• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 926 0

proposals ultimately came to nothing, in large part because of his obstructionism; 'it is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words' as he warned his sister.11 It was not all doom and gloom. The visit of the royal family to the United States in June 1939 had demonstrated the degree to which there was 'an American anglophilia [that] was deeply nostalgic for a romanticized past'. The inspection by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of the British Pavilion, part of New York's World Fair, certainly appears to have been well received. Observers were apparently dazzled by the queen's radiant smile and, no doubt for the purposes of the covering press pack, the king consumed his first hot dog. The trip, despite it having 'no discernible impact on entrenched isolationist sentiment', was deemed a great success as it demonstrated the common democratic ideals that existed.12 It had not succeeded in calming the fears of all and elements within the American public continued to warn of the Imperial menace. Writing in his Survey of International Affairs the celebrated, and often controversial, British historian Arnold Toynbee was well qualified to provide the simplest explanation for this:

American feeling and policy were still governed by past facts which had already become partly or wholly irrelevant to the international situation in which the United States was now actually placed. Perhaps the most powerful of these influences from the past was the fact that over nine per cent of the living generation of white inhabitants of the United States and the ancestors of all of them no longer ago, at the earliest than ten or twelve generations back, had, at some particular moment, deliberately pulled up their roots from ancestral ground in Europe and had crossed the Atlantic in order to start, on the American side of it, a new life free from the unhappy elements in their European heritage.13

The outbreak of war brought with it exacerbated tensions. Writing in October 1939 Douglas Fairbanks Jr., actor, socialite and later to become, at least temporarily, a British commando, offered the friendliest of warnings to Eden. The Dominions secretary was told an argument was being made in the United States that 'Britain is an Imperial autocracy built by plunder and wars—no better for its time than Hitler now'. To counter this he suggested it was imperative for Britain to stress 'the voluntary actions of the free dominions' as part of a strategy of making certain not to appear as 'an Imperial octopus and the more she looks like the mother of an independent but at all times cooperative family the better'. Betraying the American bent for commerce, the conclusion to this long, personal letter was that 'the British government should continue to an even greater extent to regard itself as no more that the "Chairman of the Board" of the British Commonwealth'.14 Roosevelt had privately offered similar advice cautioning the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, of how helpful it would be if the British could emphasize their commitment to self-government. Writing to Lord Halifax in December 1939 back in London, the former Philip Kerr repeated the President's message. The suggestion was that the British could point out publicly that the empire-building of earlier centuries had been abandoned and the lesson had been learnt that 'the only foundation for a stable international system was national autonomy'. Chamberlain wrote a marginal comment on the letter rejecting such penance, while the senior figure in the FO, Robert Vansittart, labelled it 'simply lunacy'. 'What jam for German propaganda', he wrote to his secretary of state Halifax, and for all the American isolationists, who, having goaded Britain for cowardice in the past had now 'taken refuge in the pavilion lavatory'.15

The cause for much of this animosity was fear about what it would cost to bring the first Dominion back into the bosom of the relationship. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, head of economic relations within the FO had paid a six week visit to the United States