The complicating factor has been empire: the special contribution of the English example to American life and institutions. Acquisition of empire meant both collusion with and rivalry with the British Establishment. Which of the audience of Addison’s Cato could have imagined that in the hinge year of 1898 the most trumpeted poet in America would be Rudyard Kipling, who had written with scorn and contempt of the Revolution of 1776?
Yet it was empire, and the emulation of the former master, that eroded republican virtues and institutions. As Charles Beard wrote in his classic The Rise of American Civilization, in the chapter “Imperial America,” by the year 1898:
No philosophy of Empire was worked up to systematic perfection and fused with the Constitution into the current system of ethics. Either on account of logic or Christian training, American thinkers shrank from an overt application of the Darwinian law to the struggle of nations for trade and territory. They were of course not unaware of the ancient creed, for they had heard about the theory and practice of Rome. In their schoolbooks they had read Pro Lege Manilia, the panegyric by Cicero, which summed up in a single sentence the old doctrine of might: “Do not hesitate for a moment in prosecuting with all your energies a war to preserve the glory of the Roman name, the safety of our allies, our rich revenue, and the fortunes of innumerable private citizens.” They had before them also the voluminous writings of European imperialists who scorned the more tender sentiments of liberals and frankly advocated war and expansion for glory and emoluments. [Italics mine.]
There is a distinctly modern ring to Cicero’s injunction in the age of “credibility” and “peace through strength.” It shows, at any rate, that the idea, not of becoming Roman, but of becoming a different kind of Rome, had occurred to people long before Macmillan. And in 1898, too, it had been with English encouragement that this connection was made. The results of the imperial transformation were not confined to politics and foreign affairs. Beard noted the emergence of a national style that might be called the American grandiose:
At last the measureless energy of American life had been discovered and accepted, save by a few artists who hoped that time and tide might be turned back and that the spirit of Chicago might yet be bodied forth in the delicate refinements of Renaissance Gothic. In 1914, an English critic, Clive Bell, declared that American architecture seemed on the verge of a revival worthy of Florence but after the World War he began to think it was to be more like Augustan Rome. . . . Possibly the steel frames and towering domes of business enterprise triumphant might grovel in the dust with the baths of Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars.
Of course, 1914 was another Anglo-American hinge year. There is a permanent debate in the United States about a strange phenomenon called “the loss of American innocence.” Some have dated this defloration or awakening as late as the Indochina war. But others have seen an almost Jamesian irony in the seduction, by the corrupted and ruthless British statesmen of the Great War, of the naïve Anglophile Woodrow Wilson. (This irony is scarcely tempered by the knowledge that Henry James himself played a small part in the seduction.)
In his poem “Not Like This,” Czeslaw Milosz refers beautifully to irony as “the glory of slaves.” In the evaluation of the ironic (suppose there to be such a process) some weight ought to be given to the ancient question: “Who whom?” (or as some iconoclastic modern grammarians would have it: “Who who?”). At whose expense is the irony of the Anglo-American transition, where the historic colonial power has become, in practice, the political and military colony? Is it at the expense of the United States, which has abandoned its affectation of anticolonialism and been invaded repeatedly by English manners and English taste? Or is it at the expense of the British, who called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old and then found that it was the New World doing the calling?
Elaborated and refracted through different episodes and processes, that is the question this book hopes to answer. There is an irony at the core of Macmillan’s apparently modest but actually rather conceited ambition, which sorts well with the history and argument which led up to it and which occurred after it. And it may turn out that the irony of Juvenal—the irony of usurped and displaced Britannia enjoying a posthumous revenge in the fleshpots of Manhattan and Georgetown and Hollywood—is the apposite one.
These ironies are present as much in the late twentieth century as they were in the late nineteenth. They seem always to have been waiting to be pointed out. It was in the high noon of late Victorian imperialism that the equestrian statue of Boadicea was raised on the banks of the Thames at Westminster, with lines from William Cowper’s notorious diatribe poem inscribed on the plinth. Recalling the British warrior queen’s defiance of the Roman invader, Cowper had been superbly confident in his reading of destiny:
Rome, for empire far renowned,
Tramples on a thousand states;
Soon her pride shall kiss the ground—
Hark! The Gaul is at her gates!
as Cowper had the Druidic prophecy continue, for Boadicea:
Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they.
And finally, as if the British were immune to the Greek admonition to avoid hubris:
Ruffians, pitiless as proud,
Heaven awards the vengeance due;
Empire is on us bestowed,
Shame and ruin wait for you.
