans, such as Cicero and Plutarch, who had been most inflected by Hellenism. The example of Cincinnatus was continually contrasted with the gross monarchism and corruption identified with “the royal brute” George III. Addison’s Cato was performed for the troops during the extremities of Valley Forge. Indeed, the play has been argued by Garry Wills to have inspired, by its frequent performance throughout the Revolution, two of that Revolution’s most famous sayings:
What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country.
And:
It is not now a time to talk of aught,
But chains or conquest, liberty or death.
Not only did the play give tone to the courage of Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry, but it also contained a graphic series of warnings against the young Republic’s chief enemy—Caesarism:
What is a Roman that is Caesar’s foe?
Greater than Caesar, he’s the friend of virtue.
The greatest insult that could be hurled at a political backslider such as Aaron Burr was “Caesar.” Franklin Roosevelt only softened this image in his famous assault on the “economic royalists.”
Thomas Jefferson’s design for the new republic and its federal city was indebted to Hellenism in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian proportions of his house at Monticello, but to Republican Rome in the case of Washington itself. Thomas Moore, who visited the capital during Jefferson’s presidency, wrote lightheartedly:
In fancy now beneath the twilight gloom,
Come, let me lead thee o’er this second Rome,
Where tribunes rule, where dusky Davi bow,
And what was Goose Greek once is Tiber now.
(“Davus” was the typical name for a slave in Roman antiquity, and the reference to “dusky Davi” is yet another reminder of the great exception to the lofty principles of the Revolution.)
Rome, then, is present in the American idea from the very start. But the Rome cited by Macmillan is a very different one—the Rome of conquest and booty and purple, not the Rome of Cincinnatus leaving his plow. And the Britain he represented had few traces of the Greek in it, though perhaps some of the Byzantine. What he seems to have intended was the self-conscious subordination of British to American power, as a simple concession to the new global reality, and a corresponding or perhaps compensating adoption by the United States of British customs or mores.
If that is what he wanted, then that is what he seems to have got. But the ambiguities of this Graeco-Roman synthesis are more interesting than a mere political and diplomatic compromise might suggest. Long before Macmillan, in fact, the British were striving to limit the extent of American republicanism, which they saw as a threat and a rival. Throughout the nineteenth century, as I will argue and show, they tried to prevent the emergence of a continental United States. Thwarted in this effort, they turned to making common cause with a new “expansionist” America in 1898. Seeking thereafter to engage America on the British side in European quarrels, they stimulated and helped aggrandize what might be termed the superpower spirit among American elites. In the titanic battle against Hitler, they were forced to acknowledge that the proportions of the relationship had changed, and that Britain could now survive only as a junior partner. But along the way, huge alterations had been made in the American system. The United States found itself committed in far-off places with which it had no common history, it found itself a nuclear power, it found itself involved as
an arbiter in the politics of old Europe, and it found itself engaged along the widest front in history against the Soviet Union. In the origination of all these historic changes, it had been the British connection that was seminal.
And with this connection, which was in so many ironic and unexpected ways to come at Britain’s expense, came a series of cultural influences. At certain crucial times, the old atavistic themes of blood and language were reinstated, with a stress on Anglo-Saxondom which would have horrified the young men who thrilled to Addison’s Cato. Elements even of British monarchy and aristocracy recovered their credit in American life. At particular points, American statesmen made it their business to uphold and guarantee the British Empire—though in general they never lost sight of the overarching ambition not to abolish but to supplant it.
The cultural cross-fertilizations bear an oblique but definite relationship to the political and imperial ones. At a time when the United States seemed to many English people to be a young country, free of Old World restraints and pretensions, W. H. Auden hymned its freshness and modernism in his “New Year Letter” making a virtue of:
That culture that had worshipped no
Virgin before the dynamo,
Held no Nicea or Canossa,
Hat keine verfallenen Schlösser,
Keine Basalte,* the great Rome
To all who lost or hated home.
Auden and Isherwood and Aldous Huxley and many others, even the dubious and seedy characters symbolized by the cynical Dennis Barlow in The Loved One, could interpret the idea of Rome as “the big city”; a grand site for the pursuit of hedonism and modernist experiment. Sexual freedom, vast spaces, an escape from the class system and from the idea of military and imperial education, an encounter with the melting pot—these were the mixtures of impulse summed up in the old phrase “New World.” Conversely, those like T. S. Eliot who felt a reverence for the organic, ordered, Burkean, hierarchical principle were moved not merely to admire England’s persistent attachment to an ancien régime but actually to involve themselves with it. Analogues of this emotional diagram—conservative Anglophile Americans and transplanted liberal and radical Englishmen—persist to this day, though with different overlaps and several contradictions.