On racialists and snobs
TABLE TALK,
DENIS BROGAN
Princeton and Washington—Opposing all my principles of dinner conversation, last Saturday evening at dinner I launched an attack on the American attitude to Negroes, crime, etc, etc. There was some good-natured protest, but I went on till a distinguished Young scientist asked me, 'You've solved all your race problems in Britain,! presume?' I was silenced and rebuked and I admitted, rapidly, that we had our own problems and that we were handling them badly. What the young scientist would have said if he had had the chance to read the speeCh of the Right Honourable Enoch Powell or seen the revealing picture printed by The Times of Mr and Mrs Powell leaving an Anglican church in Wolverhampton after having taken communion, depends on whether his taste for irony is greater than his probable disgust at the double treason of the clerk and of the ostentatious Christian.
It will hardly be asserted, except by the most brazen and most stupid (both adjectives do not always apply, although the correlation is high), that at a time when our world and local posi- tion is low, what we need is people like_ Mr Powell. I agree with The Times that the speech was evil and it was important because Mr Powell is an open candidate for the Conserva- tive leadership and there can be no doubt that he will get a lot of support. And it is the support that matters. For in a snobbish country like England, even the most bigoted Tory, even what Bernanos called ?es petits mufles realistes,' need a more respectable leader than Sir Gerald Nabarro (after all Nabarro is not a deeply rooted Midlands name; neither, for that matter, is Powell).
Thus it doesn't matter very much that a programme that recalls Hitler's before 1939 is preached in the Sunday Telegraph by Mr Pere- grine Worsthorne. It is another matter when we come to Mr Powell. It may be true that Mr Powell and ex-Govemor Wallace of Alabama have much in common: but Mr Powell Is an intellectual snob (a snobbery not always justifiable as a recent very ill-informed article on the United States shows). He would not be at home in Montgomery,- Alabama, although the capitol there has admirable Empire furniture which (I may be wrong) is not likely to be equalled in Wolverhampton. I don't know much about Wolverhampton; I have visited it twice. I remember the statue to the first Metho- dist to become a Cabinet Minister and a peer (Lord Wolverhampton's motto, I believe, was `capital and labour hand in hand').
During the war, I met Michael Arlen there. He was on some public relations for the govern- ment; so I suspect was I. We were both depayse. Michael Arlen was much more at home when I next met him in the King Cole Bar of the St Regis in New York. But I knew more about the spiritual atmosphere of the once radical city of Wolverhampton than Arlen did or than Mr Powell chooses to remember. For I had read some of the admirable Methodist novels of that first Lord Wolverhampton's daughter, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, and so understood, from the outside, that English Nonconformity with which, I believe, Mr Powell has ancestral connections. What his spiritual ancestors would have thought of his present role is worth thinking about.
Of course, Mr Powell denies making a racist speech, although since one of the merits of a classical education (a case that has to be argued harder and harder when we contemplate some of its beneficiaries) is exactness in the use of words, one wonders what Mr Powell wou/d call `racist'? To find a high Tory repeating all the pathological stories of his most embittered and one hopes stupidest constituents, is an alarming sign for a country that has so many troubles.
There is a case, towards which Mr Worst- home was clumsily groping, for saying that the burden of adjusting to the immigrants falls mainly on the poor and ill-educated. Mr Joseph Kraft, a large number of light-years above Mr Worsthorne intellectually and, indeed, in rele- vant knowledge a good deal above Mr Powell, has painted out in the Washington Post that it is the poor whites, climbing slowly after the wAsPs, who most resent the efforts of the Negroes to climb after them. Most of the police- who have to deal with riots and arson and mere dumb insolence from 'the Niggers' are badly paid, badly trained, and of recent immigrant stock. A generation ago, the Italians of Newark near which I am living, were treated with almost as much scorn as the blacks are now. (Mr Worsthorne might remember that many of the charges brought against the Negroes of Wolver- hampton were brought against the Italian brick- layers of Bedford who were noisy, musical, not soaked in Midland stodge—and were hard workers.) And in a brief visit to Australia, I was again and again forced to listen to the com- plaints of British immigrants that they had to compete on equal terms with foreigners (Italians, Greeks, Dutch). I remember asking a very prominent Australian journalist was it true that the Pommies were very unpopular? 'Yes; but the rabbits are the real pest.'
The poor whites of the United States know that their liberal lecturers don't have and don't expect to have Negro neighbours; nor do they, a thought for some prominent enemies of the Negroes, want or tolerate Jewish neighbours either. The poison that Mr Powell spreads can work faster- in the veins of the body politic than, possibly, he thinks. In a way, his candour has some advantages. Whether he was planning a go/pe or merely issuing a pronunciamiento I don't know (I put in the Spanish out of snob- bery, for Mr Powell's benefit). The boldness— and odiousness—of Mr Powell's outburst have enabled Mr Heath and Mr Hogg to see where the passion for party union, and the desire to cultivate that branch of the Tory party whose record of bigotry stinks, might lead them. The argument that laws cannot change men's hearts was the excuse for the refusal of President Eisenhower to do his normal duty in his eight years in office, a complacent neglect for which the United States is now bitterly paying and which may result in President Eisenhower going down in American history as another President Buchanan, not another President Grant. Laws can do a lot to change habits and changed habits often change hearts. That great philosophical historian, Elie Haldvy, more than once reminded us that 'hypocrisy is a real homage paid to virtue. Many a man has become a good man by a lifetime of hypocrisy.'
Despite the riots and the murders, the posi- tion of the American Negro, except in the very deep South, is better and promising. It is because the promises are not being kept that there is danger of a Spartacus rising. If, with the American lesson before us, we adopt either the buckpassing of the orthodox leadership or the open appeal to race hatred of Mr Powell, we shall deserve what we shall get. And to show that I am not merely an anti-Tory (I am a Liberal who regrets the better days of Liberal Wolverhampton), I admit that I had a good deal of Schadenfreude when I read that a group of dockers, strongly supporting Mr Powell, had called on their member. Mr Ian Mikardo. There was rough -justice in this demonstration of the failure of the Labour party, and especially of such devotees of the eastward position as Mr Mikardo, to keep alive the better traditions of the radical past
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