In the 1980s two controversies recalled this imagery to mind. The first was the publication of Professor Paul Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which argued that the United States was not and would not be immune to a cyclical law that condemned all great systems to perish by “overstretch.” Not strikingly original, the argument exploded like a bomb in the context of widespread angst over the American deficit. Professor Kennedy employed the line: “Rome fell, Carthage fell, Scarsdale’s turn will come,” which he had adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s play Captain Brass-bound’s Conversion. (In the original, which was true to the vision of complacent suburban stockjobbing, the suburb marked out for eclipse had been “Hindhead.”) The entire vexed question of “Number One” and “Top Nation” had been borrowed whole cloth from the English precedent.
Yet even as the finally uninteresting argument about “Number One” was going on, there were British minds prepared to squabble over who had the most influence at the Roman court. In the course of a parochial power struggle over the future of the Westland Helicopter Company, which at one stage was held to threaten the survival and “credibility” of Mrs. Thatcher’s government, it became important to the Prime Minister’s faction to blacken all criticism as “anti-American.” The matter in question, which was the undue advantage given to the U.S.-based Sikorsky consortium in a bid which also involved potential European tenders, was essentially secondary. The real dispute was over Britain’s place in an acknowledged American imperium. There were those, even in the Conservative Establishment, who found all this a trifle unsettling. They muttered, as indeed they had muttered against Macmillan, about American “imperial power” and the reduction of the United Kingdom to “dependency” and “a client state.”
There was a prompt intervention by Roger Scruton, normally considered a convenor of the “race and nation” element in the Tory Party, and editor of the (normally völkisch) Salisbury Review. Employing his regular column in The Times, he argued in imperial terms for colonial subordination. Did the critics of the multinationals not realize, he inquired, that “the British Empire lives on in America, just as the Roman Empire lived on in Byzantium, although in a form more vital, more industrious and more generous.” This elegant glaze of variation on an old theme showed how powerful the vicarious instinct remains in British circles; powerful enough in this instance to risk the payment of a compliment which could only embarrass those to whom it was offered. It didn’t really seem to matter, to Scruton at least, which empire lived on
in which, as long as the idea of empire could draw moral and historic sustenance from some simulacrum of a “special relationship.”
Somewhere in the subtext of all this is the ticklish question of race and the awkward matter of class. Ethnic hierarchy in America actually confuses the two things in a revealing minor way, since the word WASP, which denotes a racial and religious group, is only ever applied to a certain social layer of it. (George Bush is a WASP. George Wallace may have been a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon descent, and even rather vocal on all three points, but a WASP he was not.) Anglo-Saxondom, however, has always played a large role, sometimes spoken of and sometimes not, in the ordering of American society by caste and color. Once again, it was Evelyn Waugh who hit off the observation most deftly in The Loved One:
“I presume the Loved One was Caucasian?”
“No, why did you think that? He was purely English.”
“English are purely Caucasian, Mr. Barlow. This is a restricted park . . .”
“I think I understand. Well, let me assure you Sir Francis was quite white.”
Dennis Barlow, exploiting his advantages as an amoral Greek in the Californian Rome, also lets slip another trick of the trade when discussing his crude, naïve employer with a fellow expatriate:
“My manner is congenial. He told me so yesterday. The man they had before caused offense by his gusto. They find me reverent. It is my combination of melancholy with the English accent. Several of our clientele have commented favorably upon it.”
Thus the fully debased version of “the glory of slaves.”
It was, of all people, the late James Burnham who made one of the shrewdest plays upon the “Greece to their Rome” allegory. Himself of English parentage and Oxford-educated, Burnham became one of the foremost advocates of an “American World Empire” (his phrasing) and of the necessary “receivership” (also his phrasing) into which the United States would have to take the British dominions. Burnham persuaded some crucial American statesmen of the correctness of this view (see pages 243-50). But he argued that the thing should be done with due regard to British sensitivity. The British could be induced to fall in with the plan, he wrote, because with some part of themselves they desired the security of a larger and stronger system:
A similar longing, similarly expressed, was widespread throughout the Hellenic world during the century preceding the foundation of the Roman Empire. It is like a bachelor who begins to prepare himself for the restrictions of matrimony by discoursing on the beauties of “true love.”
In both Britain and America today, both the Roman and the Athenian complexes can be found in recurrent forms. Perhaps the reason for this is that the implied relationship, however it may differ from any real or imagined Greece or Rome or Byzantium, contains enough to flatter both parties. As Plutarch put it in his Precepts of Government (here adumbrated by Sir Ronald Syme in his Greeks Invading the Roman Government):
Plutarch . . . confined his advice to the ruling class in the cities. They must cease from strife and ambition, forget the glories of a distant past and abide in contentment under a superior power. Furthermore, the rule of Rome (he reminded them) was not a product of chance or violence. Virtue and Fortune had collaborated.
The signal contribution that Plutarch made was less obtrusive. He hit upon a genial device, the sequence of parallel biographies, from legendary heroes down to generals and statesmen. The two nations were thereby recognized as standing on parity.
