This week, the question of whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will occupy the White House has been overshadowed at times by the question of whether Winston Churchill will do so. The dispute over whether a bust of the British statesman would be returned to the presidential mansion – and indeed, whether it had ever left – was at the center of a larger debate about the historic “special relationship” between the United States and what is often called its mother country.
A series about the uses and abuses of history in politics.
But family ties are often more fraught than friendships. They are dramas that play out across generations, often with origins – and subplots – that are only dimly remembered. And few of this week’s commentators stepped back to consider the deep history of what Mr. Romney has called a “common bond” that “goes back to our very beginnings – cultural and historical.”
Long before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, the Anglo-Saxon identity of American colonists was fraying, stretched thin by both political and demographic forces. By as early as 1790, barely 50 percent of Americans were of English descent. Many others hailed from parts of the British Isles that suffered more heavily under the imperial yoke than the American colonies ever did. For nearly a century after 1815, when our last war with England ended, the former mother country was much more often seen as antagonist than ally. The perennial specter of war with Britain reared up as late as the 1890s, as the historian Evan Thomas recounts below.
As for the oft-invoked relationship between Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, even that began on an unpromising note, to say the least. The two men first met at a banquet in London in 1918, at which F.D.R. – then assistant secretary of the Navy – was a speaker. Not long before they became reacquainted two decades later, Roosevelt would remember that Churchill, who was serving as Britain’s minister of munitions, “acted like a stinker … lording it over all of us” and was one of the rudest people he had met in public life. (By then, Churchill apparently had forgotten the meeting entirely, which perhaps proved Roosevelt’s point.)
Despite the rocky start, of course, the eventual friendship of Roosevelt and Churchill would help cement an alliance between the nations that had begun during World War I. Roosevelt captured something of the American attitude toward Britain when he referred to his counterpart as “dear old Winston,” and Churchill often played the part with his eccentric Old World ways. During a stay at the White House near the end of 1941, Churchill was giving dictation to an assistant while soaking in a tub. He rose from the bath, entered an adjoining room, and was dictating in the nude when Roosevelt walked in. “You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to conceal from you,” he said.
Such, perhaps, are the moments from which a “special relationship” is made. Yet by 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson received the Churchill bust that now graces the Obamas’ residence, it was not clear that such good will would survive the decade. Continuing disagreements with Prime Minister Harold Wilson over the war in Vietnam led the president to tell his supposed ally, “Why don’t you run Malaysia and let me run Vietnam?” If any special relationship then existed, it was perhaps more with Churchill – then recently deceased – than with his living countrymen.
In the decades since then, Churchill has enjoyed a renaissance as an avatar of the American conservative movement, which is why the placement of his likeness in the White House has now become an unlikely campaign issue. Long before George W. Bush placed Churchill in the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan had his own Churchill portrait hung in the White House situation room.
We asked several historians to discuss the historic complexities of a trans-Atlantic relationship that is all too often reduced to symbols and sound bites – not to mention statuary.
Sylvia Ellis teaches British and American History at Northumbria University. She is the author of the “Historical Dictionary of Anglo-American Relations.”
Churchill sometimes appears to be a more hallowed figure in the United States than in Great Britain. But let’s not forget that Churchill and Roosevelt disagreed as often as they agreed, not least over British colonialism. And his posthumous role as a talisman for unity between Britain and the United States has been fodder for controversy in Britain as well as in the United States, even before now.
When Churchill died, in January 1965, Brits were appalled that neither Lyndon B. Johnson (recovering from a serious cold) nor his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, attended the funeral. Instead, three men less familiar to most Britons – Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Ambassador David Bruce were sent as official mourners.
And in 2009, when the Obama administration did not seek to extend the loan of the Churchill bust that his predecessor had kept in the Oval Office, that first “bust bust-up” drew much more attention in Britain than in the States, stoking concerns about the future of Anglo-American relations. Would a president with Kenyan roots want to laud a figure whose government had put down an anti-colonial uprising there in 1952? Yet even while some Britons were concerned about the sculpture’s removal, others felt it was an acknowledgment that the Anglo-American relationship in the 21st century needed to move beyond Churchill as its symbol – a symbol based on outmoded Anglo-Saxon values.
Perhaps the British government might not consider lending the Churchill bust again! Surely one bust in the White House is enough.
Evan Thomas teaches writing at Princeton and is the author of several books, including “The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898” and the forthcoming “Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.”
Mitt Romney is not wrong to say that the United States and Great Britain have long enjoyed a “special relationship.” But for much of American history, America and Great Britain were rivals, if not enemies. As late as the mid-1890s, there was a war scare between Britain and the United States over Venezuela. President Grover Cleveland invoked the Monroe Doctrine, warning the British not to intervene in a minor border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. The New York newspapers were full of stories comparing the strength of the American and British navies (the Royal Navy was much stronger). Britain backed off only when its attention was diverted by the Boer War in South Africa.
