Advantages of an Archaic Ox-Cart
BROGAN, D. W.
Advantages of an Archaic Ox-Cart AMERICA IN BRITAIN'S PLACE By Lionel Gelber Praeger. 356 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by D. W. BROGAN Professor of Political Science, Cambridge University;...
...there is not a dull page and there are many valuable insights...
...He is lucid in mind and expression...
...has far greater resources than Britain had and has spent them lavishly, in blood as well as treasure...
...The U.S...
...The only "par" of the U.S...
...Then, too, Gelber did not foresee the necessary turning of Great Britain to "Europe," now an accomplished fact, which makes much of his argument meaningless...
...its bluff could be called—as it was by Bismarck in 1864...
...in his discussion of American politics, he is astonishingly academic, in the worst sense of the word...
...when he sees that the Emperor has no clothes, he says so...
...Thus he notes that the high moral superiority of Jawaharlal Nehru as he contemplates the wicked world of power politics (Kashmir and Goa excluded from the discussion by definition), is nearly identical with the attitude of moralistic isolationist Americans before Pearl Harbor...
...Gelber has a delightfully acid point to his pen, an enviable power of seeing where certain parallels lie...
...It would be possible to list a dozen examples of Gelber's remote and ill-informed superiority and mere censoriousness...
...Gelber also laments the fact that American office-holders can have their careers cut short by a change of administration and may never return to office...
...True, Britain was once the richest country and the greatest naval power, though its supremacy on the seas was never as indisputable as is that of America at present...
...There has been exactly one case in this century of a government with a regular party majority in the House of Commons being forced to resign after a bad division...
...But, Britain was never the kind of "leader" that the United States finds itself, willy-nilly, today...
...He does not bother to ask himself how so badly governed a country as the United States manages to exist at all, much less why it has become the great power on which our basic freedom depends...
...And that incident took place, moreover, during the dreadful crisis of May 1940, when the majority of the members of the House of Commons supported the Chamberlain government...
...At most, Britain was primus inter pares...
...Because Gelber refuses to see this difference in scale, his judgements about the U.S...
...are often unfair...
...The old British insular position has been reversed for good...
...In some ways, Nehru and the late John Foster Dulles were brothers under the skin...
...He resists—and resents—the acceptance by Americans of all the stale anticolonial, anti-imperialist cliches...
...today is the Soviet Union...
...With some of these criticisms—the attack on the locality rule, for example—I have full sympathy...
...he is totally independent of current fashion...
...He makes much of the fact that an American President cannot be forced to resign when something goes badly...
...Prime Minister Macmillan is not so lucky...
...This is at best a half-truth...
...Nor does he mention the advantages of a system that allows President Kennedy to retain the services of a Republican such as Douglas Dillon, who is now Secretary of the Treasury...
...Adlai E. Stevenson, Thomas K. Finletter, Averell Harriman and Paul Nitze, to name only a few, are back in important positions...
...Not only does Gelber seem ungenerous...
...And he is overwhelmingly interested in one problem: effective power in the troubled and dangerous modern world...
...What is more, Gelber ignores the other side of the coin, the facilities which the American system offers for bringing non-political figures like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara into high executive office...
...Although Gelber sets out to deal with a very important problem—the substitution of the United States for Great Britain as the moderator of the world—there is a fundamental flaw in his argument: The U.S.' present role is not simply that of being to the second half of the 20th century what Britain was from Waterloo until 1914...
...Where does Gelber get this stuff...
...Whether nationalist movements produce good results in terms of ordinary human happiness naturally depends upon individual cases...
...All these virtues are manifest in his latest book, America in Britain's Place: The Leadership of the West and Anglo-American Unity...
...We are asked to contrast this with a mythical British system in which, when things go wrong, a vigilant House of Commons overthrows the government or forces a general election...
...he is limited to choosing from among Conservative members of Parliament—a fact that fills me with less than uproarious enthusiasm...
...There is a constant forced contrast between the almost ideal British (and, by inference, Canadian) system and the archaic ox-cart of the American system...
...But Gelber allows the American system no merit whatever...
...It is the United States, after all, that has retained the draft in peacetime, a burden which Canada and now Great Britain have shamefully dodged...
...Since 1945, America has been bearing a heavier burden than Britain bore in the period 18151914...
...This is also a very disappointing book...
...More than once Gelber talks of Britain as having been the "leader" of Europe and of having established almost single-handedly a pax Britannica that worked to the general good of what we now call the "free world" (at times, Gelber simply says "the world...
...If Dean Acheson is not, it is only because he did not so choose...
...And yet, and yet...
...He has again trotted out all the obsolete themes of not very good political science textbooks on the superiority of the British Parliamentary system over the Presidential system...
...Gelber's criticisms range from the U.S.' method of choosing its Presidents and its refusal to use them when they have retired from office, to the separation of powers and the unideological party system...
...This is a book well worth reading and pondering...
...Finally, in the section devoted to the Suez crisis Gelber has swallowed whole the tale told by Sir Anthony Eden in Full Circle, a book which reveals more about the Earl of Avon than about the Suez problem...
...From Gelber's analysis no reader would gather that, on the whole, Washington's policy since the end of World War II has been generous, bold and successful, as a look at Western Europe today proves...
...But it was not a serious military power...
...author, "The American Character," "Politics in America" Lionel Gelber is one of my favorite political writers...
...He knows that all one can really say about nationalism in general is that it is a protest against foreign rule and that such protest may be premature (the Congo mess does not surprise him...
...Robert Oppenheimer...
...Going against current liberal opinion, Gelber challenges the immunity from criticism of such figures as Dr...
Vol. 45 • February 1962 • No. 3
