The Rest Is History - 263: USA vs England: The 200-Year Rivalry

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

In today's World Cup special, Anglo-American relations are at their most tense, as the USA and England take to the football/soccer pitch. Join Tom and Dominic as they take a retrospective look at this 200-year love-hate relationship. From the War of 1812, to Charles Dickens, all the way up to Beatlemania and James Bond - buckle up to discover the historical drama underpinning today's battle in Al Bayt Stadium. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. We, my dear Crossmen, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans. Great, big, vulgar, bustling people. More vigorous than we are, but also more idle. With more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Forces HQ as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius. That was Harold Macmillan talking to the future

Labour MP Richard Crossman during the Second World War. And Tom, we do think of ourselves, don't we, a little bit as the Greeks to the Americans, Romans. I mean, people think of us as the brains behind the operation, don't they, ultimately? I mean, I know we're down on our uppers. I know we're not what we were, but I hope we're better than the freed slaves who served the emperor. Yes, quite a few of them must have been eunuchs. They weren't eunuchs, but I mean, nothing to boast about. So we're continuing our World Cup series, aren't we?

And we're doing kind of special episodes on the countries that are playing England in the group stages of the Qatar World Cup. So we've already done Iran. And today, England are playing the United States. very salient in the episode we did on iran is that in international relations power balance power imbalances tend to mean that one country i.e the less powerful country is far more obsessed with the other country than the powerful country is with the inferior country of course um so iran is much much more obsessed with britain or england than brit Britain is with Iran, say. Yeah. And we've had that a bit actually, Tom, because we've had that with Argentina, when we talked about the Falklands War many months ago. All those countries that were affected by Britain's empire, either formally or informally, developed a kind of mingled admiration and

resentment of Britain, didn't they? And I wonder whether that's similar to the relationship that we now have with the United States. Well, what's interesting about Britain's relationship to the United States, and apologies to Scots and Welsh, but we're going to equate England with Britain for the purposes of this podcast. Yeah, shocking behavior, but we're going to do it anyway. What's interesting about it, of course, is that in the 19th century, basically the United States is playing the role of Argentina or Iran to Britain. Britain is interested in the United States, but it's not obsessed by it. Whereas the United States is obsessed by Britain. And in the 20th century, that role reverses.

But having said that, I mean, I think it's not just about power imbalances, because I know that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic hate the phrase special relationship, quite understandably in the context of geopolitics. But I think in the dimension of culture, there is a special relationship for the obvious reason that the culture of the United States does come from Britain predominantly, preeminently, in terms of its kind of beginnings. There are lots of ways on there in which the culture is actually so integrated. Not every way, but if you think about the popularity of British actors even now, you'll see an endless TV, big, big budget TV series in which it'll turn out that half the crew is British or half the cast are British. They're kind of so integrated, aren't they, in some ways, just to be indistinguishable.

But that is quite Greek freedmen at the court of Emperor Claudius. Because I think in Hollywood, the British are called white Mexicans. White Mexicans. Is that how people talk about Hugh Laurie? Tom Hiddleston? I believe so. Tom Holland? Tom Holland, Tom!

Yeah. Is he a white Mexican? I believe that one of the reasons for the salience of British actors in Hollywood is because they're much cheaper to employ than American stars. Oh my word, I can't believe Tom Holland would sell himself so cheaply. I'm not selling it. But what I would say is that the fascination, both for English people and for Americans, about the relationship of Britain and America,

is that America, in a way, is taking a path that Britain might have taken, and vice versa. In so many ways, the war of independence is a civil war. Of course. We've talked about this before, particularly in the treason episodes, that at stake in the revolutionary wars are issues that are consciously traced by the revolutionaries back to the 17th century and beyond. So that's why the treason law, Magna Carta, has the salience that it does. Wouldn't you say? I mean, you're the specialist. I would, I would. I would, Tom.

We talked in a previous bonus episode for members of our Rest is History club about the historian Louis Hartz, whose works have gone a little bit out of fashion now. I think he was writing about the 1940s, 50s, 60s in America. And he basically argued that the United States

was a bit of 17th century England that has sort of floated off and been preserved in aspect, that its constitution, its political obsessions, the language of politics, all these things. The religiosity, exactly. They're all kind of early modern England and they've got stuck and not moved on. Well, they have a bit, haven't they? Yeah. I mean, there's a bit of an... When you do hear people arguing about the constitution and what the founding fathers and the framers of the Constitution thought, it is kind of mad to a secular 21st century Britain to see people arguing so vociferously about what people were thinking in the late 18th century.

But Dominic, we're going to do the War of Independence as a 4th of July present, aren't we? To our American listeners. A present to our American listeners. We're very much going to be bringing the British perspective on this. Yeah, they'll love that. They'll absolutely love that, Tom. It's a monstrous display of treason and ingratitude. So that's something to look forward to. But in today's episode, what we're going to do is we have broken down the entire history of England's relationship to America into six key episodes. And five of them are quite elliptical.

Let's be honest. They're not the episodes you expect. If you write down now what you think the six episodes will be, if there's anybody who gets them all right. I would be impressed. I would be more than impressed. I would be dumbfounded. But the first episode is an absolute classic.

And it's the episode that uh i guess for americans typifies the um hostile relationship between britain and america in the early decades of the existence of the united states and that is the burning in 1814 by british redcoats of the white house great moment in history tom but the thing is that for britain this entire incident is absolutely peripheral it is isn't it it's an annoyance you think most people in britain have even heard of it well great event you see because obviously 1814 1815 as it's the death throes of the napoleonic wars this is the great death struggle that britain has been engaged with revolutionary their napoleoniconic France for decades.

And in 1814, it looks as though Napoleon is finished. As it happens, of course, he's going to make an abortive comeback in 1815, which will be ended at the Battle of Waterloo. But it's continental Europe that is the focus of Britain's attentions. And basically, America is a kind of an annoying blue bottle that's got stuck in the study. It's nothing really more than that. But for Americans, of course, this is an absolutely existential crisis because Britain had, I think, had the British properly turned their attention towards waging this war. I mean, they could have seriously, seriously damaged and perhaps permanently crippled the United States, but they don't. So the backdrop to this is basically, I think, American resentment

of the fact that despite their independence, they still feel that they're lying in a British shadow. And I guess the kind of the key grievance is the way that the British who are dependent for their own survival on the Royal Navy. We talked about this in the series we did on the Battle of Trafalgar. The British very cheerfully are impressing American seamen, taking them on board, making them serve on their various ships. And the reason that they feel entitled to do that is that British law defines nationality by birth, and the US allows people to gain nationality by residence. And so it's perfectly possible for the British to see someone as being British by law and the Americans to see him as being

American by law. And the British obviously are playing by their own rules. So there's a lot of impressment going on. The other thing is that Canada, of course, has remained independent of the United States control. It remains a British possession. And there's the feeling that it's very, very vulnerable. So Thomas Jefferson, who was not, I think it would be fair to say, the British Empire's greatest fan, said of Canada that Providence has placed their Britain's richest and most defenseless possession at our door. And James Madison, who has succeeded Jefferson as president, is absolutely confident that basically that the US is holding a knife to Britain's throat because he sees Canada as being key to the war effort. Its timber supplies the Royal Navy with masts, food from it keeps the West Indies sustained, and also that ships and exports from the United States are vital to the survival of Britain in the war. And so it's in 1812 when it still looks as though Napoleon is preponderant. Yeah.

