Family Quarrels
By D. W. BROGAN
T AST November, some members of a Rotary Club in East Anglia (which I occasionally ad- dress).refused to come to the annual, Thanksgiving Day lunch because they refused to drink the health of the President of the United States. It was a symptom, but a symptom of what? Was it as serious or more serious than the refusals. of Kiwanis and other groups of indignant South- erners to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States while the federal storm troopers terrorise the innocent mobsters of Little Rock? I don't know, for it is one of the difficulties of the subject that Mr. Clark has boldly and success- fully tackled that there are no- Agreed answers to some important and recurring questions.
Are relations between 'the English-speaking peoples' exceptionally good or exceptionally bad? Are we more or less than kin? Are we usually kind? Is it safe to treat Americans as the most foreign of foreigners or as slightly wayward children? Do platitudes about Shakespeare and Milton do good, or harm? Are they even plati- tudes, i.e. boring truths? Who feels touchy and suffers from a sense of inferiority today? Is American smugness of British envy the more irritating political attitude? Is more harm than good done by inspecting the garden and doing some weeding? Can politics be usefully con- ducted on one side in a fit of Chadbandery, on the other in a pet? Should we rejoice at seeing Mr. Dulles bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the Minn let loose by the uncorking of the Suez bottle, or turn soberly to doing our own accounts and noting `One spree,' put down in the debit column, `One hangover'?
These are some of the questions that Mr. Clark puts explicitly or implicitly in this admirable, good-tempered but candid and serious book.* It is a book written on a thesis, a thesis stated with force and worked out with subtlety. 'The British and American peoples, with all their history and traditions, give the association its dynamism because they are predominantly con: scious of their sense of rivalry, while the Governments are more conscious of the need for partnership. It is the function of statesman- ship to harness this explosive force of inter- national rivalry without either greatly reducing the force or exploding the partnership.' A true but a hard saying. For the dynamism and the rivalry breed normal, human and normally harm- less friction, but when something goes wrong at the government level the rash spots can be rubbed into sores by busy hands that Satan can ,use as well as idle ones. So we have Rotary Club
* LESS THAN KIN: A STUDY OF ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS. By William Clark. (Hamish Hamilton, 16s.) patriots .snubbing Ike, and Lord Hailsham threatening the American people with a renunci- ation of his pride in his maternal ancestry. Of course, there Were more serious results of last fall's follies than those I have alluded to, but little follies may be as symptomatic as big ones. Obviously `good' Anglo-American relations can- not be trusted to exist without care, forbearance, generosity or intelligence. They ,cannot be. ex- pected to flourish without the exercise of a good deal of imagination on both sides. Thus, as Mr. Clark' reminds us, it was necessary, after 1945, to remember than the American people were not willing to give us a cash testimonial for standing alone in 1940. As Keynes belatedly discovered, it was our present and future that interested the Americans, not our past, however heroic. We made the mistake, in a good many cases, of be- having like the French 'in 1919, pointing at our honourable scars when we should have been point- ing at our future achievements. The Americans prefer boosters to heroes. In short, the American negotiators, up to' the Marshall Plan, behaved rather like Keynes and company in 1919. We shall get American faith, hope and charity if we look like deserving it. Nothing will do us less good than 'Making a poor mouth,' as the Irish Put it. Here endeth Mr. Clark's first lesson.
