In 1890, a group of American Shakespeare lovers gathered in New York’s Central Park intent upon releasing all the species of birds mentioned in the Bard’s plays that were not already native to America. Since Shakespeare mentions ostriches and peacocks, among over 50 other species, it must have been quite a sight. One of the birds introduced to this country was the ravenous English starling, which quickly deposed the New York state bird, the eastern bluebird, from its nesting places.
Hitchens, who has a keen eye for historical oddities and cultural ironies, documents America’s vacillating attitude toward Britain from the revolution to the present. After the revolution, there was much debate on what the official language of the newly liberated colonies would be. One suggestion was Hebrew, another Greek. A delegate to the Continental Congress quipped that “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek.” Hitchens notes that as “late as 1795, the House of Representatives narrowly defeated a motion that all its documents and proceedings be printed also in German. The tie vote was cast by the Speaker, one Friedrich Muhlenberg.”
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These early efforts to dilute the influence of the English language were, of course, unsuccessful. And as America grew up, it often turned to Britain for definitions of culture and style. We see Anglophilia today in everything from bogus English pubs in chain hotels to Masterpiece Theatre. These evocations of Englishness, Hitchens points out, are all rooted in the England of the past: “The cult of something at once vanished and superseded is secure against any too abrupt swing in fashion. It is reliable and time-tested.” Hitchens’s chapters on Anglophilia, or what he calls “Brit kitsch,” are mildly amusing but not very original. He really builds up some Anglophobic steam, however, when he turns to the many times Britain has succeeded in drawing America into battles the English themselves no longer wanted to fight. England “seduced” America into protecting many of its old colonial possessions, he contends, often in the name of squashing the evil influence of communism.
This famous slogan was the rallying cry for future British-American cooperation in the economic exploitation of China. “The British would dictate terms to the Chinese,” explains Hitchens, “and incur their detestation for the drug trade. The United States would act as a junior partner, at once more scrupulous and less implicated.” Britain was the skilled teacher and the United States its willing pupil, learning fast the ways of economic expansionism and the persuasive power of the gun.
And check the show of pride;
Kipling’s references to the “savage wars of peace” and calls for “freedom” to “cloak your weariness” come chillingly close to the “peace through strength” rhetoric of the Reagan years.
Hitchens also recounts a largely forgotten piece of military history: the fact that in 1919 British and American troops both fought against the Bolsheviks in Russia. That action was preeminently the idea of Winston Churchill, clearly in Hitchens’s mind the chief villain in the often sordid alliance between Britain and America. Although Woodrow Wilson was squeamish about intervening in Russia, after intense British lobbying he promised that the United States would aid the white general Aleksei Kaledin. The expedition was a military fiasco. But the episode marked the first time America–with Britain’s prodding–pronounced communism an enemy. “In the fighting of undeclared wars against godless Communism,” writes Hitchens, “Winston Churchill was America’s mentor almost thirty years before his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech.”