Congress votes in favour of war. Madison signs it into law. And this is both the first declaration of war in the United States history, and it's also the closest vote. So I think that's the measure of the fact that people have reservations about it. So there are good people in the United States. Well, particularly in New England, where there is no enthusiasm for the war at all. And centres of population, so Philadelphia would be the obvious one, where there are lots of Quakers, are likewise basically neutral. So it's not like there's a massive war fever. And I think right from the beginning, there are people in America who think that this is not a sensible thing to have done.

You don't tweak the tale of the British lion, all that kind of thing. So to the British, it's an annoyance. This is very much a secondary theater of war, as we've said. And basically, the war does not go well for America. So their immediate target is Canada. They think, we'll go and grab Canada, but it goes disastrously wrong. The Canadian militia meet the main US invasion force at Detroit, and it surrenders. It's a kind of humiliating defeat. Revenge for Yorktown, perhaps. Right.

Very good. Who can say? Yeah. And it's not a total victory for the British. There's a kind of naval war is pursued on the Lawrence River and in the Great Lakes. But it's clear that Canada is not going to be taken. And by 1814, the situation is looking increasingly critical because Napoleon's period in power is coming to an end. The Americans have very clearly aligned themselves with the French. And so the collapse of Napoleon's military position is very bad for the Americans,

not least because it starts to free up ships and men. And the more ships there are, the tighter the blockade that the British have put America under becomes. Because the continental system that the British have been imposing on Europe, they've also been imposing on America. And so this has also been a kind of a big grievance. And so by 1814, the British have basically decided that they need to bring the Americans to the negotiating table. And the growing numbers of ships and of men that they have means that they can think of a spectacular display of their relative power. Because since 1813, they've got a naval squadron that is based in the Chesapeake Bay. So that's the great estuary that runs between Virginia and Maryland. From this bay, there are all kinds of rivers that snake inwards into mainland US.

And one of these, of course, is the Potomac, on which sits Washington, the US capital. And so in August 1814, an expedition advances up the Potomac, and it's led by a rear admiral called George Cockburn, or is it Coburn? I'm not sure. And a military officer called Robert Ross, and he has 4,500 troops. And up they go. And the US defences are contemptuously brushed aside. President Madison, oh my God, he scarpers. I mean, it almost gets captured. And the British enter Washington on the evening of the 24th of August, 1814. They enter the White House. Coburn and Ross are able to sit down at a banquet that Madison had left behind in the White House. They consume it.

And they then burn all the public buildings of the Capitol, including the White House. Tom, this is a great story. Although I think it's an immense tribute to the sagacity and forbearance of the British that they don't burn any private residences. And is there any sort of looting and killing or are they generally quite well behaved? No, they're very well behaved. Coburn was actually quite keen to burn the whole city. He was absolutely gunning for that but ross says no because he says the purpose is not to alienate american opinion

actually quite the opposite you want to keep people like the quakers and new englanders on side it's to humiliate the u.s government so that they will then be brought to negotiate terms um and that's exactly what happens so the british are in Washington for nine days, then they withdraw, absolute minimal resistance. And Madison promptly sends ambassadors to Britain to negotiate terms. And the British are very, you know, they're very, very happy to basically to agree to a peace treaty. And the US abandons all the war aims with which they'd entered the conflict. But I think they feel that they've been spared. They've got away quite lightly because they've been spared certainly kind of total defeat and very probably dismemberment of the United States. So it's a pretty total defeat.

Now, this is not how the War of 1812, as it's called, is generally remembered in the United States. Yeah, I was going to say that. It's not remembered that way at all. I mean, in Britain, let's be frank, I think among the general public, I mean, among people who are not history devotees, it is literally just not remembered. Yeah. But in the United States, it's remembered as a sort of great moment of nationhood,

isn't it? For two reasons. And the first is that in the 14th of September, 1814, the British attack Baltimore and they bombard this fort, Fort McHenry. And there's a huge US flag, 15 stars on it. And it flutters throughout the bombardment and then the British withdraw. And this inspires a poem, which is then set to music.

And in 1931, this song becomes the US National Anthem. And that, of course, is the Star Spangled Banner. Yes. So the US National Anthem commemorates a kind of defiance, a display of defiance against the British. And actually this is very British behaviour, isn't it? Because, you know, making a victory out of a defeat

is basically what we do. It's kind of Dunkirk and all that kind of thing. But what's very satisfying about that is that the Star Spangled Banner, the tune is actually an old british song from a london club i think the the anachriontic society which was some sort of 18th century dining club or 19th century dining club or something yeah so it's nice to think that the the american national anthem is actually british exactly exactly yeah um and the other reason why the totality of British supremacy in the 1812 war is forgotten is that the conflict actually ends with a ringing British defeat. And this occurs after the peace treaty has actually been signed, but the news of grabbing hold of Louisiana. The Americans are under the command of a man called Andrew Jackson, and he inflicts an absolutely stinging defeat. So about 2000 British soldiers die. And this is, I think, about half an hour of action.

Americans lose about 70 men. And this is tremendous for the Americans. So they make a great fuss of it. Jackson becomes a great hero. The 8th of January becomes a federal holiday. Hurrah, hurrah for Andrew Jackson. Hurrah for America. But anyway, I think that that war kind of perfectly illustrates the way in which smaller powers confronted by superpowers will invariably inflate their successes and their triumphs. You're really endearing us to our American audience. Well, no, because it will turn around, of course. Of course it will. You know, I'm merely, this is the hubris that precedes the nemesis. The nemesis is coming. So 1812, 1814, that shows Britain and America not as the best of friends.

But the truth is that, of course, they're both English-speaking nations. The cultural links are incredibly strong. British writers, for instance, are very, very widely read in the United States. And by the 1840s, American writers are starting to be read in Britain as well. But still, the cultural preponderance is all on Britain's side. And in 1842, the most famous novelist in Britain, perhaps in the world, makes a trip to the United States, and that is Charles Dickens. Brilliant.

