Ohio History Journal

edited by

THOMAS E. HACHEY

 

Cincinnati Through English

Spectacles: A British Diplomat's

Confidential View in 1945

 

 

 

 

In the months immediately following the Second World War, British consuls sta-

tioned throughout the United States forwarded to the London Foreign Office a sub-

stantial number of telegrams, memoranda, and dispatches regarding the climate of

American opinion toward England. What Winston Churchill had called "the Grand

Alliance" seemed, in the judgment of many of these diplomats, to be an increasingly

tenuous liaison.l The post-war world contained new and often divisive circumstances

in contradistinction to the unity produced by a common cause in the period of hos-

tilities. Some of the consuls cautioned against allowing satisfaction with the Allied

victory to obscure the implications and significance of another reality: the likelihood

that British dependence upon the United States would become progressively greater

in the years ahead. All seemed to agree that promoting goodwill with the Americans

should be one of the highest priorities of His Majesty's Government. Indeed, the

London Foreign Office had undertaken a comprehensive effort to propagandize

Americans during the period immediately preceding World War II,² and had con-

tinued that effort under somewhat different guises during the larger part of that

conflict.³ The future need for amicable Anglo-American relations was certainly

apparent to Foreign Office officials in 1945 and they accorded the closest scrutiny

to recommendations by British consuls in the United States regarding how that end

might best be achieved.⁴ One of the most engaging of these communications was a

dispatch which London received on November 5, 1945 from Arthur H. Tandy, the

British consul at Cincinnati. So impressed by this dispatch was the Foreign Office

 

 

1. These documents, arranged by calendar years, are among both the Foreign Office general

correspondence files (F.O. 371) and its consular files (F.O. 115) located at the London Public

Record Office.

2. See Thomas E. Hachey, "Winning Friends and Influencing Policy: British Strategy to Woo

America in 1937," Wisconsin Magazine of History, LV (Winter 1971-1972), 120-129.

3. See F. 0. 371/30652-30727; 34086-34091; 38501-38676; 44535-44550 which contain a

substantial number of documents attesting to this effort between the years 1942 and 1945.

4. In addition to the Foreign Office minutes contained in volumes like F.O. 371/44615, see

also the Foreign Office private collections (F.O. 800) and Foreign Office Confidential Print

(F.O. 401-490) for further evidence of this sentiment.

 

Mr. Hachey is Associate Professor of History, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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280                                                                OHIO HISTORY

 

that it printed several copies and circulated them among members of the British Cab-

inet for their guidance and instruction.⁵

Arthur Tandy was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the first assignment

of his foreign service career in 1929 was to the British consulate in Philadelphia.

Thereafter, Tandy served as acting consul-general at Los Angeles and, in November

1939, was appointed consul at New York. He remained at that post until March 10,

1943, when he was transferred as consul to the recently established British consulate

at Cincinnati. In his dispatch of more than two years later, Tandy sought to justify

sustaining such consulates as the one at Cincinnati even though the war-time exigen-

cies which had inspired their establishment no longer existed. His report, however,

extends far beyond the scope of such a rationale and constitutes a well informed anal-

ysis of both Cincinnatians and Americans from the perspective of a professionally

trained foreign observer.

Facts and opinions are liberally mixed in Tandy's report, and his prognostications

vary from the highly fallible to the remarkably prophetic. Tandy found Cincinnati

insular and parochial, isolated not only from Europe and the world, but also from

other regions of the United States. He viewed the community as a faded Queen City,

one in which life by 1945 had become mired in lethargy, due partly to the static

nature of existence at the river level, and partly to the blandness of the stodgy Ger-

man-American population. In his observations concerning discrimination toward

Jews and Negroes in Cincinnati, Tandy predicted that prejudice toward the latter in

the United States had created a social problem which was destined to result in future

strife. On a national level, the British diplomat deemed that a majority of the Amer-

ican public suffered from chronic mental and emotional instability. He was particu-

larly concerned that a combination of simple ignorance, latent Anglophobia and

America's instinctive isolationist impulse might result in a serious chasm between the

United States and Great Britain. Tandy recommended that the London Government

direct a concentrated program for the enlightenment of American youth whom he

believed were more educable than their elders since the latter often held irreconcilable

anti-British biases. A large part of his report was intended to illustrate how effective

British consulates like the one in Cincinnati could be in facilitating that task and how

their continuance was therefore essential.

