Earlier generations of Englishmen had found colonial uprisings endlessly fascinating. They had pored over newspaper accounts (many written by young Churchill) and tacked pages of the Illustrated London News—depicting the Mutiny, Chinese Gordon’s Last Stand, Kitchener at Omdurman, and the expeditions relieving Boer sieges of Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking—to the walls of their homes. Challenges to the supremacy of the Union Jack had stirred their blood, and they had responded eagerly to calls to the Flag, Duty, Race, and the White Man’s Burden. In the early 1930s millions of Britons, especially the elderly, members of the upper class, and those who had reached their majority before 1914, still felt that way. But imperial enthusiasm was dwindling among the working classes and the young. They were weary of the White Man’s Burden. The new mood was caught by Aldous Huxley; to him the Raj resembled the Old Man of Thermopylae, who never did anything properly. “For some reason,” young Jock Colville wrote in his diary, “no subject is more boring to the average Englishman than the British Empire.”8
British imperialism was, in fact, an idea whose time was going. The issue had already been decided. In the House of Commons the master blueprint governing the imperial future, the Statute of Westminster of 1931, decreed that the Mother Country and her dominions were “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”
George V, who treasured his legacy, watched in dismay as his imperial role beyond England’s shores shrank to that of a posturing mascot. Confused, he minuted in November 1929, on the eve of the Depression: “I cannot look into the future without feelings of no little anxiety about the continued unity of the Empire.” His apprehensions were well founded, though perhaps for reasons too cosmic for him to grasp. Empires are the sequelae of historical accidents. England, an island and therefore a trading nation, had gained control of the high seas just as colonies became ripe for plucking. As long as sea power remained dominant, imperial institutions were invincible; under Victoria it was British policy to keep the Royal Navy—330 warships, manned by 92,000 tars—larger than the combined navies of any other two powers.9
Air power would prove to be the ultimate blow to the Empire’s role as the world’s one superpower, but the first great blow to the imperial future had been dealt by the Great War. In the red month of August 1914, when England’s poet laureate promised Oxford and Cambridge students that if they enlisted they would find “Beauty through blood,” all 450 million subjects of the Empire went to war, bound by a single declaration from their king-emperor. They sprang to arms in a trance of ardor, even elation. By Armistice Day 3,190,235 of the King’s subjects had fallen in the slime and gore of trench warfare, 1,165,661 killed in action, 962,661 of them from Great Britain. Over 2 million soldiers had been wounded, thousands of them crippled and maimed, destined to be public wards for the remainder of their lives. Add to these the nearly half-million young widows and fatherless children, and one finds that two years after the war 3.5 million Britons, nearly 10 percent of the population, were receiving a pension or an allowance.10
In the year of the Wall Street Crash, when Robert Graves’s American publisher issued Goodbye to All That, his powerful evocation of service in the trenches, the Nation thought it striking “not that he tells the truth about the war but that it took him so long to discover it.” But the lag applied not only to Graves; it was characteristic of an entire British literary generation. The most extraordinary thing about England’s disenchantment with the war is that it didn’t surface for over ten years. The reading public had been fed the self-serving memoirs of those responsible for the disaster and the thin fictional gruel of Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay. Those who had remained home were simply incapable of absorbing the truth. Aging Tommies told them that sixty thousand young Englishmen had fallen on the first day of the battle of the Somme without gaining a single yard. Sixty thousand! It couldn’t be true. Those who said so must be shell-shocked.11
The coalescence came in 1929. On January 21 the curtain rose on the first of what would be 594 London performances of Journey’s End, the ultimate in antiwar plays, by Robert C. Sherriff, a thirty-three-year-old former insurance man who had served in the East Surrey Regiment’s Ninth Battalion through the bloody spring of 1917. Its audiences left the Savoy Theatre stunned but primed, now, for Graves’s memoir; for Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War; for the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues, which appeared that spring in Berlin and was immediately translated by a London publisher as All Quiet on the Western Front; and, the following year, for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.12
The Great War may have been the first historic event in which reality outstripped the imagination. In the 1980s it is difficult to grasp the public innocence of that earlier generation, and how it recoiled when confronted at last by the monstrous crimes which had been committed in the name of patriotism. As time passed, the yeast of bitterness worked in the public mind and its emotions. By 1932 readers had accepted Sassoon and Graves as sources of the revealed word, and traveling troupes were presenting Journey’s End in every post of the Empire. Newspapers and magazines picked up the now-it-can-be-told theme; pacifism became as fashionable as war fever had been less than twenty years earlier. On February 9, 1933, the Oxford Union voted 275 to 153 to approve the resolution “that this House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country.” Eight months later, in what may have been the most significant by-election of the decade, a Tory in London’s East Fulham, whose Conservative majority after the last campaign had been fourteen thousand votes, was swamped by an obscure Labour challenger. Labour’s man had told the constituency that he would “close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force,” and demanded that England “give the lead to the whole world by initiating immediately a policy of general disarmament.” His victory margin was five thousand votes, representing an extraordinary swing of 26 percent. It was no accident. Over the next four months constituencies ranging widely in character but representative of the country’s mood elected antiwar candidates by margins ranging from 20 to 25 percent.13
Churchill was alarmed. In the House of Commons he was the League of Nations’ chief supporter, but the league now faced a trembling future. He became preoccupied with national security. Unilateral disarmament would be madness, he told Parliament. The by-elections also distressed Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Conservative party, but his response was very different. To him the loss of safe seats was a grave matter. If the voters wanted disarmament, he decided, that was what he would give them.14
The real threat to British security, His Majesty’s Government held, lay within. Indeed, Conservative MPs believed that the menace faced them just across the well of the House of Commons, on the Labour benches. Actually, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was itself a mildly conservative party, and had proved it in 1924 while occupying the front bench for nine months. Many of its members were former Liberal MPs who had switched parties once they saw that Labour was the only realistic alternative to Tory rule. Nevertheless, Conservatives believed that if England was to remain the England they knew and loved, they must remain in power.
