LETTERS TO TI
DITOR
[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as bri are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym, al name and address of the author, which will be treated
sonably possible. Signed letters r must be accompanied by the intial.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR]
ISOLATIONIST AMERICA
Sta,—With every month that the war is being protracted, I notice an increasing asperity in the tone of the English periodicals and newspapers towards the United States. They are harshly impatient with America and Americans for the following reasons (so far as I can gather): t. They are sc purblind that they cannot see that England and France are fighting their battle.
2. Their superficialness of character makes them confuse the issues at stake, disables them from squarely facing realities, and throws them back upon their own fetish of isolation, which they hysterically idolise.
3. Having shown that they are too mean-spirited to do the right thing in the fight which the democracies of England and France are waging against totalitarianism, they should at least have the elemental decency to keep their mouths shut and not bellow out their opinions as to the conduct of the war, or offer their insulting and gratuitous advice, or send emissaries to go poking about in affairs which definitely do not concern them.
The Americans have no desire to gainsay these notions. In fact, most of them are blissfully unaware of them, evincing little or no interest in the judgements which foreign nations may opine about them. So little do they care for the good opinion of others that, unlike other peoples, they never put their best foot forward in the outside world, shooting motion pictures and books, showing their corruption, perversion, gangland excesses, political chicanery and general rottenness, in a constant stream, which they have been doing now for a good many years. If the rest of this planet think that the United States is a country largely inhabited by racketeers, 'crooked politicians and promiscuous females, why, that's O.K. with the Americans. It's not because the Americans clad themselves in the armour of national superiority (which, by the way, is something that the English never do), that they do not feel the prods of foreign calumny; they just don't give a damn. You're entitled to your opinion, mister, and I'm entitled to mine; and, by the way, how do you think the baseball season is going to come out?
It is a fact that people will not fight for abstractions; they must have something their senses can grasp. You say that you are fighting for democracy. That is a pretty abstract word. Just exactly what do you mean by democracy? If what you mean by democracy was the system practised in England just before the war, you will find many here in America who will dissent to your use of the term. I, as an American, do not consider equal justice for all as denoting democracy, rr even equable political representation. Demo- cracy must stand on a different basis than something which is grudgingly given by a conciliatory upper class to classes which are hard pressing it. Democracy must stand on the ground of the most common and least privileged of the people composing a country. It first must be of the people before it can be by or for it. Therefore you do not touch us when you say that you are fighting for democracy. You are not fighting for our kind of democracy.
Neither are we relations that are being untrue to their san- guine and spiritual affiliations. If we are relations at all, it is only illegitimately. The institutions of this country are Anglo-Saxon in so far as they were established by men of English blood, but their views were not the views prevailing in the England of Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke; in fact, they were in the minority on this side of the Atlantic, and had to force their way of life on the majority. The War of Independence was not only a rebellion against the authority of the English Crown, but it was a civil war as well. Those loyalists that did not want the American way of life migrated to Canada, whose English-speaking parts, together with New Zealand and Australia, are the direct descendants of the British polity. The Americans and the English have different customs, different laws and legal procedures, different educa- tional systems, different forms of government and different systems of society. And even their spoken languages are hardl An American, although living near the Cana, , will be conscious that he is in a different
cultur r., ,ient almost the . moment he steps into Canada. Observe how a Canadian spends his Sundays and how an American spends his; how a Canadian regards his peace officer, and how an American regards his.
Moreover, of what special affinity can this country be to England, or the English point of view, when we take into account the 14,000,000 negroes, the 20,000,000 people of Ger- manic blood, the 6,000,000 Italians, the 5,000,000 Jews (of whom I am one), the millions of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hun- garians, Croatians, Irish, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Mexi- cans, Greeks, Albanians, Finns, Russians, besides Japanese, Chinese and Filipines; not to mention the Indians, who, Mr. Nicolson to the .contrary, are increasing in numbers. If this country had had the English outlook all along, all these people mentioned could not be here now; instead of a policy welcoming the oppressed of all nations, there would have been a policy of exclusion, similar to that practised in Aus- tralia; instead of 132,000,000 people, there would be at the most 5o,000,000, living in an undeveloped continent.
We are not your blood brothers and your ways are not our ways. Your democracy is not our democracy, and we will not fight to help you preserve it. Should the time come, and we hope it won't, when we will be the only opponent to totalitarianism, we feel confident that we can maintain our way of life come what may. Being Americans, and hating abstractions, the various recondite arguments set forth by the contestants confuse us and irritate us. We know that England and France are fighting for something worth-while, but it- is not for democracy or the rights of man, because we sincerely believe that you never had them and hardly know
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