The Anglo-American Partnership:

...Professor Allen generously acknowledges his principal authority for that period and effectively places it in the larger context of his history...

...Indeed, the English liberal and labor classes supported the North so staunchly that hundreds of thousands of them actually endured hunger rather than support the Confederacy, on which their jobs in the cotton mills so largely depended...

...These extremists, in both the United States and Great Britain, have been and still are the enemies of the Anglo-American partnership, which is supported in both countries by middle-of-the-road people of good will and good sense...

...Of course, the United States is now the "senior partner" and has inherited many of the insults formerly heaped on Britain...

...I believe I have no lawful right to do so...

...The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship...

...Their partnership will succeed because it must...

...Only Churchill clearly saw and boldly spoke out against the frightful menace of Nazi Germany...

...The strength and weakness of Woodrow Wilson and of his friends and opponents, the tragically successful attacks on the League of Nations, the malignant propaganda of anti-British isolationists, the fanatical efforts of our "revisionist" historians to whitewash and minimize German militarism as the primary cause of the war...

...After the full significance of the Emancipation Proclamation was realized, British public opinion swung strongly to the Union...

...author, "A Letter to America" This book is timely and greatly needed by Americans, especially by our "eggheads," whose extraordinary lack of knowledge about Anglo-American relations is usually accompanied by amazingly dogmatic opinions about them...

...Fortunately, the author has largely relied on earlier American scholars of enduring stature and on contemporary historians and writers of the first rank, such as Morison and Commager, Allan Nevins and T. A. Bailey, Lionel Gelber and J. B. Brebner...

...Many self-righteous Americans forget or...

...True, the greatest statesman of our age, Sir Winston Churchill, has written what will almost surely remain the greatest narrative of the Second World War...

...One of them...

...in his First Inaugural address in 1861: "Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern states that by the accession of a He-publican administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered...

...Similarly, his restraint, intellectual honesty, and passionate desire to be fair to America are apparent in his account of the Venezuelan crisis of 1895...

...Churchill won what was essential to the salvation of Britain, the greatest victory of his public career: the consummation of the Anglo-American partnership...

...Professor Allen explains why...

...the whining of our pseudo-intellectuals which accompanied and helped Hitlers Big Lie about the "Crime of Versailles"--all seem like a sad dream long, long ago...

...Gone are the carefree days for those Americans who never made an honest, careful study of the unprecedented development of a worldwide empire into a worldwide commonwealth of free nations, but who joined with venom in the hue and cry of other "neutralists...

...The author makes the record clear without the special pleading and blind self-righteousness which have made much American writing on that period unreliable...

...The Anglo-American partnership was complete with the entry of the United States into World War II...

...The author appreciates their worth...

...Allen does not rub it in...

...to this day, deliberately ignore the words of Lincoln, the "gradualist...

...At all times, the author leans over backward, possibly too much, to be fair to the American point of view...

...I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that 'I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists...

...Then came Armageddon...

...Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary...

...The author tells us that "groups like the Manchester Working Men could send resolutions of support to Lincoln, such as that which obtained from him the reply...

...That is not a war of which honest-minded Americans today can be proud...

...Napoleon lost: we did not win, but our diplomats saved the day...

...The early part of this well-documented, well-balanced book is devoted to a comprehensive description of the relative status of the two countries, the economic, social, political, cultural and emotional bonds which, despite many mishaps and even more misgivings, have united Britain and America...

...Roosevelt glimpsed it...

...There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension...

...Most of our historians have failed, through ignorance or design, to reveal to Americans Britain's restraint and wisdom in her life-and-death struggle from 1914 to 1918...

...The Anglo-American partnership is no exception, as Professor Allen points out...

...The best we could do was not enough for the most dangerous tyrant of the nineteenth century...

...like our own, was divided...

...and much lesser figures (and their ghost writers) have contributed beams of lights and clouds of darkness...

...Professor Allen, who was recently appointed to the Chair of American History at the University of London, has done a magnificent job...

...And the book will prohably not bo entirely pleasing to Professor Bemis of Yale University, whom the author frequently cites, but whose isolationist and pro-German leanings prior to Pearl Harbor were so damaging because of his great reputation...

