CONFESSIONS OF AN ANGLOPHILEPHOBE

...And if England, and Russia too, are each going to make a nationally selfish play for tremendous postwar stakes, I don't want to see this country, blinded by its homegrown Anglophiles, bluffed out or cozened out...

...It is the Anglophiles—and to a far lesser extent and far less effectively, the Russophiles—who are trying to steer us in that direction...

...The first assignment given me was to cover a cricket match—it's never, never a game in cricket, it's a match—that afternoon...

...I, was badly bewildered and even more bored and, to top it off, I almost got kicked out of the News competition when, in writing up what seemed to me an extremely silly business, I called a "boundary" a home-run...

...I know tnat Great Britain is our ally...

...But this nation simply cannot afford to be the lone big altruist, the lone big internationalist, the lone big sucker of the postwar world...

...In short, if I may coin a tongue-twister, I was an Anglophilephobe...

...I know that both nations share the common ideal of wanting victory to be followed by something resembling permanent peace on earth...

...They are doing far more dangerous things than are the women's-club women who bolster their own morale and give themselves a pleasant sense of social kinship with England by knitting for British War Relief—for all that the wool coming over and the sweaters going back take up precious tonnage...

...I want to see us lick the other fellows at their own little economic game...

...America Can't Afford It But I am not an Englishman...

...For the Anglophiles are not restricted to the cricket-players and the knitters...

...If I were an Englishman, I might even go along with the British treatment of India and the pregnant British silence about Hong Kong and Malaya and Singapore—for against the danger to all the United Nations in their consequent loss of Far Eastern confidence and good-will, I should have to balance the value to Britain of retaining or regarding the richest chunks of the old Empire...

...But indubitably and unblinkingly, I'm an Anglophilephobe...

...The immensely powerful financial group at the bottom of Manhattan is Anglophile to its Morganatic core...

...It is an influence devoted toward unquestioning and almost automatic acceptance of whatever the British want, say, or do...

...In the first place, Haverford, being the only college in the U. S. with a cricket team, held the intercollegiate championship and was not going to give it up by default...

...And in official circles in Washington, assisting and advising in the formulation of national policy, the Anglophiles, headed by Harry Hopkins and by the most egregious Anglophile of all, Felix Frankfurter, hold almost unmitigated sway...

...Among the publishers of important and influential Eastern newspapers, Anglophiles predominate...

...For the remainder of what might loosely be called my college career, I indulged in an idle-hour crusade to get cricket abolished, at least as a major sport...

...If British—and Russian—policy and plans were being directed today toward a true and honest internationalism, concerned with the welfare of all the peoples on earth and carrying no we-eome-first overtones, the United States might well and willingly head up the whole crusade...

...There is...

...If I were an Englishman, I should support the sudden British suggestion that airfields leased for SO years by Britain to the United States had been leased only for military, not commercial, purposes and that airfields all around the world built by Americans witte American materials paid for by American monejs should of course be open to British commercial uses after the war...

...If I were an Englishman, I should have agreed with Winston Churchill that the big invasion ought to come, not cross-Channel, but up from the Near East through the Balkans—for I should see that, thus, British troops might stake the Empire's claims to certain rich oil fields before the Russian army beats them to it...

...It wasn't the English I resented but the Anglophiles...

...Thus strategically situated, the Anglophiles wield an influence out of all proportion to their numerical strength in the nation...

...Other Ends In Mind In the cosy little literary world of book and magazine writers and editors, the Anglophiles are rampant...

...I happen, by the sheerest good luck, to be an American...

...What I minded was that adulatory attitude in Americans which made them want to ape the English, which led them indiscriminately and unnaturally to accept English ideals and adopt English ways...

...Perhaps now you see where I'm heading and perhaps you begin to smell that there's a moral behind ail this rambling reminiscence...

...What 'Anglophilephobe' Means But my crusade never got half-way down the crease, much less to first base...

...I know that Britain and the United States are joined together in the primary and immediate common task of defeating Nazi Germany and militarist Japan...

...Nor should I be bothered by the inconsistency of wanting monopoly in chemicals and competition in airways...

...But that is not the whole story...

...there'd been a couple of fellows out there that afternoon whose occasional catches indicated they might make fair-to-middling utility outfielders for the baseball team, and I hated to see talent wasted...

...A kindly upper-classman did his best to explain to me something about "overs" and "leg before wicket" and "the slips" but it was all Oxford English to me...

...In fact, I'm tempted to say of those Americans who habitually bow to the British in awe, tt» reverence, and in disregard of the present and future welfare of their own country: Let 'em go back where they wish they came from...

...If I were an Englishman I daresay I should applaud my country's efforts to achieve these nationally selfish ends...

...And suppose I set one point straight right here and now...

...If I were an Englishman, I should approve official British temerity in urging repeal or relaxation of the U. S. anti-trust laws—for I should recognize the postwar threat of unbridled and enterprising American competition to the domination of world markets by British-owned or British-run cartels...

...For Britain has other ends in mind than victory and peace...

...Mind you, I'm still no Anglophobe...

...If I were an Englishman...

...But far more significantly, a very vocal minority at Haverford was determined to stick to the good old English tradition...

...The English tradition was that gentlemen played cricket...

...If I were an Englishman, I should back the British insistence on British agents to make United Nations purchases in South America with U. S. Lend-Lease money—for I should know who then would get the credit, and along with it a headstart toward the South American business after the war...

...But I wasn't an Anglophobe at all...

...I still like the English fine, and I admire extravagantly the shrewdness and the industry with which they are looking out for their own national interests...

...If one of the present editors of, say, the New York Herald-Tribune had been a college-mate of mine, I'd doubtless have been branded an Anglophobe, provided he knew the word that early...

...Those ends have to do with the preservation, restoration, and possible enlargement of the prewar British Empire—and with furthering the postwar economic welfare of Great Britain, not merely in concert with the welfare of other nations but also at the expense of the welfare of other nations, including the United States...

...It is an influence used bitterly and often with arrogant anger against any American who dares honestly to wonder whether certain British war and postwar policies and plans may not be inimical to the interests and the welfare of the United States...

...I liked the English fine and it didn't matter two pinstripes to me if they wanted to play all the cricket they pleased...

...This time, it's not cricket...

...In that direction lie danger and possible disaster...

...The college was Haverford (hello there, Felix Morley and William Henry Chamberlin, my lads) and it happened like this: In the sweet-smelling Spring of my freshman year, some vague stirring of journalistic ambition prompted me to go out for the News...

...I still am...

...it's not even a gentleman's game...

...I went out and sat in the sun for three or four hours while alternate bowlers did their awkward stiff-armed bowling and a procession of batsmen with bats as broad as barndoors ran awkwardly back and forth encumbered by leg-guards and everybody else stood around looking pretty and useless in white flannels...

...Unfortunately, the Anglophiles who dot our Eastern sea-board are doing far more dangerous things these days than playing cricket...