Until now British Communists had all been members of the working class, or shabby young men wearing steel-rimmed glasses who mouthed the weary party line in Hyde Park, responding to questions with incomprehensible jargon and quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In the early 1930s communism became respectable, then fashionable, then a distinction among intellectuals and university undergraduates. Among the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) members were W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender. Oxford’s October Club, a CPGB cell, had three hundred dues-paying students. Cambridge started later, but soon one of every five Cambridge men had signed on, among them one H. A. R. (“Kim”
) Philby.
Those who dismissed this as an example of British eccentricity, or of typical undergraduate irresponsibility, were silenced by news from the United States, the world’s most affluent nation. Ragged mobs of the homeless and penniless were occupying U. S. public buildings—including one statehouse—and twenty-five thousand war veterans, arriving in Washington with their families to plead for relief, were routed with tear gas and bayonets. American recruits to the party included John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, and Edmund Wilson, who called Russia “the moral top of the world, where the light never really goes out.”
Every generation cherishes illusions which baffle its successors (who passionately defend their own), but intellectuals are expected to view the world with healthy skepticism. Those who visited the Soviet Union in the starkest years of the Depression were so easily deceived, so eager to accept the flimsiest evidence, so determined to believe the most transparent misrepresentations, that one feels that some of the scorn directed nowadays at the appeasers of Nazi Germany should be reserved for men who ought to have known better. Bernard Baruch asked Lincoln Steffens, “So you’ve been over into Russia?” and Steffens replied: “I have been over into the future, and it works.”15
He had seen what Stalin wanted him to see, on a rigged tour, the kind generals stage for visiting politicians. Everything paraded by him had worked, but he had not seen into the future or even the present. As one of the most celebrated journalists of his time, Steffens should have investigated his host’s policy of collectivization and its ghastly results. Only a willing dupe could say of such a holocaust that it worked. If it did, so did Auschwitz.
Actually, the moral top of Edmund Wilson’s world, where the light never really went out, had entered a period of murk which masked monstrous crimes—crimes which were suspected but not acknowledged until Nikita Khrushchev revealed them in 1957—all committed in the name of the people they were destroying. The catastrophe had begun with Lenin’s death in 1924. Churchill, his archenemy, nevertheless recognized Lenin’s greatness: “The strong illuminant that guided him was cut off at the moment when he had turned resolutely for home. The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth; their next worst—his death.”16
Lenin had left a vague “political testament” which recommended that Joseph Stalin, then secretary-general of the Communist party’s Central Committee, be dismissed. Stalin suppressed this document and, in his role as secretary-general, joined two accomplices in a ruling triumvirate which expelled Stalin’s chief rival, Leon Trotsky. (Eventually, Stalin would order the murders of his accomplices and Trotsky.) Stalin consolidated his position as master of the Kremlin, and by 1932 the Soviet Union was in the grip of a reign of terror which would reach its peak in the great purges of 1934–1938. To the world, however, Stalin insisted that his rule was benign. In the early summer of 1932, interviewed by the German biographer Emil Ludwig, he denied that he was a dictator, denied that he reigned by fear, and declared that the “overwhelming majority” of the laboring population in the U.S.S.R. was behind him. Their support, he said, accounted for the “stability of Soviet power,” not “any so-called policy of terrorism.”
At that time no Russian translation of Mein Kampf existed, but in this exchange Stalin had instinctively followed a principle set down in Adolf Hitler’s tenth chapter: “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victims to a big lie [eine grosse Lüge] than to a small one.” Everything the Russian dictator had told Ludwig was the exact opposite of the truth. Soviet peasants were already in the toils of a misery far more wretched than anything known under the czars. Abandoning Lenin’s managed economy, with its quasi-capitalistic incentives, Stalin had launched a series of five-year plans moving twenty-five million farmers from their lands into collectives. Troops and secret police rounded up protesters and murdered, exiled, or imprisoned them in an expanding net of concentration camps which systematically worked them to death. Nevertheless, collectivism failed. The Ukrainians were devastated by famine. Stalin rejected their appeal for help and actually exported grain while ten million of them starved to death.