And Charles Dickens sails to America. There's a number of reasons why he wants to go. The first is basically that he is very popular. The Americans see him as being almost an honorary American. So they call him the great Republican of the literary world. So Dickens, who loves praise, who loves performing, thinks, well, I can be tasted by the Americans. What could be nicer? He also has, there are copyright issues. So American publishers are stealing British editions and publishing them so dickens doesn't get any royalties yeah again dickens is always very keen on maximizing his income so he wants to go and sort that out he also uh he wants material for a book he thinks that going to america might be you know provide him with uh interesting material uh and he wants

a break you know he's been writing non-stop yeah and so he dickens's idea wants a break. You know, he's been writing nonstop. And so Dickens' idea of a break is to cross the Atlantic in the middle of January when the storms are particularly violent. So he sets off with his wife. The cabin is way too small. The storms are absolutely terrible. He's on a steamer and the smokestack is um is so battered about by the gales that it has to be chained down to stop it blowing over and setting the ship on on fire uh

they reach newfoundland and run aground um so it's all it's a terrible terrible voyage so when they finally arrive in boston where dickens first steps foot on uh soil. He's very much in a mood to enjoy himself. And so he really likes Boston. He's greeted with adulation and he loves that. He goes on to New York where they stage a Boz Ball. So Boz is the pseudonym that Dickens has been using. And it's attended by 3,000 people. And another 2,000 people had applied for tickets. That's a bit like the rest is history live, Tom. Very live. Well, so here's something for us to aim at.

When Dickens appears at this boss ball, he does so on the arm of a general who is in his full dress uniform. And as they enter, the band plays See the Conquering Hero Comes. We have to do a live event where we enter stage like that yeah yeah um and and so dick is his herring around new york he's doing what he always does which is to visit various institutions that could provide him with material for his book so he visits prisons factories asylums slums all these kind of stuff uh and he also meets some of america's most famous writers so he he meets edgar allen poe he uh he meets washington irving who's an absolutely massive

fan boy washington irving is i mean absolutely devoted to dickens i think he'd met longfellow in boston right so it all seems to be going well also on top of that his wife catherine to whom dickens normally paves abominably because he finds her boring and she's constantly pregnant but she's not pregnant on the trip to america and dick she's basically the main focus of dickens's attentions and so this is probably the happiest that they you know the time that they spend together right so it all seems to be going well but as as the weeks and then the months pass, Dickens starts to get increasingly disenchanted with America. He starts to get bored of the fuss.

People are always asking him for autographs, that kind of thing. And he's starting to get bored of it. In England, he can always retreat, but in America, he can't. And the strain starts to get on top of him. And also his insistence on demanding the copyright law be changed. It's absolutely dead batted. The Americans are not interested in hearing about this. And so Dickens gets increasingly cross. And again, it becomes a kind of massive flare point. And so by the time that Dickens goes to Washington, where he meets the president,

John Tyler, and Dickens finds him very polite, but incredibly boring. I think John Tyler is incredibly boring. Well, but say we went to the United States, we went to Washington. Yeah.

And we got an invitation to go to the white house. Absolutely plausible. You'd go, wouldn't you? Yeah, I would. I'd go. I mean,

you might not think, yeah, you'd go if it was Trump, you'd go if it was Biden, you'd go whoever. I mean, ideally it wouldn't be Trump,, I would. I'd go whoever. I mean, you might not think. Yeah. You'd go if it was Trump. You'd go if it was Biden. You'd go whoever. I mean, ideally, it wouldn't be Trump, but I would still go. But you'd still go, wouldn't you? I think.

I would. I would. No question. Yeah. Because you just, so you could kind of, you know, say that I'm gone or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Take a fork. Exactly. But Dickens refuses. He can't be bothered. Well, that's why he's Charles Dickens and I'm not, I suppose. He thinks it's going to be boring. And when he goes on into Virginia and he hates it.

So he says. Virginia is very nice, Tom. I think that's folly on Dickens' part. Yeah. Okay. But this is the spin that Dickens gives to Virginia. He describes it as the regions of slavery, spittoons and senators. All three are evils in all countries. And he's right about the slavery and probably about the spittoons and senators all three are evils in all countries and he's right about the

slavery and probably about the spittoons so he's he's particularly revolt it's the slavery that really upsets him and actually revolts him so much that he he retreats from virginia and heads back to pennsylvania and essentially it turns him and he he ends up hostile to pretty much everything that he sees in America. So he goes to the Mississippi. He describes it as the beastliest river in the world. He goes to the Midwest and he magnificently, he says of the Midwest, I would say to everyone who can't see a prairie, go to Salisbury Plain. Oh, no way. Some of you must be delighted by that.

Yeah, absolutely delighted um if we have any listeners in ohio in ohio um yeah of the people of ohio he describes them as morose sullen clownish and repulsive so he's he's appalled not just by slavery but by treatment of native americans who he describes as a fine people but degraded and broken down. And so basically within a few months, he's absolutely desperate to get back to England and he goes via Canada. So he goes to the Niagara Falls, he goes to Toronto, then to New York and heads back across the Atlantic, back to Liverpool.

And he's so delighted to be heading back to England that all his spirits recover. He entertains himself and his fellow passengers by playing an accordion. And he organizes a club in which all the members of the club have to dress up as doctors. And then go around. Apparently, they go around pretending to cure people who are sick. They'll go and pretend to be doctors and pretend to cure them, which Dickens thought was absolutely hilarious.

Oh, my word. That's surely – you're sent to prison for that these days. Yes, but for Dickens – I mean, this is absolutely the kind of thing Dickens adored. So he gets back to England, and basically the bad blood between Dickens and America persists. So the Americans have continued to refuse to sort out the copyright issue, and it remains an issue for British writers right the way up until 1891. Well, Gerard Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, that was ripped off, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. I mean, by that point, there was a formal relationship, a formal legal agreement,

but absolutely, the tradition of copyright infringements continues, as you say, right the way past the Second World War. Dickens then writes a couple of books that cause immense upset in America. So one of them is American Notes, which is basically a description of his journey. It has a vituperative attack on the institution of slavery. But it also condemns the Americans in ways that, as the passage that you opened this episode with, the passage from Macmillan suggests, the kind of stereotypes of Americans that the British have always held to, that they're vulgar, that they are crass, that they throw their weight around. It's basically this old world hauteur.

These people are upstarts. Yeah. And Poe, who's a big fan of Dickens, is so offended by it that he describes it basically as Dickens' suicide note, you know, for his popularity in America. Yeah. Dickens then writes, he's writing a novel called Martin Chuzzlewit. It's not going very well.

It's his least popular novel. And so he decides that to try and pep things up, he'll send his hero, Martin Chuzzlewit, off to America for no apparent reason. I mean, he just goes off to America. And the chapters on America are actually incredibly funny. The Americans are the most dreadful caricatures, though, aren't they?

They really are. And again, people in America take massive offense. And even Washington Irving, this time, breaks off his friendship. So basically, Dickens' portrait of New York is a city where everyone spits. That's the main focus. And again, it's this sense that Americans are obsessed by money, which you might think coming from Dickens, who'd come over specifically to complain that he wasn't getting enough money. But he talks about the conversation in America as being the greater part of it

may be summed up in one word, dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seem to be melted down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars. Life was auctioneered, appraised, put up and knocked down for its dollars. And that, I mean, that again is a kind of an abiding critique that the British will have.

