Passing the White Man's Burden

...In 1898 the pattern changed...

...Within a few years, argues Hitchens—and Powell would surely agree—the special relationship was merely " a poor relation's reverie of staying on terms, of exerting an uplifting influence...

...For it will truly "be a splendid thing if, showing that countries can after all learn from history, the United States decided to become less Roman, and the British decided to become more Greek, and both rediscovered republican virtues in a world without dogma...

...Writers & Writing PASSING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN BY ROGER DRAPER I? fall 1943, at the emotional apogee of the U.S.-British friendship, Harold Macmillan was in North Africa as Winston Churchill's representative at Allied Headquarters...

...Whatever " at bottom" may mean, Hitchens is wrong: Notallof the conservative ideas were British—we certainly contributed our share to the racism—and not all of the ideas were accepted solely by conservatives...

...Morgan's gold, had suckered us into the trenches...

...No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt" during World War II, he later wrote...

...warplanes on a bombing mission to Libya use their country's airfields...

...In November 1898, shortly before the Senate was to consider legislation providing for U.S...

...Churchill, one of the two political geniuses who finally overcame it, was himself the product of a special relationship between the son of an English duke and the daughter of a Manhattan real-estate speculator...

...Roosevelt sent this on to Lodge with a note suggesting that it was "rather poor poetry, but good sense...

...Confronting in Germany a powerful new rival that was, among many other things, encouraging the Afrikaners in the Boer War, it decided to head off the possibility of American support for the Orange Free State and the Transvaal by actually applaudingtheU.S...

...The early years we Americans spend learning about the Mayflower, the settlement of Virgina and so forth do seem to make us into vicarious Anglo-Saxons, and the British themselves seem to feel this: In April 1986, only they among all our NATO allies let U.S...

...while as rivals they might be ruined...

...Another obstacle to understanding Hitchens' meaning is his habit of keeping up a steady flow of irony...

...To Richard Crossman, a prominent Labor politician and writer, the future Prime Minister said: "We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American Empire...

...How, otherwise, can we account for the peculiar fact that during the Falklands War, even Italo-Americans (mostly descendants of those "multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy") supported Britain, not Argentina with its large population of Italian descent...

...government even suppressed the film The Spirit of '76, on the grounds that it would "make us a little bit slack in our loyalty to Britain in this great catastrophe...

...As one of them, Brooks Adams, wrote, the empire "in the Western tropics is disintegrating," but together the U.S...

...Washington still wanted to supersede the empire, not to rescue it...

...Still, Hitchens is right in thinking that we would be better off if we worried less about our empire and more about our republic...

...Hitchens argues that the nativist undertones of the special relationship emerged as late as our last Presidential election, when George Bush skillfully exploited "Mayflower imagery" against Michael Dukakis...

...Then we annexed Hawaii to complete the chain...

...The advocates of an adventurous foreign policy, however, sought to achieve such goals in alliance with Britain and not against it...

...Professor Woodrow Wilson, for example, pointed out that in the years prior to the 1890 census immigration had produced "an alteration of stock which students of affairs marked with uneasiness...

...True, but how important were they...

...Lodge liked the poetry, too...

...Neither is Hitchens quite clear about what he wants us to believe...

...But by 1940, as the author admits in another connection, a majority of this country's conservatives opposed Lend-Lease, so at this stage, at least, the leading Americans associated with close AngloAmerican ties were mostly liberal Democrats...

...At first it was, as Hitchens would have it, a vehicle for conservative imperial ambitions...

...During the War the U.S...

...The peace settlement gave us that archipelago as well as Guam, an island on the sea route to it...

...These fairly recent events linking the destinies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan bring me to Hitchens' basic complaint against the special relationship: It is, he thinks, "at bottom a transmission belt by which British conservative ideas have infected America, the better to be transmitted to England...

...moves in Asia...

...Thus if you don't already know the diplomatic history oftheperiod,you will find it very hard to follow in this book...

