Roar & Uproar

That magnificent character, the British Lion, forgot his Anglican manners last week, got up on his hind legs, and roared right in the face of his U.S. ally. The roar raised a transatlantic gale, but it also vented British vapors which had accumulated during five years of mannerly restraint. Afterward, the Lion felt better. The American objects of his spleen knew a little more about him and perhaps about themselves. British-U.S. relations may even have been improved by the week's exchange. Said the New York Sun: "A steady diet of mutual admiration and respect would be wonderful, but it would be a terrific strain on human nature."

The Twisted Tail. The roaring was begun by the London Economist, a formidably good-mannered weekly which has no U.S. counterpart but might be described as a cross between the Wall Street Journal and a New Republic with muscles.* Along with most of the British press (notably excepting Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail), the Economist throughout the war has heeded official injunctions to go easy on America. Last week, just in time to be answered by President Roosevelt (see U.S. AT WAR), Economist Editor Geoffrey Crowther shed his inhibitions and stepped out, blowing hard:

"The British have been having a bad time in the U.S. of recent weeks. The outburst of criticism and abuse has been one of the most violent and sustained of the war years. . . . When the criticism comes from a nation that was practicing Cash-&-Carry during the Battle of Britain . . . it is not to be borne. . . . With every outburst of righteous indignation in America, the ordinary Englishman gets one degree more ready to believe that the only reliable helping hand is in Soviet Russia.

"Henceforward, if British policies and precautions are to be traded against American promises, the only safe terms are cash on delivery. And if Americans find this attitude too cynical or suspicious, they should draw the conclusion that they have twisted the lion's tail once too often."

That tore it. A News Chronicle columnist said that the Economist "accurately expresses the thoughts of millions of ordinary Britons." Two weighty sobersides, the Yorkshire Post (owned by relatives of Anthony Eden's wife) and the London Times turned their thunders on hitherto sacrosanct Franklin Roosevelt, roared that it was time for the U.S. to state its policies and define its world responsibilities. (After the President's message to Congress, the Times applauded.) Editor Crowther, whose first outburst had been marked by well-reasoned rage, came up again with an ill-timed, ill-natured, ill-reasoned diatribe against U.S. military policy. At this, even the Daily Mail was moved to shush the Lion, suggest that enough was enough.

How to Twist a Tail. What put the Lion in such an uproar? In the U.S., for the best part of a year, there had been less than usual anti-British criticism. At year's end, British policy in Greece had disturbed Americans. But no Briton had been more eloquent than the New York Times, among others, in pleading for U.S. understanding of Britain's power-political necessities.

The real causes were many, human and deep. There was the postwar future. Its black, economic realities--including the fear that the U.S. would make the most of its competitive advantages--had Britons on edge. There was the past. The British do not forget that the U.S. had to be bombed into World War II. And they are continually vexed by the U.S. tendency to consider U.S. participation in World War I, and now in World War II, as acts of noble generosity rather than necessity. There was the homesick attitude of U.S. soldiers. The British would be eternally grateful for the presence of U.S. soldiers in Europe, but they could not escape the fact that many of these soldiers were fed up with Europe and all its works. There was the State Department's abstentionist* attitude during Britain's current difficulties in liberated Europe.

All this Americans could understand, once they stopped to think about it--and last week the Lion made many of them stop and think. All the same, they could wish that the Lion, instead of indicting the U.S. people, would learn how to address his complaints plainly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Under the U.S. Constitution, the President is charged with the conduct of Foreign Affairs by & with the advice of the Senate, which has not recently offered any advice unfriendly to Britain.

*Winston Churchill's friend and Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, used to be a director of the company which runs the Economist. But it does not speak for him now. *Former meaning: isolationist.

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