Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [157]
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote on July 9, 1942, to Stafford Cripps, who had expressed concern about Anglo-American relations: “The dominant underlying feeling is not bad592 … But there is a central difficulty. It is, as I see it, a lack of continuing consciousness of comradeship between the two peoples, not only in staving off an enemy that threatens everything we hold dear, but comradeship in achieving a common society having essentially the same gracious and civilized ends.” Columnist Walter Lippmann expressed similar views to John Maynard Keynes. There was a need, suggested Lippmann, for a new political understanding between Britain and the United States about the future of its empire: “The Asiatic war has revived593 the profound anti-imperialism of the American tradition.”
The Foreign Office was dismayed by remarks made by the Anglophile Wendell Willkie during a visit to Moscow. He told British ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr that U.S. public opinion towards Britain was shaping “dangerously,” that he, Willkie, was “scared” by it. Not one of the Americans he had met on his journey between Washington and Moscow, from truck drivers to ambassadors, had a good word for British behaviour abroad. He urged that the prime minister should make a speech on postwar policy, showing that he realised that “old-fashioned imperialism”594 was dead. Churchill, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing.
A July 6 report to the Foreign Office about the British embassy in Washington was almost flagellatory about the American view of Halifax’s mission: “The Embassy … has a quite fantastically low reputation595. It is regarded as snobbish, arrogant, patronizing, dim, asleep and a home of reactionary and generally disreputable ideas.” The report then listed popular American objections to Britain, headed by its class system, which was alienating workers—“the British are going red;” imperialism; “British bunglers in high places: over-cautious, contemptuous of all new ideas and defensively minded, tired old men bored with their own task … British sitting safely in own island with 3.5 million men under arms, Brits always being defeated … Lend-Lease is stripping America to supply the British who have not even paid their [First] war debts … Anti-British sentiment is a part of the central patriotic American tradition … Anglophobia is a proof of vigorous Americanism, socially acceptable in a way anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism are not … All the Roosevelt-haters hate the English because they are held to be popular with the President.”
British postal censorship reported to the Foreign Office on a cross section of U.S. opinion monitored in mail intercepts. From Newark, New Jersey, a man wrote to a friend in Britain: “Believe me we here are disgusted reading of British retreats and nobody blames the Tommy. We blame the Brass Hats for their inefficiency and being outmanoeuvred by Jerry every time.” On September 11, a New Yorker wrote in the same vein: “There is no doubt that something is rotten about the British command everywhere … It isn’t always lack of material—it is more often blind stupidity.” Another New Yorker, posted to Australia, wrote to a British friend in Stoke-on-Trent: “English imperialism is responsible for more of our griefs and wars than you can shake a stick at. Incidentally I’m surprised to find that a great many Aussies hate the set-up in England more than I do! You IMPOSSIBLE English!”
Eden’s parliamentary under-secretary, Richard Law, son of former prime minister Andrew Bonar Law, dispatched an extraordinarily emotional report to the Foreign Office during a visit to America. He claimed that in U.S. Army training camps “anti-British