...It is beyond doubt," he says at one point, "that wherever the United States needed to lose any kind of virginity in global affairs, the British were on hand with unguents and aphrodisiacs of all kinds...

...Not so: Enoch Powell, the ex-professor of Greek who predicted that nonwhite immigration would flood Britain with "grinning pickaninnies, " has certainly neither forgiven nor forgotten our unwillingness to rescue the Raj...

...As he himself gaily tells us elsewhere in the book, "It might well be argued that the United States would have chosen empire over republic in any case...

...With their arrival, the English roots of the old majority assumed a new importance...

...When he writes, for example, of Churchill's need in 1940 "to circumvent any literal-mindedness about the Neutrality Act as it might touch British economic or military interests," shall we really conclude that he wishes the act had been more stringently enforced...

...To give merely one example, Britain's effort to improve Anglo-American relations in 1898 comes up long before any discussion of their nadir, during the Civil War...

...Now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland," Wilson noted, "men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy...

...A diplomat who later became ambassador to Washington went so far as to write one of the leading expansionists, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, to tell him "with what pleasure I see that Hawaii is at length to be annexed...

...When the Confederates seceded, a Whig-Liberal government gave them so much help—by building them a navy, for instance—that we made serious threats of war...

...These sentiments, common to both the Left and the Right, explain the strength of isolationism in the '30s...

...Indeed, we did so as late as 1895...

...I could rarely see the logic of the sequence of topics...

...Blood, Class, and Nostalgia is not easy to read, despite its being amusing and, for the most part, well-written...

...Until 1861 Whitehall systematically resisted our continental expansion...

...With our Manifest Destiny at last fulfilled, American "expansionists" looked outward, toward the Caribbean, where the last European colonies tottered invitingly...

...Especially among Americans, the hankering after what Adams called an "Anglo-Saxon coalition" had a racist side as well...

...But that will not be wholly up to us, with or without Britain...

...According to Hitchens, it "is now officially and generally forgotten that there was ever a pro-American Left or an anti-American Right in Britain...

...What we took to be our scruples regarding imperialism, resentful allies saw as the hypocrisy of our own special type of imperialism...

...The problem is that Hitchens does not provide a coherent account of his theme, the evolution of Anglo-American relations during the past century and a half...

...The courtship of Washington was, to all appearances, a success...

...Yet his management of bilateral relations was essentially a failure...

...Now,it did not...

...One manifestation of the new intimacy has become famous, even if remembered apart from the events that inspired it...

...In his new book, Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar Straus Giroux, 398 pp., $22.95), Christopher Hitchens rightly maintains that the British hoped "the growing strength of the United States could be harnessed to the existing British Empire...

...You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt...

...Although we have always had a special relationship with Britain, it has often beenahostileone, particularly during the first century of our independence...

...But the mood vanished quickly...

...Before, most Americans or their ancestors had come from Northern Europe...

...The expansionists manipulated the sympathetic McKinley Administration into supporting a Cuban revolution against Spain, which the U. S. Navy crushed by attacking its Asian fleet in the Philippines...

...Its almostforgotten subtitle was "The United States and the Philippine Islands...

...Over time the political character of the special relationship changed...

...As Hitchens correctly insists, he wanted Washington to save the empire as well as Britain...

...We must run Allied Forces Headquarters as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius...

...A new orthodoxy held that perfidious Albion, aided of course by Mr...

...Earlier, Britain might haveopposedsuchschemes...

...By 1917 we had not only overcome our traditional fear of foreign alliances, we had allied with our traditional enemy...

...Like earlier generations, most Americans preferred to supersede the imperial power, particularly in the Caribbean, not to brace it up...

...It is surely more, though...

...control of the Philippines, Rudyard Kipling dashed off to Theodore Roosevelt the celebrated doggerel extolling "The White Man's Burden...

...and Britain "could easily maintain a fleet which would make them supreme at sea...

...He draws together many kinds of sources, particularly literary ones, but he tends to arrange them thematically rather than chronologically...