Documents such as British Consul Tandy's dispatch to the London Foreign Office

normally would have remained closed to public view for several more years even

under the reduced restrictions of the Public Records Act of 19676 had it not been

for a Parliamentary ruling in 1971 which authorized the opening of government

archives through the year 1945. These heretofore unavailable archival sources were

accordingly declassified, arranged by subject headings, and made available at the

 

 

5. Dispatch No. 1363, British Embassy, Washington, D.C., to the Foreign Office, London,

October 26, 1945. F.O. 371/44615. Enclosed in this dispatch was Arthur Tandy's own report

from the consulate at Cincinnati. The latter was given limited circulation among members of the

British Cabinet as a part of the file known as the Foreign Office Confidential Print.

6. Access to British Government archives is presently governed by the Public Records Act of

1967, which introduced from January 1, 1968, a "thirty year rule," opening the records then to

the end of 1937 and making provision thereafter for the annual advancement of the open date on

January 1 of each year. A few papers are closed for fifty years by virtue of the Lord Chancellor's

instruments under Section 5 (i) of the 1958 Public Records Act.

7. The suspension of the 1967 Public Records Act was intended to assist scholars engaged

in studies which extend over the entire period of World War II. Other than this specific excep-

tion so generously authorized by Parliament, the "thirty year rule" is still in force.

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Cincinnati, 1945                                                       281

 

London Public Record Office for the first time in the summer of 1972.⁷ The value

of these sources for the student of Anglo-American relations is manifest in the num-

ber of insights afforded by pertinent portions of the document which follows. Both

the perceptivity of the author and the unique qualities of the region about which

he writes contribute to making the report by the British consul at Cincinnati distinc-

tive and exceptional. Moreover, the unconscious elitism and traces of condescension

discernable in this dispatch, despite a genuine effort at objectivity, reveal at least as

much about the British diplomat as they do about the people of Cincinnati. Mr.

Tandy's report begins:8

"The British Consulate at Cincinnati is one of the four new independent consular

posts created in the interior of the United States in the latter part of 1942 and early

1943, the other three being Denver, Kansas City and St. Paul-Minneapolis.

*     *    *

"The creation and conduct of such posts was inevitably experimental. This report,

based upon two years' experience at one of them, is submitted in the belief that the

present is an appropriate moment to assess the worth and effectiveness of the new

consulates in the United States, now that the abnormal conditions in which they have

operated (and to meet which their creation was largely designed) have been brought

to an end by the conclusion of the World War.

"By contrast with its notable contribution to the growth and development of nearly

every great city in the United States, British stock in Cincinnati is comparatively neg-

ligible both in numbers and influence. The population is basically German, origina-

ting in the 1848 migrations, the Germanic influx continuing fairly steady until the

outbreak of the first World War. There is also a substantial Italian and a smaller

Irish element; but of comparative newcomers of English, Scottish or Canadian birth,

of the type so prominent in business and professional life in other large American

cities, no more than a handful. In fact there are hardly any British subjects in Cin-

cinnati at all and very few in the consular district. Why, then, open a British con-

sulate? Our critics did not fail to raise the question. It could be fairly effectively

countered by informing them that until recently, in proportion to the population, the

United States had for many years maintained rather more consular posts in Britain,

and those situated in rather smaller cities, than had Britain in the United States. Prior

to the war the figures were twelve United States Consulates in Britain (population

45 million) and twenty British Consulates in the United States (population 130

million). And if Bradford with less than 300,000 inhabitants was worth a consul,

it could be held that Cincinnati had a rather better claim with its more than half a

million. True there are few British subjects in Cincinnati; but neither is there any

large number of American citizens in Birmingham. The effect of these statistics

could be followed up by pointing out that, before the creation of the new posts, the

British consular district of St. Louis contained both Kentucky and Colorado within

its boundaries and thus comprised a territory stretching from the Appalachians to

the Rockies, a distance of 1,500 miles, the width of Europe excluding Russia. No

 

 

8. Approximately one-third of the text was deleted since no purpose would be served by

including Tandy's narration of facts or events which may have been unfamiliar to foreign

readers but are commonplace knowledge to most Americans. Sections of the dispatch dealing

with Kentucky and West Virginia were also omitted since they were only incidental to the main

report on Cincinnati. Otherwise the vagaries of spelling, capitalization, and paragraphing have

been followed exactly as in the original typed manuscript.