...Yet, he is not falsely sentimental in telling this dramatic story of the growth of a partnership without precedent in history...

...The author's intensive analysis of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 confirms the statement of Morison and Commager in their masterly Growth of the American Republic: "This Peace of Paris certainly gives the lie to the epigram that 'America never lost a war or won a peace conference.'" It is equally clear that our representatives were amazingly successful in the conferences which terminated the War of 1812 in the Treaty of Ghent...

...His clear and vigorous style holds the reader's attention without ever descending to clever innuendo or glib half-truth...

...Diplomatic relations are also sketched with rare impartiality and sensitive insight...

...Most of the British and American politicians pretended it wasn't there...

...He is not only magnanimous to a degree seldom exhibited by American historians, but he knows how to write...

...British opinion...

...John Hay and Elihu Root were the two ablest Secretaries of State we have produced...

...the First World War is nearly finished in our books...

...and I have no inclination to do so.' Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them...

...All that nonsense lies in the past...

...But even Churchill was obviously limited in his account by his statesman's sense of responsibility...

...Charles Francis Adams, are here described in careful detail...

...Of course, this great work will probably infuriate writers of the extreme Left and Right...

...This reviewer believes that this history should have stopped with Pearl Harbor and Britain's immediate declaration of war on Japan...

...Nor will this book appeal to the isolationist propagandists of the 1930s like John T. Flynn and Walter Millis, whose Road to War helped to blind the American people to the clear-cut causes of America's entry into the First World War and...

...Chief personal credit for this statesmanlike result was due to one of the ablest Prime Ministers in Canadian history, Arthur Meighen, who at the Imperial Conference of 1920 had singlehandedly won over the other Commonwealth prime ministers to his policy of terminating the alliance...

...I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or country.'" The Trent Affair, the Alabama Claims, the inspired wisdom of Lincoln, the growing statesmanship of Seward, the superb diplomatic skill of our minister...

...Professor Allen's account of that magnificent and melancholy era, from the standpoint of Anglo-American relations, has not been equaled...

...The development of the Anglo-American partnership was helped by the Washington Arms Conference of 1921, resulting in the termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which, though never a menace, had been a serious embarrassment in British-American affairs...

...During our Civil War...

...Partnerships have their stresses and strains, their trials and tribulations...

...is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you...

...The future lies ahead of Britain and America, dangerous but inspiring...

...The principal reason was that the moral issue of slavery was not clear...

...Incidentally, it would have been helpful for American readers if the author had mentioned the fact that although the British "burned Washington" in 1814, our soldiers had burned Toronto the year before...

...American imperialism," has replaced "British imperialism"--to our chagrin or rueful amusement...

...How that partnership has since succeeded, with a surprising minimum of friction, could well be the subject of a less definitive but highly entertaining and useful book...

...Britain's cool common sense saved that situation, but Mr...

...at first, to the issues at stake in the Second...

...We Americans can read about that period of our foreign affairs with well-founded pride...

...Not until the days of Churchill's ascendancy was British statesmanship so masterly in the day-to-day relationships with America and so steady in its vision of what the Anglo-American partnership meant to both Britain and the world...

...The events and personalities of the years since December 7, 1941 are too immediate, too controversial for definitive treatment even by a historian of Professor Allen's obvious impartiality...

...Unlike our Civil War...

...This is an immense labor of love by a scrupulous scholar who confesses and reveals his bias--"a warm affection for the American people...

...The greater part of the book, based on American history, is a broad survey and thorough analysis of the relations between our two countries from the Revolution to our own day...

...The period in Anglo-American relations from 1898 to 1907--including the Spanish, Boer and Philippine wars, the Open Door policy, the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, the Alaskan boundary dispute, the Venezuelan claims, the Anglo-Japanese alliance, the Hague peace conferences, the growing threat of German military aggression, the emergence of America as an active world power--has been definitely treated in Gelber's classic study...

...Then came the frustrating period from 1921 to 1939, marked on both sides by an extraordinary lack of vision and magnanimity and plain common sense...