The American Attitude Toward England

A Supplementary Statement to Some Recently Uttered Remarks of Dean Inge

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

LET us look at the facts squarely, and undeluded by the cheap sateen hypocrisies of ward-politician diplomatists. Let us get rid of all this assuaging bosh about the bond of a common language, about mutual interest and about identity of blood and race that is trotted out to lullaby the issue at AngloAmerican banquets at the Cecil Hotel, at Seamen's Fund concerts aboard the ocean liners and at Bankers' Club lunches to visiting British profiteers. A common language didn't hold up the Wars of 1775 and 1812; identity of blood and race didn't forestall the American Civil War, nor prevent the Anglo-Saxon English from siding with its participants of French, Spanish and Creole descent; mutual interest, if it were more than so many words, wouldn't have made it necessary for Grover Cleveland to pass his remark to England in the matter of Venezuela. We can get nowhere by resorting to the subterfuge of such comfortable and meaningless phrases; we must look behind them. Thus looking, what do we discover?

SOOTHING handclasps and quasi-secret Elks' grips aside, we discover that England and America arc farther apart today than they have been since 1886. On the surface, the appearance is otherwise, but, below, the undertow is plainly to be felt. In the first place, the interests of the two nations are fast pulling in different directions. Where, for instance, would the interest of England lie in the event of war between the United States and Japan? Where, again, would the interest of the United States lie in the event of war between England and the new Germany? As for identity of blood and race, the identity is presently less than it has ever been in the history of America; the Anglo-Saxon blood stream in the United States has been declining steadily with the passing of the years; it gives ground gradually but surely to the infiltration of middle-European, south-Europcan and Asiatic strains. And as for a common language, all that the English optimist need do to disillusion himself is to come over here, get on a train and make stop-overs in the Pennsylvania Dutch region, the German areas of the Northwest, the Swiss colonies of the Pacific Coast, the Italian and Czech settlements in the mining states, the French and Spanish stretches along the Gulf, the Slav colonies along the North Atlantic seaboard, the Scandinavian areas of the middle Northwest and the scattered Negro belts, to say nothing of the New York East Side, the Dakota prairies and the Southwestern frontier states. But beyond all this there is something else, something much more important, and that is the notion, inculcated in every American schoolboy, that the two nations arc natural enemies. Ask any little American boy today who has got through his primary school history and who didn't have an older brother killed in the late war which he would rather fight against, England or Germany, and the youngster will select England. They may alter the school-books all they care to, but they can't alter the fact in the little boy's mind that his George Washington fought the English, that his John Paul Jones fought the English, that the English bribed Benedict Arnold to betray his country and that every Fourth of July firecracker is a redcoated soldier of George III to be blown to kingdom come.

It is a characteristic of the American that he is very cocky, provided the odds are overwhelmingly in his own favour, and, accordingly, as all these little boys grow to manhood and find that the United States is today tremendously the superior of Great Britain in wealth, man power, petrol resources (important to modern warfare), etc., it is not unnatural that they should desire once again to match strength with the ancient enemy. For we must remember that the majority of these boys now grown up are typical Americans even if they are not honourable gentlemen. The late war blew their steam off in no wise. Their hearts were not in it after the first pumped-up and artificially induced hysteria evaporated. Germany had invaded Belgium? Well, Belgium was as remote and unfamiliar a land as Timbuctoo, so what of it? Germany had sunk the Lusitania? Well, the Lusitania, after all, was an English ship: that, in these grown-up boys' minds was a more important fact than that some Americans had lost their lives on it. The Germans were threatening Paris? The boys looked into their history books and found that the French, for all the beautiful gesture of Lafayette, had charged the United States a pretty stiff fee for sending help over in the American Revolutionary War.

AND, anyway, these little boys, now grown up, had no fond recollections of Belgian, English and French boys as they had of German boys. The family butcher had been a German and his little son had been the delivery boy who, after the meat in the brown paper had been deposited at the back door, was impressed into service for a game of duck-onrock in a neighbouring alley. The man who ran the corner saloon had been a German who let the little boys crawl under the swinging rattan doors and who shut his eyes when they stole pretzels from the wicker basket at the door-end of the bar. The cook had been a German woman, and the little boys, grown up, still remembered her Christmas cookies. The policeman had been a German—for that was before the Irish got control of the force—and the little boys forgot his having chased them off the streets for playing tag on the car tracks in the memory of the hearty, brotherly handshake he gave them when he came around annually on Christmas morning to collect the usufructs of Christian amity for having kept burglars away on the preceding 364 nights. The baker had been a German and, as the little boys recalled, he "wouldn't hurt a flea." The four-piece band that had played such magnificent tunes in front of the house in those years long gone was composed of Germans; Zimmer, the great baseball hero of those days, was a German; the "Lilliputians", who gave the first grand theatre show that these little boys had been allowed to go to, were Germans; Sandow, the strong man and their boyhood god, was a German; the first tune that every one of their piano teachers taught them was Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen; all the toys that made their youngsterhood happy had been marked "Made in Germany"; the wonderful and envied acrobats at the circus were Germans; and the Grimms, whose fairy tales their mothers had read to them, were Germans. It was pretty hard to hate the Germans, the little boys in khaki and with real guns in place of the old air-rifles found. The Germans had never done anything to them, they considered, and, after the first flare and novelty of adventure wore off, the little boys in khaki and with real guns in place of the old air-rifles began to see things a little differently from Woodrow Wilson, who, after all, they reminded themselves, was a lot more English than nine-tenths of them were.

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These boy-men's eyes turn presently to adventure in another direction and; save I am sorely mistaken, that direction is England. For this, I for one, as an American, am sorry. Though I have no English blood in me, I admire England and the English, the land and its people. I have spent parts of many happy years in that tranquil and comfortable and lovely country, and, among my closest and most "valued friends, there are many, many Britons. I can, therefore, be of no greater service as an honourable friend than to point out to them, truthfully and without the conventional contemptible American hypocrisy, the, way the foolish, unfortunate and tragic wind blows.