We'll be coming back to that in the last moments of this program, Tom, when we get to the late 20th century. And we will be coming to it in my third vignette, which shows the corollary of the almighty dollar, which is that by the end of the 19th century, the economic balance of power between Britain and America is starting to shift. And perhaps the paradigmatic illustration of this is a man who becomes at one point the richest in the world, but who originally came from Scotland, from Dunfermline, Andrew Carnegie, who's born in 1835. But when he's 12, so in 1848, he emigrates to Pittsburgh with his family. And he begins right at the bottom. He kind of works in a cotton mill. He works as a telegraph operator. But over the course of his life,

he proves himself brilliant at capitalism. And he ends up this huge monopolist. And he, in a way, embodies American capitalism at its most brutal and aggressive. So he crushes all his rivals. He smashes unions. I mean, he's an absolutely unapologetic monopolist. All rivals are there to be destroyed. And he is not a great man for indiscriminate charity, which he sees as fostering laziness and drunkenness. And yet for all that, he remains the child of his Presbyterian upbringing. And that Presbyterian upbringing, that kind of radical Protestant sense is something that of course is common to both sides of the Atlantic. It's there in Britain, it's there in the United States. And in 1889, Carnegie publishes a track called The Gospel of Wealth, where he basically makes the argument that it's the duty of people to get incredibly rich so that they can then reinvest their money in ways that won't kind of relieve poverty per se, but will enable the poor to improve themselves. Basically, it's

the duty of the rich to get rich so that they can provide ladders for other people to then climb up and also become rich. And this is very American, I think. And it's one that Carnegie is so rich. So he ends up selling or basically selling off all his companies to John Pierpont Morgan, which he does in 1901, by which point he's basically the richest man in the world. And he then uses the money. He invests in parks, libraries, schools, and Carnegie institutions are, you know, they're not just in the United States. They're also across the world and particularly in Britain. So he reinvests in Britain. And the British have their eyes opened both to the sheer scale of the American economy.

You know, they're so accustomed to thinking of themselves as the great economic power that I think that Carnegie's, the dispensing of Carnegie's largesse kind of opens their eyes to the sheer scale of what is happening. The industrial economic financial power is leaking across the Atlantic to the United States. But also what they find impressive is the scale of Carnegie's generosity. And I think that that is also a way that the British see the Americans, is there's a respect for the principle of charity of their rich. I mean, there's an absolute sense that rich Americans tend to be more generous. Yeah, no, that's absolutely the case now, Tom. I mean, I've written columns about it. Why don't British billionaires hand out as much money as Americans do? And the explanation, I think, is largely cultural. It's just a thing that americans are expected to do and then britain they're not well carnegie is the archetype and maybe the trendsetter for this and the embodiment i think of of all these trends the ways in which um the lead is passing from britain to america the child is starting to school the parent right the disciple is starting to

school the master darth vader and obi-wan kenobi tom a comparison you have made before um comes in the 12th of may 1905 when andrew carnegie visits the natural history museum in london where a huge cast of a dinosaur fossil is a is unveiled this dinosaur fossil is one that was in the Natural History Museum until a very few years ago. It's a Diplodocus, which is a sauropod, a very long neck, very long tail. When it was found, it was described as the most colossal animal ever on earth. And this is why Carnegie wanted it, because it seemed to embody his own, the massive scale of his own ambitions, his own fortune. And so he donates the

actual fossil to a very lavishly appointed museum in his own hometown of Pittsburgh. But he also makes casts of it and sends it around the world. But the first one he sends is to Britain. And he gives a speech at the Natural History Museum when it's unveiled. And he is unapologetic about what it is that has enabled him to make his gift. He says that, you know, it is my commitment to making money. It's his unfettered accumulation of capital that had enabled him to fund this gift to the British people. But he also says that he is giving it to serve as a physical embodiment of the links between the British and American peoples. And he wants this dinosaur to serve as an emblem of an alliance for peace. And I guess that Carnegie, to that extent, is the embodiment of the future, that Anglophobia will persist in the

United States. Obviously, lots of people from Ireland have emigrated to the United States, and that has added for the good of the world if they were to coexist, not just in peace and friendship. And in the decades that follow, that friendship will start to develop, most notably by the fact that America, although entering the war late, will enter the First World War on the side of Britain. Yeah. So when Carnegie, I guess, is making his money, the future president, Woodrow Wilson, is reciting Gladstone speeches by heart in front of the mirror to teach himself how to be a political orator. Obviously, Wilson is the guy who takes the US into the First World War. And with that, I guess that first wartime collaboration is the moment when the relationship starts to converge politically, if you like. The key thing about that dinosaur, Tom,

that is the dinosaur that is stolen in the excellent film, One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. Yeah. Peter Ustinov steals it, doesn't he? I think that film is almost certainly deemed inappropriate for young people today. And the dinosaur has been removed. Am I right?

Why has the dinosaur been removed? So it's been replaced by the skeleton of a blue whale. um there was a feeling that uh to have the skeleton of a whale would better convey messages of protecting the environment okay fair enough than a cast given by an american plutocrat well the whale is brilliant i mean yeah the natural history museum the whale is brilliant okay fantastic tom that was really, really interesting. That's a hard act to follow, but follow it, I will, after the break. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Yeehaw! We are talking America and we're talking specifically america's relationship with england and dominic in the first half we were looking at a century where britain definitely was the uh the larger player yeah now we're moving into the 20th century and sad to say america is very much

overtaking us top dog it is top dog it's. It's top nation. Well, Tom, fantastic. Yeehaw. Thank you. Congratulations on that. I think everyone will have enjoyed that. Yes. So we ended the first half talking about, um, uh,

the coming of the world wars and how that marks a sort of political convergence. Um, and, and I suppose most people listening to this think I'm going to do FDR and Churchill, Thatcher and Reagan, Blair and his very tight trousers, and George Bush.

Remember he wore those inappropriately tight jeans? And he aped Bush's walk, didn't he? He did. And aped is the word. Yeah. All kinds of naturalists talked about how the leader of ape troops inspire their inferiors to copy them and coming from from tony blair's greatest admirer i mean that is that is pretty damning it was a painful moment uh what it was literally must have been an incredibly painful moment for him judging by his trousers anyway listen um let's move to the second world war let's start in the second one where i've chosen three light time slightly elliptical moments pearl harbor obviously happens at the end of 1941. So up until that point, the United States has not been directly

involved in the Second World War, certainly not in the war in Europe, other than kind of very, very indirectly. And GIs, American GIs start to arrive in Britain pretty soon thereafter. So the first GIs arrive in January 1942. And in total, their numbers rise to 3 million people. I mean, this is by far the single biggest movement of Americans to Britain in history. They are admired and resented by the locals in equal measure. The joke is, of course, that all the girls can't get enough of them with their chewing gum and their gifts of nylon stockings and chocolate and all these sort of things. So the joke is that when you're wearing your wartime underwear that you've been given in Britain because of rationing called utility knickers, they're called utility knickers, one yank and they're off. Very good.

