From The Phoney Victory (Peter Hitchens, 2019) pp102-3
Churchill can have had few illusions about the USA, being more familiar with that country than most British politicians. He would have known that much of its population was indifferent to Britain’s fate, that many – especially Irish-Americans and German-Americans were actively hostile to Britain.
This truth had been partly tested in the last prewar summer by the strange visit of King George VI and his queen to Canada and the USA. Both Roosevelt and the Chamberlain government (and the Canadian premier, Mackenzie King) felt that something needed to be done to improve relations between the two great English-speaking naval powers. No doubt they envisaged a watering-down of the Neutrality Acts, which blocked American military aid to Britain. They sought the lessening of the resentment many Americans felt over Britain’s behaviour in the Great War, and its default on its debts afterwards. Millions of Americans still believed that cynical propaganda had lured the USA into a war that was none of its business in 1917. None of them, at the time, could have guessed that within a year of the royal visit, France would have fallen and Britain would have ceased to be an arrogant imperial rival and become a supplicant.
In the autumn of 1938, when the royal visit was officially announced, the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane) broadcast on the ABC radio network about England’s ‘selfishness’ and ‘perfidy’. He accused the British of pouring soft soap over the head, ears and eyes of Uncle Sam, ‘who is so sought after when needed and so scoffed at in the intervening times’.‘ In a Senate debate in January 1939, Senator Robert Rice Reynolds spoke of the king and queen coming to the USA to ‘curry favour with the United States, all of them on bended knee, if not literally so, figuratively so, for the purpose of asking the United States, the people of America, again to save them’. Senator Reynolds was the sort of man who we would now call an ‘isolationist’. But presumably he viewed himself as an American patriot defending his country’s interest and following George Washington’s policy of avoiding foreign entanglements. He used the same speech to complain that Britain and France did not recognise America’s part in winning the Great War, and refused to admit they owed money to the USA. This was not, at the time, a particularly unusual or fringe opinion on Capitol Hill. Nor was it unusual in the USA as a whole, especially in the Midwest and among Irish-Americans and German-Americans. In a 1937 Gallup poll, 70 per cent of Americans said they thought it had been a mistake for the USA to enter the Great War. This was not just a sentiment among the poor and ill-educated. Ernest Hemingway had written in 1935 , ‘We were fools to be sucked in once in a European war, and we shall never be sucked in again.’ In September 1939, posters were observed in Chicago bearing the words ‘Beware the British Serpent! Once more a boa constrictor “Perfidious Albion” is crawling across the American landscape, spewing forth its unctuous lies.’ The royal visit, when it came, was highly successful within reasonable limits not least because the young king and queen democratically did eat hot dogs at a picnic at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home on the Hudson River. The informal meal (even though the queen used a knife and fork) dispelled some of the resentment at British snobbery and aloofness felt by so many Americans. But it still did not lead to an immediate conversion of President Roosevelt or the American people to the cause of helping Britain. The king and queen were a pleasant young couple, but that did not mean that Americans, with their own concerns and their faint, amused scorn for what they saw as Britain’s archaic form of government, were prepared to die, or even spend hard cash, for Britain’s sake. Roosevelt must also have been greatly struck by the king’s remarks to him, in late-night conversations, about Winston Churchill. These were recorded by Canada’s Mackenzie King (who himself regarded Churchill as ‘one of the most dangerous men I have ever known’). George VI told the president that he very much held the Gallipoli disaster against Churchill, and would not wish to appoint him to any high office “unless it was absolutely necessary in time of war”.
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