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282                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

argument was needed to establish the contention that so huge a district could not be

effectively covered from a single centre.⁹

"From this large and unmanageable area the new Cincinnati district took away the

whole of Kentucky, except the southwestern corner known as the Purchase; from

Detroit it inherited a fringe of Southern Ohio counties skirting the northern bank

of the Ohio River; and from Baltimore the western half of West Virginia. The

Southern Ohio strip is a region of prosperous farming and imperturbable mental

outlook. Throughout this region the Taft family name and influence still command

strong loyalties; and geographical remoteness, traditional self-reliance and economic

well-being combine to minimise the significance of international events. Hostility

to the foreigner begins close to home. Washington and New York are at times the

object of antagonisms and suspicions hardly less acute than those directed more

continuously at Britain and Russia. It is in such rural areas, in the opinion of the

writer, even more than in the Middle Western cities, that the hard core of American

isolationism lies.

*     *    *

"Cincinnati still wears the title of Queen City of the West conferred upon her by

[Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow,10 but it recalls lost opportunities no less than former

pre-eminence. Long before Chicago had mushroomed to notoriety and fortune, Cin-

cinnati was the undisputed Mid-Western metropolis, the prevailing steamboat travel

of the era bringing to its banks a colourful and aggressive throng of pioneers, as well

as many contemporary European celebrities, including [Charles] Dickens and [Wil-

liam Makepeace] Thackeray. Here, too, Mrs. [Frances Milton] Trollope gathered

gall for her celebrated volume, "The Domestic Manners of the Americans," and her

Bazaar gave America its first and probably least successful department store. It was

not solely the decline of the stern-wheeler and the coming of the railroad that ended

this golden age. The conservatism of the people also played its part. The predomi-

nant German population has been true to type not only in its virtues but also in its

limitations. Thrifty and industrious, a high percentage of them home owners with

a commendably negligible tax delinquency record, favoured too by a well-diversified

industry (machine tools, soap, meat packing, plastics and paper), they have not been

conspicuous for taking chances. Only last year the City declined, among a number of

new industrial projects, a proposal of General Motors to build an automobile body

plant in the suburbs. Few communities, on the eve of reconversion and with the

bogey of depression round the corner, would have looked such a gift horse in the

mouth. But Cincinnati did so and for an interesting reason. The proposed factory

would have encroached on a zoned residential district. The City Planning Commis-

sion, disregarding the protests of the press and Chamber of Commerce, took the

view that human and family values and the contractual obligations arising from homes

built in reliance upon the permanence of healthy and agreeable surroundings out-

weighed the promised economic benefits of the new factory. The Commission may

also have reflected that it was better to leave well alone, and that a city with 90 per

cent of its population American-born could do without the motley and heterogeneous

 

9. The British Government terminated the consulate at Cincinnati in September 1958 after

determining that English interests in that region could be sufficiently served by the British con-

sulate general at Cleveland, which is still in operation.

10. Tandy is in error since Longfellow was but 27 years old and had not begun his writing

career in 1834, a date by which the term "Queen City of the West" was already in common

usage. See Alvin E. Harlow, The Serene Cincinnatians (New York, 1950), 33.

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Cincinnati, 1945                                                     283

 

influx which the automobile industry invariably attracts and the concomitant labour

troubles which have long plagued Cleveland and Detroit. But the decision, which

is not an isolated instance and has been paralleled in the past, explains why Cincinnati

has failed to match the growth of Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago.

"The writer, who has now had experience of United States posts both on the East-

ern and Pacific seaboards as well as the Middle West, found Cincinnati unique in one

minor but interesting respect. He has never before lived in an American city where

prominent business and professional men engage in intellectual hobbies and are not

afraid of owning up to them. Thus the senior partner of a leading Cincinnati law

firm is a Chaucer devotee and owns a notable library of Chaucerian and early English

literature. The writer's landlord, a real estate operator, has been a lifelong Petrarch

scholar and confesses that, when as a younger man he visited the then leading French

Petrarchist of the day, the latter was impressed almost to tears by the revelation that

his subject was a matter of interest to anyone in the United States. Another business

executive is a student of Russian iconography, and yet another an avowed cultivator

of the Greek and Latin classics. This refreshing departure from the general philis-

tinism of average American business and professional life finds a visible centre in the

Monday evening gatherings of the Literary Club, founded shortly after the Civil

War, whose members meet in rooms befittingly reminiscent of the eighteenth century

and maintain a high standard both of subject matter and literary expression in their

weekly papers.