Very good. Great banter. George Orwell writes about this in one of his columns. He says, it's difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now occupied territory. The general consensus of opinion, Orwell adds, seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes. Now, this is the theme that I want to talk about, because actually, so far, we haven't talked about black Americans. But of those 3 million Americans who arrive in Britain, just under 150,000 there or thereabouts are black. And they work in labor companies, or they work in transport or as

engineers. They're not generally frontline troops and certainly not officers. So what did the British make of them? Obviously, Britain has an empire. And for that reason, there's all kinds of assumptions and prejudices sort of floating around in the imaginations, in the subconscious, or indeed the consciousness of ordinary Britons. Most ordinary Britons have probably never seen a black man. So they may have done if they live in Liverpool or in London or in some sort of port, Bristol, for example. But if you're out, you know, in this sort of, in the hinterland, in deep England, then you almost certainly haven't. There is, interestingly, despite the fact that Britain, you know,

rules India, has both participated in and then abolished the slave trade, that there is a kind of racial hierarchy within the British Empire. There is a sense in Britain that Americans are racist and that that is a sort of vulgar thing to be. Well, that's what Dickens hated. Right. So, I mean, Dr. Johnson had talked about this in the 18th century. Dickens talked about it even in children's stories.

So I've talked before in this podcast about how I love the Billy Bunter stories set at Greyfriars School, sort of Edwardian boarding school stories. In those stories, an American boy arrives one day. He's called Fisher T. Fish. All he cares about, Tom, is, you guessed it, money. He's incredibly avaricious. So these are stories written for British schoolboy readers or schoolgirl readers. Fisher T. Fish is not merely avaricious. So these are stories written for British schoolboy readers or schoolgirl readers. Fisher T. Fish is not merely avaricious. He is racist.

There's an Indian boy, for example, at the school who the British boys call Inky, but he's a great friend of theirs. He's a great cricketer, Tom. You'll be pleased to hear. He's modeled on Ranjit Singh, isn't he? He is indeed. Fisher T. Fish at first is quite racist towards him, and the other boys say, oh, we know you'll be racist, of course,

because you're an American. But if you continue with this, we will beat you up. So what about Lincoln? I mean, is he not seen as a representative American? Of course he is. But don't forget, I mean, the British would have said, well, the Americans shot Lincoln. That's right.

Yes, that's right. So anyway, these black GIs arrive. Now, the United States at this point has a segregated army. So the Roosevelt government, the Roosevelt administration, writes formally to insist that Britain will uphold the segregation of the U.S. Army. And letters are sent out to local police and so on all across Britain to say, listen, these Americans are going to be segregated. We must do our best to uphold that. However, the British say, we will not segregate outside bases. In other words, we will not give you

segregated pubs, segregated restaurants, all of these kinds of things. That's just not how we do things. It's too complicated, but it's also kind of not us. So what do the Americans do? The Americans say, well, black and white troops must stay separate, but they must also go out separately so they won't have to mix when they go out into the towns and villages of Britain. Tom, you were clearly itching to say something, and I'm wondering what it was. Well, I was just wondering about trains. So when they travel on trains, do they travel separately? And the reason- Yeah, I'm sure they would travel separately. So the reason I asked that is you may remember we did in the 12 Days of Christmas episodes we did

at the beginning of the year, I did one on Hawaii and the Crown Prince of Hawaii was traveling back to Hawaii across America on a train, having been to Britain. Yes, I remember that. And a conductor tries to remove him from his compartment on the grounds that he's not white, to which he indignantly replies, in England, an African can pay his fare and sit alongside Queen Victoria. Right. Well, he's not wrong, Tom, because there aren't segregated trains in Britain. I mean, there simply isn't a large enough non-white population for this even to be an issue. Now, the interesting thing is that despite what you might assume about imperial prejudices and whatnot, all the evidence is that most Britons are genuinely shocked and surprised by the attitude of white American soldiers to their black comrades.

So you look at mass observation, which was this great survey that was being done at the time about popular attitudes. You look at people's letters and diaries. Indeed, you look at what black Americans said themselves. So this is the black journalist Roy Otley writing in the journal Negro Digest. He wrote, the people here have a racial tolerance which gives them a social lever. They're inclined to accept a man for his personal worth. Thus, the Negro has social equality here in more ways than theory. To put it in the language of the Negro soldier,

I am treated so a man don't know he's coloured until he looks in the mirror. Now, Olly goes on to say, that's not to say there aren't degrees of racial prejudice in the British population. It is that they are much more unconscious and are much more wrapped up with the empire than purely on skin color the place of sort of sanctuary for black black americans is often the pub so they will go to the pub they have separate leave days from their white counterparts so they are allowed out to the to the pubs and there generally i think it's fair to say they get on pretty well with the locals

so pubs will, I mean, there's a lot of resentment of Americans, of white Americans among the British population at large, but actually lots of people feel quite sorry for the black Americans. So pubs will have signs that say, for instance, this place is for the exclusive use of Englishmen and American Negro soldiers,

which obviously white American officers deeply resent. So in a place called Bamber Bridge near Preston, a white American officer writes home and says, one thing I noticed here and which I don't like is the fact that the English don't draw any color line. The English must be pretty ignorant. I cannot see how a white girl could associate with a Negro. Now, Bamber Bridge is interesting because it's one of two or three places where this ends in open violence. I mean in gunfire, Tom. Gunfire.

So we're in June 1943 in Bamber Bridge near Preston. The U.S. 8th, it's a truck company of the U.S. 8th Army. You know how we love military conversations on this podcast. So it's a black company of the US Eighth Army. You know how we love military truck conversations on this podcast. So it's a black company with white officers. The author, Anthony Burgess, famous for A Clockwork Orange, is also in Bamber Bridge during this period. So how old is he? So he's pretty young then.

I mean, he must be a child in his teens, something like that. I mean, because he's... So he's not serving. He's not in the war. No, no, no. He remembers later that the US, the white officers demanded that the pubs institute a colour bar and the

landlords of Bamber Bridge got together and put up signs that read Black Troops Only in the pubs. So that obviously endeared them enormously to the American officers. And on the night of the 24th and 25th of June, a fighting between black troops and white officers basically ends up in a shootout.

So there's a fistfight at first. People go back to get guns from the camp. They start shooting in the streets. One private, William Crossland, is shot in the back and killed. Four other black GIs are wounded. News of this spreads. More black GIs go and get rifles from the weapons store at the camp, and they all sort of arrive in the town with their rifles.

The U.S. military police put a machine gun on a vehicle and drive into the center of Bamber Bridge with this machine gun. There's a lot of shooting. There's barricades erected. It's eventually quelled. 27 of the black GIs are convicted and sentenced to hard labor. Back in America. Back in America.

I mean, talking long sentences, Tom, decades. How long do they serve? Well, this is the interesting thing. By and large, these things were hushed up. They were in closed court, and the sentences, the details of the sentences were kept secret. So actually, who's written a book called An American Uprising. So here it's an ordnance ammunition company training for D-Day. Similar story, fighting in the pub, tension with white soldiers, shots fired. People are riding into the center of this small town in Cornwall in Jeeps, kind of firing their guns.