By the autumn of 1932 England’s ruling classes were afraid of their own countrymen, and their fear alarmed Labour, whose MPs heard wild tales of plots by His Majesty’s Government to turn Britain into a police state. Hugh Dalton, MP, son of a clergyman but a committed socialist, visited Stafford Cripps, a member of the Labour hierarchy. Dalton wrote in his diary that Cripps “thinks there is a grave danger of Fascism in this country,” that Metropolitan-Vickers, the munitions manufacturers, “are ‘probably supplying arms to British Fascists.’ ” Cripps, Dalton wrote, believed that “Churchill will probably defeat the Government on India next spring and form a Government of his own, with a Majority in this Parliament and then ‘introduce Fascist measures’ and ‘there will be no more general elections.’ ” Dalton, appalled, thought that “this seems to me to be fantastic and most profoundly improbable.” But Harold Laski echoed Cripps, telling Dalton that he had “heard ‘from an inside source’ that members of the [all-party national] Government are discussing the advisability of not having a General Election in 1936, nor till such later date as the Government advises the King that it would be safe to return to party politics.”17
Cripps and Laski were looking into the wrong closets. British politics were unthreatened by communism. But the domestic disorders, the dole, and the increase in CPGB memberships profoundly affected His Majesty’s Government’s foreign policy. HMG’s subsequent dealings with a resurgent Germany make no sense unless seen in counterpoint with Tory anxiety. The London hunger riots had, or so it seemed to them, been a sign that England’s class system was disintegrating. The remarkable stability of British society was rooted in a social contract whose origins lay in the medieval relationship between lord and serf. Within the memory of living men, employees could be arrested for the most trivial of offenses, and an employer was entitled to police help in finding a runaway employee. Under the Prevention of Poaching Act, suspicious constables had possessed the power to stop and search anyone in “streets, highways, and public places.”18
Although unwritten and largely unspoken, the terms of the social contract were handed down from generation to generation and seldom challenged. Now the hunger riots had changed all that. The precise distinctions between the classes would never be the same. If mobs could roam London, those in power reasoned, their troubles with the lower middle, working, and underclasses had just begun. They were right, but wrong to blame Moscow and its British minions. Englishmen kept their places when they and their families were fed, clothed, and housed. The unemployed, however, knew no such restraint. The man without a situation took little risk, and might attract attention to his cause, by stoning limousines, joining a demonstration—or joining the Communist party. To those in power such men, by their very numbers, were alarming. Nearly a quarter of the country’s work force was jobless, and in some dark pockets the figure reached 50, 60, or even 70 percent. England had to export or die. That was the fate of an island nation. Now goods lay in mountainous stacks in warehouses or on wharves. Desperate, His Majesty’s Government adopted draconian measures—£24,149,060 in new taxes and £2,344 in spending cuts.
Among those affected by the cuts were British tars. An able seaman’s pay was reduced from four shillings a day (ninety-seven cents) to three shillings (seventy-three cents). Shattering three centuries of tradition, men of the Royal Navy mutinied. Over thirteen thousand of His Majesty’s sailors anchored in Cromarty Firth, Scotland—men whose ships bore such proud names as Nelson, Repulse, and Valiant—defied their officers, sang “The Red Flag,” and elected leaders for what can only be called their own soviet. Only a handful were punished. Their pay was restored. The Admiralty angrily denounced HMG’s capitulation, calling it a ghastly precedent. The government agreed but said it had had no choice.
And, of course, the grim facts did bear political implications. I
n December 1929 there had been just 3,200 Communists in Britain, 550 of them organized in cells. Now the hammer and sickle was carried through the heart of London. Membership in the CPGB was growing rapidly as the Depression deepened, increasing by 140 percent, then 259 percent, then 282 percent. And these were only the hard-core, card-carrying members. The number of sympathizers was far larger; in two by-elections the Communist candidates received, respectively, 31.9 and 33.8 percent of the vote.
At the same time, Communists everywhere had become more militant and more submissive to Moscow. This was one result of the Comintern’s Tenth Plenum in 1929. Stalin had decreed that local deviations from the party line be suppressed and that all loyal members move to set “class against class.” They were told to fight, not only capitalism, but also the labor movement. Since the Comintern had been founded to “accelerate the development of events toward world revolution,” the threat to established order everywhere was open. In London it was taken seriously; to conservative Englishmen the possibility of a Communist Britain seemed very real.
Several Tories with strong influence on their party’s leadership contemplated executing a momentous pivot in the history of British diplomacy. No one spoke of it publicly, nor was it whispered in the House of Commons smoking room. Even as theory, it was still in the fetal stage, and it might never come to term. Only a few Conservatives were committed to it. But others, including members of the party hierarchy, thought it had merit.