"But apart from this agreeable and unexpected intellectual bypath, the mental

atmosphere of Cincinnati is far from bracing. This may be due to climate and geo-

graphical location, to the miasmas and torpors inseparable from life at river level.

Unkinder critics aver, with some plausibility, that the native stodginess of the basic

German element has permeated the entire population. Whatever the reason, it is

undeniable that Cincinnatians do not bring to their controversies any noticeable dis-

play of violent feeling. Thus local isolationism and anti-British prejudice, apart from

some vehement manifestations towards the close of the neutrality epoch, have run

in comparatively unruffled grooves and lacked the viciousness that characterises their

expression in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. Cincinnati, one is often tempted to

surmise, cares for none of these things. It is, or would like to be, indifferent to them,

a Laodicea among cities. Apart from the rising toll of casualties towards the close

of hostilities, it may be seriously doubted whether the population felt the war's impact

to any sensible degree. There appears to be little hope of any fundamental alteration

in this attitude of rooted indifference to external events. For most people, and not

only in the Middle West, the unseen and the unknown are also the unimaginable.

The atomic bomb and rocket-propulsion may work a change, but both are in their

infancy and we do not know what defence may be contrived to meet them. If science,

as is not inconceivable, can repeat the uniform pattern of past experience and devise

effective counter-measures to these inventions (and even if it does not), American

isolationism may yet take on a new, vigorous and dangerous lease of life. Signs of its

re-emergence were becoming abundantly apparent towards the end of the war period,

even amid the mounting crescendo of Allied victory. In the Middle Western atmo-

sphere, it is a factor that can never be completely discounted: endemic, tenacious

and ever potentially resurgent.

"In such an atmosphere, the only effective defence is, if not attack, at least sur-

prise, and it is undeniable that the simplest facts of the British case are novel and

peculiar to Mid-Western ears. Thus the manner and content of the spoken word

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284                                                          OHIO HISTORY

 

acquire a corresponding importance. There is, as everywhere throughout the United

States, no lack of invitations from Rotary clubs, societies and organisations, church,

school and college groups, the ordinary stock-in-trade of a consul's public speaking

activity. These for many years now have come to expect a 'good talk' from a British

consular officer as a matter of course; and however galling it may be to know that

they are getting for nothing what they pay for on other occasions (and there were

weeks, especially when his appointment was newly current, when the writer was

obliged to decline, in favour of war relief and other charitable causes, proffered fees

amounting to anything from 100 to 200 dollars), such groups incontestably offer

a valuable unsolicited forum for getting the British standpoint across. Manner is as

important as matter, for the impression left by a speaker outlives recollection of his

remarks, which are all too quickly forgotten. Sincerity and straight talking are the

most effective approaches, and hostility can often be disarmed by frank confession.

It is true, and the admission does no harm, that until recently the average Britisher

was far more ignorant of the United States than the average American of Britain.

The disclosure can be followed up with the information that in an effort to fill the

lacuna we are now teaching American history in our schools (and even importing

American professors to help us do it); but that although we may be ignorant of

American history, on the fundamental fact of that history, the Revolution, we are

taught that the Americans were right and we were wrong; and if that was all the

American history we ever learned, we should still have mastered its most valuable

lesson. Such an opening can usually secure an attentive reception for explanations

of the true nature and evolution of the Commonwealth and Empire. It can be de-

veloped with a plea for reciprocity and an elimination of the anti-British bias that

has so long luxuriated within the pages of the average American textbook.

"The writer made it his business to speak in as many universities and teachers'

training colleges as possible. Higher educational institutions in the Cincinnati con-

sular district, while not matching the remarkable number of such institutions in

Northern Ohio, present some distinctive and noteworthy features. Cincinnati itself

is the seat of the largest municipal university in the country; Louisville, also a munici-

pal university, possesses in its president [Einan William Jacobson] an experienced

authority in the field of primary education, one who believes that American national

prejudices are too costly a luxury in the modern world, and who is taking practical

steps towards ensuring that the chauvinistic and tendentious school textbooks of the

past are progressively replaced by works written for Americans by American scholars