A local says it's uh it's like the wild west um and eventually um 14 this time 14 black soldiers are tried for mutiny in Paynton and the way this sort of works is basically the Americans will take over a courtroom they will put up a big star spangled banner little nod back to your 1812 war there Tom uh they will play the national anthem the u.s national anthem and they're sort of you know it's a it's a full american performance in a british courtroom so there's people shouting objection and all that kind of thing uh but the sentences once again they are kept secret the 14 accused men are sentenced to long long periods of hard labor back in the

united states um and and there's a real sense actually in Cornwall that this is a terrible injustice, that the black soldiers have been very, very badly treated, that basically these disturbances are the product of racism on the part of their officers because the black soldiers are dancing with white girls, because the British girls are glad to see them and all this kind of thing,

and the white American officers don't like it. And then probably the most famous one is Bristol a year later, 1944. I mean, here, 400 black GIs had gone out on the town on Saturday, the 15th of July. They are with white British women. An American white officer stops them and basically says, you can't go around with white women. You all have to go back to base.

Fighting starts. 120 armed US military policemen pitch up. There is lots of shooting. I mean, it's unbelievable, Tom. The military policemen get a load of buses and blockade the street and are firing from behind these buses. Blimey. One policeman is stabbed.

A black soldier is shot dead. Lots of black soldiers shot in the legs because they would aim at your legs to disable you rather than to kill you. They don't ideally want

to kill their own side. And it's the same story. Bristol was actually put under curfew for several days to stop the fighting. But it's not all doom and gloom, actually.

I think it'd be nice to end this bit of the show on an upward note. So GIs are sent to Cottingham near Hull. There's a brilliant website, Tom, called the Africans in Hull and East Yorkshire Project, which is where basically I've sort of gleaned this bit of the discussion from. So they're all sent to Cottingham. And up in Hull, actually, the locals really seem to have taken them to their hearts.

So there's a point at which a group of African-American soldiers go to the Wilberforce Monument. Right. Because Wilberforce, of course, is a Hull man. And the newspaper accounts of the time. The man who emancipates the slave, leads the abolition of the slave trade. So he's the sort of champion of anti-slavery in Britain at the turn of the 19th century. And there are newspaper accounts, local newspapers, that say that groups of African-Americans go to the plaque that marks the original site of Hull's Wilberforce Monument, and they kneel down and kiss the ground. Can you believe that, Tom?

Goodness. But there's a couple of lovely stories. So there's one story that in February 1943, a group of African-American soldiers are named. Their names aren't given in the accounts. They go to an evacuee party, and they meet three black children who've been orphaned their father came from the west indies and had been torpedoed by u-boats their mother had died before the war so they're now orphans they've been evacuated from the center of hull to the countryside because of fears of german bombing and these african-american soldiers take them and adopt them as the mascots for their unit. And they raise 160 pounds, which is an awful lot of money in those days,

for their clothes and for their future education. So that's the Simmons family. It's a lovely story. And another lovely story, there's a guy called Wiley Young. It's really, we don't know much about him. They were just sort of trace records, American servicemen. He meets a woman called Ellen Cole. I get the impression that her husband was away at the war or something like this because she's got two small children,

but Wiley Young becomes friends with her and will walk her home after dances and things. The colonel of his regiment visits Ellen Cole's house and asks her to refrain from being friendly with black servicemen. She says, Colonel, you're not in America now. If I want to socialize, I will. It's my home and that's the end of the matter and while young the black serviceman is very taken with this um he has his photo taken with her children so the photo is on this website uh the children dressed up as uncle sam and as britannia so he's with these two kids and he sends the photo home to his family and he says um you would never have believed that one day i would have you know your son would have his photo

taken with a white british family could never happen at home and um yeah there you go well well but um just to uh pursue one further aspect because it will lead into, I think, what you're going to talk about next. Yeah. That issues of kind of sexual jealousy are quite a strand, aren't they? Oh, massive. And then the story of the American GIs coming to Britain, so overpaid, over-sexed over here. Yeah. What British men tend to say.

Because a lot of British women women and girls um are obviously fine americans uh you know they've got lots of money they're very got much better uniform some nonsense about their teeth tom all that kind of stuff all that kind of stuff and i guess also that part of the anxieties around what you're saying about black servicemen yeah mixing with white british girls is expressive of white American anxieties about miscegenation. Absolutely right. It's kind of run through. I mean, they're Southern white soldiers. You know, they are stunned to see this. They just think it's against the laws of nature and God. But it's expressive of a way, isn't it, that America just seems, you know, whether it's white

or black to British people, just seems sexier. It does indeed. The war leaves Britain, you know, whether it's white or black to British people, just seems sexier. It does indeed. The war leaves Britain, you know, it's kind of washed out, grey, austerity everywhere. Whereas in America, it's all about bright primary colours. Absolutely right. Wealth, speed. And so that idea that America is, I guess, cool would be the word, is something that is hugely influential in the way that Britain comes to see America in the post-war years. And I think you're absolutely right. And I think there's about a 20-year period

after this point. So as I said, they arrived in 1942. So I'd say there's about a 22-year period when America completely has the upper hand in terms of not just high culture. I mean, you think of, I don't know, abstract expressionism and Saul Bellow or something, but also popular culture. And there's a real sense in the 1950s in particular, and the very early 1960s, that Britain is just becoming completely Americanized. So Harry Hopkins writes a book called The New Look in 1964, looking back to the late 40s, early 50s. And he says, American habits and vogues now cross the Atlantic with a speed and certainty that suggested that Britain was now merely one more offshore island. In John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger, 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis, the main character, Jimmy Porter, says, I must say,

it's pretty dreary living in the American age, unless you're American, of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans. And of course, children, teenagers at this point, I mean, the very word teenager is an American invention. They're copying American fashions, particularly listening to American music. So 1956 is also the year of Bill Haley and the Comets coming to Britain and inspiring, you know, sort of people terribly excited. But the music that particularly inspires people in Liverpool, you know, to snatch a city at random is black music. Yes, that's right. It is black music.

So the musical, so it's, you know, the blues and all that, but obviously particularly true, not just in groups like the Beatles, you know the Rolling Stones all those guys that the animals in the northeast all these bands are inspired by black music and the musical traffic is all one way so there are there are a couple of people um in Britain who make sort of weird dents in the American market so one of them is is Lonnie Donegan, who... Skiffle. Skiffle. But he sings with an adopted nasal fake American accent.

The other is Acker Bilk, who dresses as a kind of Edwardian band leader, but he's playing kind of jazz and there's no singing. So he's not, you know, Stranger on the Shore is his great hit. That actually reaches number one in America in May 1962. But you could be forgiven for not knowing that he was British. Now, of course, as you've just said, there is an absolute turning point, and that turning point is the visit of the Beatles.

Now, at first, most American executives, so we're talking about 1963, most American record company executives were very, very suspicious of the Beatles. So even after the summer of 1963, when the Beatles have had tremendous success in Britain, Capitals executives, the Capitals is the record company, they don't want to release them at first across the Atlantic. And in fact, their boss, Jay Livingston, tells George George Martin we don't think the Beatles will do anything in this market and this is because of what you say that Britain is perceived as grey bombed out old-fashioned tweedy dowdy boring unsexy you know terminally uncool yeah why would British music but eventually I suppose because they've seen the phenomenon of the screaming of the massive sales in Britain, capital's executives agree, okay, we'll give them a go.