But if we bear that-in mind, we shall find that we, have assets that, skilfully and honestly used, give us advantages over the French, the Italians, even those temporary darlings of the more naive Americans, the Germans. On the ambivalent feelings of the Americans to the mother or step- mother country, Mr. Clark, drawing on an ex- ceptionally wide experience, is magnificent. I don't know anyone who has shown more sense and wisdom than he does here. My only serious complaint is that he is too brief in dealing with that traditional suspicion of England, combined with a touching, if occasionally irritating, pre- occupation with English life and customs, which is a dominant American culture trait. (He might have noted that whereas 'British' is often used, pejoratively or foolishly, as in 'the easy British victory over the Spanish Armada.' English' is almost always used in an admiring if sometimes resentful fashion.) An Englishman, naturalised in America, ceases, far sooner than other Euro- peans renounscing the sins of that old and wicked continent, to be regarded as anything but an American sans. phrase. In that sense, Professor Bela' is right; the biggest 'racial' block in America is the 'Anglo-Saxon,' real and bogus members each counting for one, Many of the most devoted Anglophiles are innocent of a drop of English or even Of British blood (the converse is true; there is no Anglophobe like an American
af old colonial stock with a hereditary resent- neat to pay off). And last autumn, many, many liousands rallied to the Eden cause or dissented :nuch more in sorrow than in anger.
All this Mr. Clark discusses admirably. But [ think he allows toO little for the Protestantism of America. This may no longer have the political tone of the 'dissidence of dissent,' but it is a very important force. An Anglican may easily under- estimate it, either by overestimating the import- ance of the 'Protestant Episcopal Church,' or by recognising and lamenting its comparative unim- portance. Mr. Clark does not do that. He knows that, in New York, Cardinal Spellman is far more important than Bishop Donegan. Bus Protestant- ism, not the high Anglicanism of, say, Pusey House or Fond du Lac, is a very important force and a force that, normally,ls a trait d'union be- tween Britain (more especially Scotland) and the central block of Americans. Protestantism colours even non-Protestant bodies. It deeply colours American Catholicism (I have heard a Methodist hymn Sung in innocent good faith at Mass in a smart Catholic parish and the American priest is also a 'pastor' in the social sense). Even modern Judaism is Americanised this way. Mr. Clark rightly notes that what marks American religion is often really patriotism. He might accept a parallel that I have drawn more than once, that the Americans worship America, their God is Divus Cesar or, at best, Genius Rome. that the salute to the flag is the equivalent of the incense on the imperial altar and that, as
much as the Romans or the mysterious people of the Scrolls, the *Americans 'worship their standards.'
There is a lot of truth in this, for the Christian, disconcerting truth. But for all that, there is a great deal of real, other-worldly religion in America, even among Catholic and Methodist bishops. There are many millions for whom re- ligion is not just patriotism put under the aegis of an American God. And these are the people who do expect a lot from us and whom we, ignorantly and smugly, kicked in the teeth last autumn. They may be innocent in thinking that 'righteousness exalteth a nation,' but they do believe it and they don't put Americanism above all criticism. It is these people who are tormented, especially in the South, by explosions like the Little Rock emeute. They are the 'Nonconformist conscience' of America—a very good thing to have, as we should know.
On another side, Mr. Clark has said something worth saying, but perhaps he has not said it enough. There are few limits to the credulity with which Americans believe hard-luck stories from the victims of imperialism. The most preposterous stories about British atrocities in Muscat or Oman will get credence. Until the premium on the Canadian .dollar made it seem implausible, millions of Americans believed that Canada dutifully paid tribute to the tyrant mother country! (Mr. Clark might have noted the political phenomenon that most baffles and hurts many good Americans, the fact that the Canadians, with the manifest superiority of things 'American' visible south of the border, still don't jump at the chance of, say, territorial status in their great republic .,or even full rank as sovereign States—to quote the nonsense of Governor Orval Faubus.) Ghana, the Canadian dollar, Guatemala and Haiti are teaching some lessons and many Americans are learning. We could learn a few lessons, too. One is that the United States is not a lonely and lost dominion anxious to creep back into the sheltering womb of the Commonwealth, in fact or in form. It
was from its mother's womb untimely ripped in 1776. It might be better if the Americans forgot this obstetrical truth. It would be even better if we remembered it. The Americans are not loyal and the welcome they will give the Queen will be a republican welcome, the welcome Rome gave Cleopatra or Berenice (tnutatis mutandis, that is). It will be republican but warm, one of the many paradoxes that this great theme is fertile in. To the essentials of the problem and to most of the paradoxes, Mr. Clark is a most admirable guide.
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