conforming to more enlightened and objective standards. The University of Ken-

tucky at Lexington boasts a particularly active agricultural department, which, as is

fitting in a predominantly agricultural region, maintains a close and fruitful con-

nexion with the practical farming activity of the State. Berea, a unique institution,

brings higher educational opportunity to the young mountain population, and com-

bines it with a significant achievement in the field of handicrafts. It was invariably

possible to ask the president of these and other colleges to pass one along to the

next. University audiences, which during the war years have included large numbers

of armed services trainees taking special courses, afforded a valuable opportunity

for hearing and gauging the opinion of modern American youth and those who will

soon be teaching the American youth of to-morrow. The questions put by these

students were often more intelligent and to the point than those of their elders.

"But with all audiences, it must be confessed, adolescent or adult, one invariably

found that one could not take too much for granted. On repeated occasions one

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Cincinnati, 1945                                                      285

 

launched into more advanced topics only to be brought up short at question time

with the inevitable 'When are you going to give Australia its freedom?' Or 'Why

does India have to pay taxes to Britain?' One soon became reconciled to this and

took consolation in the thought that one's remarks, in addition to their primary in-

formative function, stimulated a very necessary catharsis. If such beliefs exist, they

had better come out and the bosom be cleansed of its perilous stuff. It was possible

to hint to teachers that, since nearly everybody in the United States has been to

school, such beliefs are a challenge to the teaching profession; that these are dan-

gerous days for illusions or delusions; and that, since the penalty for being wrong

is apt to be costly, it is far safer to find out the facts and to stick to them.

"Nevertheless it is necessary to consider seriously whether these public speaking

duties, to which British consular officers in the United States are now irrevocably

committed, are worth while. The point has been keenly argued and every consular

officer who has seen his working time and leisure cut into by the insistent demands

of the insatiable and unboreable American public has asked himself the question.

Leaving aside the consideration that constant refusal of such invitations would

impair a British official's effectiveness in this country, there is no certain answer.

Such activity necessarily resembles pouring water into a sieve. If we are silent, our

enemies have it all their own way. On the other hand the unconverted are difficult

to reach and harder to convince. The prurient and censorious criticism, to which

the American people are so notoriously addicted, is undoubtedly a pathological

phenomenon warranting the studious attention of the social scientist and the psy-

chiatrist. To live in the midst of it as a stranger becomes with the passage of time

an exhausting experience. The fact must be faced that the mental and emotional

instability of a large majority of the American public is chronic. It is the perpetual

necessity of making the medicine of public relations its daily bread which imposes

so constant a strain on the duties of a foreign service assignment in the United States

and which, in the writer's opinion, renders inadvisable the posting there of officers

of junior or intermediate seniority for too long and uninterrupted periods of service.

"The plain truth is that the American public, in words once used to the writer

by a college president, is grossly and dangerously ignorant of foreign affairs. The

removal of such ignorance through existing educational and publicity channels is a

clear responsibility of the United States Government, as a matter of hard-headed

self-interest. But notwithstanding the recent descent of State Department specialists

into the arenas of public meeting and radio forum, it may well be doubted whether

the United States Government will ever adequately measure up to the task; and the

American press and radio are, with some notable exceptions, too irresponsible to

form and adhere to a proper conception of their function in this important particular.

So to the limited extent that any corrective can be administered by British officials,

the British taxpayer has to foot the bill. This statement is made with all due reserve.

Britain stands or falls in foreign public opinion by her deeds. If these are bad or

unwise, no words will gild them. On the other hand what is received in return for

publicising a good cause or a sound course of action is an imponderable, but none

the less important for that and in the testing time may well prove of incalculable

value. If Mr. Churchill's dream of an Anglo-American Union ever materialises, the

British Foreign and Information Services in the United States will have played their

part in securing this consummation and have earned their footnote in the histories.

"... The roots of anti-British prejudices have often been analysed. But an oppor-

tunity to study unfamiliar manifestations at first hand is always illuminating. The

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286                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

German-American population of Cincinnati is not pro-Nazi. Its forebears fled Ger-

many to escape Nazidom's earlier and, by comparison, somewhat less odious pre-

cursors. Its ranks have not been swelled by recent immigration, there was no Bund

in this region to bid for its sympathies nor has it possessed any German language

newspaper for many years. Yet like so many strains which have settled in the

United States, including those from Britain, the German-American tends to look

back to the land of his origin with a wrong-headed nostalgia. He pictures Gemut-

lichkeit, beer gardens, music and mountains and, forgetting conscription, discipline,

brutality, recreates an ideal Germany that never existed. There are those who claim

that he is really unhappy, although he does not know it, and ill at ease in the prom-

ised land, whose material blessings are an insufficient compensation for a lost Eden

of spiritual and aesthetic values, looks round for a scapegoat, which in the shape

of Britain is readily provided for him both by American tradition and his own an-

cestral antipathies.