And the one thing that people often miss about this story, so we in Britain tell the story a lot about the Beatles flying over, unexpectedly conquering America and all this sort of stuff. It's actually not really unexpected because capitalitals executives once they decided to do it they basically decided to go all in they go all in and they really really generate a lot of hype so the i want to hold your hand the beatles first single in america is released on boxing day 26th of december and they make sure that it's you know copies are sent to compliant disc jockeys that basically enormous amount of pressure is put on local radio stations

to play it. Everything is contrived. So even before the Beatles arrive in New York, which is the 7th of February, 1964, Capitol have spent $50,000, which is 10 times as much as they've ever spent on any other artist, on posters, on badges, on stickers, all this kind of thing to generate the hype.

They have sent four-page brochures to disc jockeys across the United States. They have basically bribed a crowd. So that crowd that you see to greet the Beatles, they have been bribed. They have been given each a dollar. It's like a Vladimir Putin crowd, Tom. They've been given a dollar and a free Beatles t-shirt. So when the Beatles get there and there's 5, who say, oh, the Beatles rolling their eyes and thinking, you know, it'd be lovely if they were revisionist about the Beatles, if they punctured the balloon. But sometimes it's a bit like you're talking about,

I don't know, it's a ludicrous comparison, Martin Luther or something. Sometimes you just have to say, listen, there's no getting away from the facts of history. Go on, Tom. But I mean, isn't the reason the Beatles succeed is that they are repackaging American culture to a degree? They are, of course. The Americans are sufficiently attuned to English culture that this fusion is something that America can immediately buy into. Agreed. Absolutely. They speak English. I mean, if they didn't speak English, this would not have happened. So their press conferences and so on are absolutely central to all this. I mean, Beatles are foes who roll their eyes when i say their native wit and whimsy but um but their native wit as it were is an absolutely crucial part of the

story but it's also the stereotype of it is that america is a nation in grieving after the assassination of kennedy and that it's this old world charm and life and light that revivifies it. I don't know whether, I mean, I'm sure you'll scoff at that. But the very fact that it is a myth that is told, I mean, it's a story that is told, it's a pretty radical reconfiguring of the role of Britain as being the country of light and joy and fizz and bubble. It's a massive reconfiguring.

Now, I personally don't think it's so much the Kennedy assassination, so much as the fact that American rock and roll music had gone into a bit of a trough and that they don't really – no new trendsetters emerged. Elvis is slightly yesterday's man. The new trends of the mid-60s haven't really got going. There's a slight sort of sense of American pop music being a bit kind of moribund, popular culture being a tiny bit moribund, and the Beatles offer something new. And their sort of jokiness, their sense of irony, their willingness to poke fun at themselves, all of which are very much part of British popular culture, kind of musical culture. Nobody has really done anything like that in the American kind of pop music world yet. So they appear on The Ed Sullivan Show,

the biggest TV audience in American history, 73 million people, even Billy Graham, who never watches TV on the Sabbath. He watches it so that he can see what his daughters are getting so excited about, apparently. Then tremendous kind of chart success.

So that spring, the Beatles have places 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 41, 46, 58, 65, 68, and 79 in the Billboard chart. So Taylor Swift-style dominance, I think it's fair to say. And that actually – so it's not just the Beatles, as you say, because otherwise it wouldn't be an interesting story. It's a story about the complete transformation of Britain's image so in the years before the Beatles arrival only Ackerbilk and the Tornado another instrumental the Tornado's Telstar had ever topped the Billboard chart but from February 1964 for the next two years British acts hogged the top spot in one out of every two

weeks. That's an incredible, from a country that previously had not done anything at all. But also, I mean, the explosion of music in the 60s, it's not just about the British conquering America. It's about British and American influences merging and mixing. Agreed. And so Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix come to Britain. Yeah, yeah. And it's the sense that there is maybe a kind of common Anglo-American culture once again. And that's the other, I mean, the other great British cultural artefact of the 60s, which is James Bond.

I mean, that's all, that's the same thing, right? It's produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, who are Americans. The films are made with American money. They're made predominantly for the American market, but they are selling the idea of British cool. Now, the interesting thing about this is I do not think this could have happened before this point because of the empire, because we talked about that sense of admiration and resentment. I think you can only do all this once the resentment no longer exists. So, in other words, Britain is no longer the imperial bully actually what britain is now is the post-imperial jester poking fun at its own yes but also it it couldn't happen if the

beatles had say been upper class or indeed um sean connery right yeah i mean that's true yeah that that obviously people in britain are, very attuned to the class system. Americans much less so. The divisions in America tend to be racial. In Britain, they tend to be class-based. But there is a sense that these are not the monocle-wearing redcoats who burn the villages of freedom-loving Americans. Exactly. I think that's absolutely right.

These are cheeky chappies. These are cheeky chappies. They're cheeky chappies. They're ordinary people. It's slightly hard to place them within an American context, which makes them kind of fun, makes them outsiders. So you have this British invasion. So this lasts, I would say, until about, let's say, the end of 1966. That's when you get the change to California,

to the music of San francisco more folky more hippie-ish more political and you can actually just trace that statistically by looking at the charts and see how all these bands like the dave clark five and herman's hermits kind of fall out of fashion at about that point though the beatles and stones continued the beatles and stones continue but i think it's fair to say that britness loses some of its cool. So that sort of, you know, I'm wearing a pair of Union Jack knickers. I'm Austin Powers. That sort of sense, definitely. But you still get...

So the, I mean, the archetypal parody of a rock documentary is Spinal Tap, where it's Americans pretending to be British. But the British aren't cool in Spinal Tap, are they? They're ludicrous. They're ridiculous. Yeah, they are ludicrous, but they're still the archetype of a successful rock band. They are, but I think the fact...

You wouldn't have made that in 1965, I would say. No, okay. Now, Spinal Tap actually is a nice segue because it illustrates... I mean, there's sort of... The sense of the British is becoming a bit ridiculous. That's always simmering, I think, even despite – I mean, it goes quiet during the British invasion,

but it's always there. You talked about Anglophobia. There's always, I think, a tendency, a pleasure, that some Americans get in sort of stamping on Britain. Dare I mention the Grey Lady, the New York Times. Now, that said, a lot of Americans do love Britain and they are coming over in increasing numbers. And I think what you get at the end of the 70s

is a lovely example of those two things colliding. So this is my final vignette. It's the 5th of March, 1979. So it's only weeks after the end of the winter of discontent in Britain, this very gloomy, dreary period of terrible industrial unrest that is about to bring the end of James Callaghan's Labour government and usher in Margaret Thatcher. You've got a couple of classic American visitors to Britain. They're called Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton. She's born in Britain. He's from California.