It was not until the Spanish American War in 1898 that the “special relationship” began. America’s ambassador to Britain, John Hay, reported that he was receiving expressions of support from the British government. Great power politics were the reason: Britain wanted to ally with the emerging American naval power against German imperial ambitions in the Caribbean and Far East.
Anglo-American amity got a boost in World War I, of course, when American doughboys bolstered the exhausted forces of Britain and France against Germany. But the real alliance began with Churchill in 1940, when the new British prime minister was desperate – not too strong a word – to get America to enter the war against Hitler. Churchill and Roosevelt met together on a cruiser off Nova Scotia in August 1941 to sing Anglican hymns and profess their shared Anglo-American (Churchill would say Anglo-Saxon) faith in liberty and freedom from tyranny.
Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor at the National Review and the author of several biographies of America’s founders, most recently “James Madison.”
The term “Anglo-Saxon” was used by 18th-century English Whigs to identify liberty with Britain’s tribal past. Absolutism was depicted as a sinister European import, introduced by the Norman French invaders in 1066.
Once the United States became independent, we proclaimed ourselves the champions of liberty; Britain was a reactionary backslider. When Dickens sent Martin Chuzzlewit, hero of his eponymous novel, to America in the 1840s, he got an earful of bumptious Brit baiting. “Bring forth that [British] Lion! I taunt that Lion! I tell that Lion, that freedom’s hand once twisted in his mane!”
Anglo-American relations brightened in the 1890s as we became more self-confident and Britain, mindful of the rise of Germany, drew closer to its former colony. Anglo-Saxon then became shorthand for common history, ideals and (increasingly) foreign policy.
Winston Churchill symbolized the new relationship, with his American mother, Jennie Jerome, his wartime bromance with F.D.R., and his multivolume best seller, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples”— Brits and Yanks, fighting tyrants together.
Barack Obama represents a new myth — Multicultural Man, whose freedom comes from diversity — and when new myths come, old ones must retire. But Mitt Romney doesn’t seem ready to junk the Anglo-Saxon myth just yet.
Joseph Prud’homme is a professor of political science and director of the Institute for the Study of Religion, Politics and Culture at Washington College.
It bears remembering that the dominant view of Britain during and after the American Revolution, and throughout the 19th century, was grave suspicion and distrust. This unease was a war of conflicting values: empire or democracy, birthright privilege or rugged individualism, state-imposed religious orthodoxy or confessional freedom? The 20th century – a time when the United States and Britain forged deep ties by fighting side by side – is anomalous in this history. And with memories of the two world wars fading, the special relationship forged through the last hundred years may yet prove fleeting.
Since the 1960’s the United States and Britain have grown increasingly culturally removed. This is a result, I believe, in part of the de-Christianization of Great Britain. As Callum Brown documents in his important book “The Death of Christian Britain,” in the course of a decade the young of Britain simply gave up on the ancient religion that had informed its past. In the wake of the demise of Christianity in Great Britain (where now less than 10 percent of the population attend any religious service monthly, and scarcely more do so annually), a yawning cultural divide has opened between an increasingly areligious nation and a stubbornly churchgoing one.
Mr. Romney should not be faulted for focusing on a rather brief period in the relationship between our two countries. He hopes for that period to be affirmed and revitalized. But that period was a time when Roosevelt and Churchill could sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” together on the deck of the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, and that time is no more.
Maya Jasanoff is a professor of history at Harvard and author of “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.”
The Romney campaign’s emphasis on the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” shared by the United States and Britain trafficks in ethnically loaded stereotypes at the expense of historical and demographic precision. Even in colonial times, the future United States attracted large numbers of settlers from the Celtic regions of the British Isles, Ireland, Scotland and Wales — to say nothing of the thousands of Africans who arrived as slaves on British ships — making “Anglo-Saxons” only a part of our white population, just as they are only a part of Britain’s. In looking for the foundations of the “special relationship,” Romney’s advisers might less controversially and more accurately have pointed to our common reliance on the English language.
The idea of the “special relationship” grows out of a concept popularized more than a century ago by British politicians and intellectuals, who championed the formation of a ”Greater Britain” that would unite Britain, the United States and Britain’s so-called “white” dominions (including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) in a worldwide English-speaking federation. Advocates included Cecil Rhodes, who endowed his eponymous scholarships at Oxford in the service of this ideal. But it was most famously taken up by Winston Churchill, whose multivolume “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” painted a romanticized picture of Anglo-American solidarity for a cold war readership. Churchill earns enduring admiration for his unblinking resistance to fascism. But he was also a die-hard imperialist, whose commitment to the “special relationship” sat alongside a rather less democratic aversion to anti-colonial nationalism.
Today, with English as a global lingua franca, a history of the English-speaking peoples could span the world – while what the peoples of the United States and Britain share most obviously is not a trace of Anglo-Saxon heritage, but a remarkable degree of ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity.
Adam Goodheart is the director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, where Peter Manseau is a scholar in residence. Emily Blackner, Maegan Clearwood, and Kathy Thornton, student associates at the center, contributed research.
Historically Corrected is a project of students and faculty at Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. To learn more, click here.