BRITAIN LOOKS TO AMERICA
Hesseltine, William B.
Britain Looks To America By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE London FIRST and strongest of the impressions the stranger from America gets in England is the extent and depth of American influence on the life...
...They have pointed with a superior air to their history, and to their traditions...
...She may, it is true, ignore Churchill's warnings and make the old structure over into a newmode Kremlin, but in doing so many of the children will thirife she is building a modernistic American dwelling, complete with chromium-plated breakfast nooks...
...And Labor won...
...But the first thought of the victorious party was of America...
...Through the GFs, American ideas, American customs, American ways of doing things have made a tremendous impact upon the British...
...The cinema houses show American pictures, and the youth of the land dream dreams of Hollywoodish houses, American gadgetry, and, above all, American automobiles...
...The General's lady, showing Americans through her monstrous' mansion, bemoans the Englishman's unprogressiveness in heating facilities...
...The GI's, Lend-Lease, the movies, and the big trucks thundering along the left hand side of the narrow roads have profoundly affected the grandmother country...
...The boys have talked of their homelands in tones of nostalgia and words of romance...
...HOWEVER much this definition of the TVA—or of Americanism—may have astounded Americans, it illustrated anew the tremendous hold which America has on the British imagination...
...It has not yet been metamorphosed into a filling station smelling of gasoline, dioxide, and decaying rubber...
...But nowhere has the American influence been better illustrated than in the recent elections...
...The orators in Hyde Park dwelt long on the American diet, on American automobiles, and American standards of living, and promised that Stalinist means could achieve American ends...
...No sooner were the votes counted than Laski, whose position in Labor's councils depends, in large part, on his supposed influence in the United States, rushed to the microphones to give Americans a preview of Labor's coming attractions...
...The street kiosks are hideously Victorian, the churches are pre-reformation, and the only modern buildings in sight are bomb shelters—mostly modeled after Neanderthal mansions...
...For years they have discounted American tourists as boasters, and they have dismissed American business men as sordid money-grubbers...
...Both Tory and Labor parties attempted, in the campaign, to identify themselves with America...
...They have made serious, and generally successful, efforts to enlist articulate Americans—journalists and scholars—in support of things British, but they have ignored most Americans and most American things...
...They have seen the American Army, American machines, and American airplanes...
...In this land where the base pay of locomotive engineers is 18 dollars a week, American wages seem indeed utopian...
...That 'central principle,' said Laski, was "Planned production, by the State, for community consumption...
...But the war and the American invasion have brought a change in attitude...
...The surroundings are redolent with reminiscences of the 19th Century...
...ONE of the evidences that the grandmother country is undergoing a change of attitude is the tone of deprecating apology the stranger from America meets on every hand...
...The village blacksmith shop is still a blacksmith's shop with its mingled odors of coal gas, hot iron, and scorched hooves...
...For four years the United Kingdom has swarmed with GFs—three and a half million of them— and dire necessity has combined with gratitude to force the reticent Britons to welcome the boys from the United States...
...And all this, implied Professor Laski, was only applying the central principle of the TVA to England...
...Visiting England is, for all the world, like visiting Grandma, and a mood of remembrance quickly envelops the stranger...
...Churchill and the Tories laid claim to having brought Roosevelt's America into Armageddon, to having brought Lend-Lease and the GI's into the Empire's battles, and to having a pipeline to Washington...
...They have seen American wealth in all of war's prodigality...
...She dug in an old trunk for her wedding gown, for the piece of fine old lace she had never used, and for the yellowed program of a forgotten drama...
...First would be the Bank of England...
...A guidebook for GFs in London apologises, over the Lord Mayor's signature, "for the lack of amusements, for the popular poverty, and for the scarcity of modern conveniences...
...Mother Country," of course,, is a historically accurate designation, but "Grandmother Country" would be more correct psychologically...
...Would the United States believe that Churchill was right when he charged that Harold Laski, and all the idealogues of the Labor Party, were stooges of Stalin...
...The grocery clerk's wife, who once lived in America, passes quickly from apology to denunciation as she contemplates her lowly position in the English aristocratic social system...
...The plumbing dates from 1890—when not from 45 B.C.—and the heating from the Middle Ages...
...Stimulated by the Americans, Grandma has decided to modernize the house...
...Britain Looks To America By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE London FIRST and strongest of the impressions the stranger from America gets in England is the extent and depth of American influence on the life of the mother country...
...Would the United States continue, through Lend-Lease, to underwrite the British government...
...Labor promised American progress, and the Stalinists among them were the loudest in identifying themselves with the United States...
...We are not going to touch any little man's savings...
...BUT under this musty exterior, there is much evidence that the grandmother country is yielding to new influences...
...They have been impressed by the pay scale of the American soldier, and by the wage scale of the American worker...
...But, since the American invasion, the tone is changing to one of apology...
...The British people have been impressed by American power...
...Despite the Tories' agonized warnings that nationalization of mines and the socialization, of industry were Russian rather than American ideas, the people voted for Labor...
...In Grandma's house the heating arrangements were obsolete, and the old lady sat wrapped in a shawl, shivering in a half-heated room...
...They have courted English girls by the millions and married them by the thousands...
...Four years of propinquity and promiscuity have altered the racial stock of the United Kingdom...
...Through the years, the British have been arrogant and smug in their dealings with outlanders...
...Labor, on the other hand, made promises to rebuild England's houses on American models, to remake the social system on the American plan, and to pay American wages...
...Grandma lived in a house whose plumbing was antiquated and inadequate...
...Then there would be industrial reorganization...
...In plain fact, the English have been impressed...
...Investments, under control, would go into houses and schools...
...to the ancient cathedrals and the spires of Oxford: and they have justified their conservative business methods, their narrow, crooked roads, and even their plumbing on the grounds of antiquity...
...But, step by step, said the prophet, Labor would socialize the instruments of production...
...She kept mementoes of her youth, and insisted on showing them to grandchildren who were never quite able to imagine the days when Grandmother was a girl...
...We are not expropriators of anybody's property," he assured the United States...
...England is a grandmother country, wrapped in a woolen shawl and remembering tales of the old families who used to live in the neighborhood...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 39