They've flown in. They drive up the m5 they arrive at their hotel which is in the english riviera tom you know the english riviera talky yeah yeah uh mr hamilton's in a foul mood he says everything's on the wrong side of the road what do you get for living in a climate like this that he thinks the m5 is like a back road because it's terrible he'd think the english riviera poor climate only a californian could think but finally they've arrived at that hotel like so many you know large numbers of tourists were coming 13 million tourists a year were coming to britain at the end of the 70s and a large proportion of them american mr hamilton is looking forward to getting a drink but

you know and then something to eat but the hotel owner says the kitchen's closed you know the kitchen stops at nine and uh would you have a ham or cheese sandwich instead and mr hamilton can't believe his ears and he says what the hell is wrong with this country you can't get a drink after three you can't eat after nine is the war still on and eventually there's a whole series of shambles it's mr hamilton orders um a waldorf salad he says I really want a Waldorf salad. And the hotelier says, I'm sorry, we're just out of Waldorfs. Because he doesn't know what a Waldorf salad is.

Mr. Hamilton goes, what the hell is going on here? You know something, fella? If this was back in the States, I wouldn't board my dog here. And the hotelier says, fussy, you see? Poodle. And this is, of course, the episode Waldorf Salad from the sitcom Fawlty Towers, John Cleese sitcom.

And if you haven't seen it, I heartily recommend it. It's very, very funny about Anglo-American cultural differences at the end of the 1970s. But actually, the brilliant thing about this is that it completely represents what people were saying about Britain. Americans were saying about Britain at the end of the 1970s, the beginning of the 1980s. I had a look at all these guidebooks about what American guidebooks said about Britain, because at this point, more Americans, I mean, apart from the war, more Americans are coming to Britain than ever before. So the Let's Go guide starts, I mean, the introduction, the Let's Go is done for backpackers and stuff. It's introduction, it says.

Consider what happens to a country when quite unexpectedly for 20 years, everything goes wrong. Rapid economic decline, massive loss of prestige in world politics, unemployment, inflation, Northern Ireland, riots, such as Britain's position today. I mean, imagine, that's the introduction to a tourist guide. The Fodor's introduction, right, which is written for older, more affluent travellers. Again, this is 1982.

This is literally how the preface begins, Tom. For all its increasing air of shabbiness, its strikes, its unpredictable weather, Britain is still a desirable destination. So it's sort of, it's like you apologising for doing football in a Restless History podcast.

Yes, it is. So the guidebooks are hilarious. They go on and on about how terrible everything is. The thing that everyone goes on about, funny enough, going back to the faulty towers of the hotels. Paul Theroux, the great travel writer, wrote a book called Kingdom by the Sea in 1982. He's writing that during the Falklands War, isn't he?

Yeah. He says, every large hotel in Britain is run down or badly managed, overpriced, understaffed and dirty. The staff overworked and slow. He says the staff are always lazy, dishonest and aggressive. British hotels are indistinguishable from prisons or hospitals being run with the same indifference or cruelty. Which the British are aware of as well, because otherwise Fawlty Towers wouldn't have chimed the way they did. Of course.

So the British do kind of know this. But even so, I think people are still quite shocked by the way in which Americans talk about Britain because the way that Americans talk about British hotels is actually the way that Americans talk about Britain economically and politically. So 1975, very famously, the United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, there's a transcript of an Oval Office White House conversation in which he says to Gerald Ford these words,

Britain is a tragedy, begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in, that Britain has become such a scrounger. It's a disgrace. Ford, when he leaves office in January 1977, I mean, this is so humiliating, Tom. In his farewell remarks as president, he says these words, it would be tragic for this country

if we went down the same path and ended up with the same problems that Great Britain has. And this sort of goes on and on. There's a Harvard political scientist called Samuel Beer, writes a book in 1982 called Britain Against Itself. And in the preface, he explains why he's written the book. And he says, basically, I was inspired by a conversation with one of my students at Harvard. When Beer said to her, why do you want to do my class? She said, well, my father told me to do it. He said, study England, a country on its knees.

That's where America is going. And that view is, I mean, it's so widespread. Well, so this is going back to the Harold Macmillan, Greece and Rome. It is, absolutely. And the people that absolutely incarnate this. So this is what brings it back to the present. The institution that is the embodiment of this attitude is the New York Times. So then as now, I mean, you could swap New York Times articles about post-Brexit Britain

with New York Times articles about 1970s Britain. Unbelievable. But isn't it, I mean, today it's more complicated because I think we discussed this before, that it's a marketing strategy for the New York Times. Yes. Because it's looking to expand into the British market. And so it's pitching at people who are to the left of the Guardian. Right.

It's people who love the self-flagellation. But that's not what the New York Times is doing in the – I mean, when the New York Times writes in 1978 on – No, not in the 80s. It's an indisputable fact that Britain has a relatively low standard of living, a poor choice of goods, bungling and slowness at all levels, and a manana attitude that infuriates even spaniards i mean all this i mean i apologize to spanish listeners i mean even

all this sort of stuff is not aimed at getting subscribers it speaks to some degree of maybe even unconscious contempt absolutely but but if we i mean if we look going forward now yeah i think there is a difference there, which is that actually, I mean, you were saying that in the years immediately after the war, there was an anxiety in Britain that Britain was basically becoming an American satrapy. And I think the fact that Britain is seen now by the American behemoths that govern the media, and particularly social media and the internet and all those kinds of things. I mean, it is simply a province now. I mean, it's simply a subdivision to be developed however you want to. And that's what the New York Times are doing.

Tom, this is very depressing. But I think the consequence of that is that actually we are much more Americanized now than we've ever been because of social media. And because the language of the internet is American. Well, our intellectual elite are more Americanized than they've ever been. And they're the people, for example, who use media, academics. They're the people who are on Twitter and who are picking up American obsessions, who are getting excited about whether or not you can say Anglo-Saxon. Exactly. All of these kinds of things. But are of the public at large people who work in shoe shops i don't know i mean i know that's always your your argument i don't know that's the

sambrick reflex i think that is the sambrick reflex i guess they're all watching netflix i guess they're what you know yeah they're probably watching the bbc less they're watching netflix more i would say so we should end by saying how that Fawlty Towers thing ends. Because of course, I promised you this, Mr. Hamilton, and this is your thing about British self-flagellation,

Tom, because Mr. Hamilton assembles the other guests and Basil gives this fantastic speech. He says, they all satisfy customers. Of course, if this little hotel

is not to your taste, then you are free to say so. That is your privilege. And I shall, of course, refund your money. I know how important it is to you Americans, he says. But you must remember that here in Britain are things that we value more, things that perhaps in America you've rather forgotten, but which here in Britain are far, far more important.

And at that point, somebody interrupts him and says, I'm not satisfied. And then all the other British guests say, yeah, it's actually terrible. And so the American wins the day. Do you know how Basil ends the entire conversation, Tom? I can't remember. This is exactly how Nazi Germany started. Well, that is the perfect note on which to end a history podcast.

We hope you have enjoyed it. May the best team today win. And we will see you again tomorrow for more I don't know where we're going because we haven't worked out more historical wittering more historical witterings we'll see you then

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