“Parallel biographies” is a potentially telling phrase, which might go some distance to explaining the ease with which Americans and British exist in each other’s imaginations. Winston Churchill may be, and is, quoted endlessly by American politicians, to the mutual satisfaction of two traditions. Princess Diana can painlessly become an American star or celebrity. In the world of literature and entertainment, the common language and mutual history make for alternating waves of fashion, with Liverpool intelligible in Los Angeles and vice versa. Moreover, while the larger and richer relation can bask in its quite recent but definite preeminence, the poorer and smaller one can privately boast of having a more polished and civilized tradition. As Sir Ronald Syme puts it: “Hadrian, more a Greek than a Roman, paid honor and deference to the exponents of Hellenic eloquence.” What did that cost him?
Returning to Macmillan’s original formulation after these reflections, it is clearer than ever that he intended the “special relationship” to be a relationship between conservative forces. The Americans were to supply the capital, and the British were to provide the class. This would give the British imperial manner a fresh lease, and lend some much-needed tone to the grandiosity of the American century. These are the unspoken conventions which have, in variant form, governed the relationship since its inception.
*Has no ruined castles,/No marble columns. The lines are taken from a poem by Goethe which opens: Amerika, du hast es besser.
[2]
Brit Kitsch
In January 1946, Mr. Edmund Wilson wrote a pained review of Brideshead Revisited for The New Yorker. Evelyn Waugh, he lamented, had disappointed him. There had been the fizz and wallop of Vile Bodies, the venturesome innovations of Black Mischief, and the sinister, strangely modern energy of A Handful of Dust, which even took its title from The Waste Land. And now this . . . this harlequinade, as Wilson eventually settled upon calling it:
The reader has an uncomfortable feeling that what has caused Mr. Waugh’s hero to plump on his knees is not, perhaps, the sign of the cross but the prestige, in the person of Lord Marchmain, of one of the oldest families in England.
For Waugh’s snobbery, hitherto held in check by his satirical point of view, has here emerged shameless and rampant. His admiration for the qualities of the older British families, as contrasted with modern upstarts, had its value in his earlier novels, where the standards of morals and taste are kept in the background and merely implied. But here the upstarts are rather crudely overdone and the aristocrats become terribly trashy . . .
Wilson was a decided Anglophobe at least as far as the ticklish questions of class and empire went, and was to spend much of that year of 1946 wondering aloud and in print at how little the British seemed to have learned from the experience of war. His acidulated description of their sahiblike behavior in Rome and Athens and their chilly demeanor at home had elements of love-hate in it, but the exasperation certainly predominated. In this, for once, Wilson was in a fairly safe American majority. The famous “Open Letter to the People of England,” printed by Life magazine in October 1942, had come close to summarizing the view of most Americans who were not consumed by Anglophilia, and certainly expressed the private opinions of the Roosevelt administration as well as the Luces:
One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t like to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions. If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing all alone.
Wilson would never have said “strategize,” any more than Evelyn Waugh would have, but he would have approved the sentiment. The Americans of the 1940s admired the British for qualities of democracy, solidarity, and courage. They did not intend, as had happened in 1914-18, to let their general admiration and generosity be parlayed into a rescue operation for the British Establishment, the British class system, and the British Empire.
Edmund Wilson was slow to see the point in his Europe Without Baedeker, but in the real world the British were giving ground very fast to a nascent American empire which in later life he was to recognize and to find highly unpalatable. It was only when the Britain of great prewar dominions had become a memory that nostalgia for it became possible. This nostalgia was nowhere more lusciously indulged than in America, which developed an unslakable thirst for the high style of the country house, the hunt, the brittle drawing-room repartee, and the other supposed strengths of the English manner.
Some
of this was merely coincidental with the recrudescence of conservatism as a force in American life, but some was directly connected to it. On the cusp of the seventies and the eighties, there was an efflorescence of mannered, extreme, conservative journalism on the campuses of many of the more “traditional” American universities. The most celebrated example was that of The Dartmouth Review, which fought to restore “standards” to a college much altered by the liberal race-and-class buffetings of the preceding decade. One of its founding editors was Benjamin Hart, who was born within a few years of Edmund Wilson’s death. He is the son of Jeffrey Hart, who is professor of English at Dartmouth and also a veteran co-editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review.
Benjamin Hart directed the “Third Generation” project for the Heritage Foundation, which was the major think-tank resource for the soi-disant Reagan revolution. In 1984 he published a book, Poisoned Ivy, which became the manual of the eager young conservatives then migrating from college to Washington. Inescapably, the book was compared to Buckley’s earlier classic God and Man at Yale, and Mr. Buckley himself did little to discourage this comparison by contributing an introduction.