"At the other extreme stands the Anglophile, perhaps even more dangerous than

the Anglophobe. He too looks back to a romanticised past, to the England of manor

houses and country lanes and thatched cottages and Stratford-upon-Avon; although

Stratford is no more representative of England than is Santa Barbara of the United

States. We should indeed importune Heaven to save us from such friends. It is in

this respect that organisations like the English Speaking Union may conceivably

menace the future of Anglo-American relations. While some branches are aware

of the danger and have endeavoured to liberalise and extend their membership,

others (and Cincinnati is one of them) have preferred to remain closed and exclusive

corporations. Yet an English Speaking Union should conceive its mission as directed

to all whose language is English, irrespective of origin. Too often the pride of Brit-

ish ancestry paraded by its members is a pharisaic relief that they are not Bohunks

or Wops. The demographers predict, however, that in time the Anglo-Saxon ele-

ment of the American population will decline before the greater fertility of other

stocks. Already we are witnessing symptoms of the process. A son of Slovenian

parents is now Governor of Ohio [Frank Lausche] and a son of Italians [Fiorello

LaGuardia] has long been Mayor of New York. A President of the United States

may one day be named Bogoslavsky or Castellini. Self-interest has ousted senti-

ment as the only rational basis of Anglo-American co-operation. The next step is

to concentrate, irrespective of blood and race, on that community of language and

law and common ideals which Britons and Americans share, in the comforting re-

flection that when Britain and the United States are really menaced, the logic of

events forces them together, whether they like it or not, in defence of the security

of their joint heritage.

"With regard to the work of the British Information Services, the writer's experi-

ence reinforces the conclusion that, since the possibility of harnessing individual

speaking talent to official policy has ceased with the termination of the war, the

most promising scope for the continuation and development of information activities

offers in the field of education. The B.I.S. reputation stands high in educational

circles, as within more limited terms of reference between the two wars did that

of its forerunner, the British Library of Information. The prejudices and ignorance

of many of our elder American critics are convictions of too settled and cherished

a stamp to respond to the arts of enlightenment and persuasion. We must cut our

losses in this quarter and concentrate on the young. If the B.I.S. can maintain its

standards of quality, teachers and students will continue to appreciate and request

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Cincinnati, 1945                                                      287

 

its exhibition and printed material, the placing of which has presented on difficulties

in the Cincinnati consular district during the war years. It would, however, in the

opinion of many competent observers, be unwise to concentrate or restrict this

effort in the direction of university and high school, important as these institutions

are in the American educational scheme. Rather will it be found profitable to keep

in mind and to cater as efficiently as opportunity offers to the requirements of the

primary public and parochial schools at the base of the educational structure, which

bulk largest in the school experience of the majority of American children and in

which their thinking patterns are still predominantly formed. There are obvious dif-

ficulties in these quarters, but they can often be surmounted, and where this is so,

the initiative is well worth the effort. Visual education is clearly destined to play

an augmented role throughout the educational system, for now that consumer restric-

tions are lifted, the process, already begun, of equipping every school with a pro-

jector will continue at a rapid rate. Here our difficulty will lie in the discovery of

peace-time film subjects comparable in interest to the best of the war documentaries.

Hollywood has taught American youth impatience at the absence of action and pace

on the motion picture screen and reconstruction and social problems are at a decided

disadvantage in this respect compared with the Battle of Malta. The pictorial re-

sources of British history may be found worth cultivating in this connection. Finally,

the strongest of pleas must again be lodged for a sensitive attention to sound, that

continuing stumbling block of British films in the United States.^1l

"No discussion of the projection of Britain would be complete without mention

of the unspectacular but none the less highly effective achievement of the B.B.C.

which, working closely with American radio stations, of which one of the most

co-operative has been Cincinnati's clear-channel powerful and far-reaching W.L.W.,

has diffused a familiarity with everyday British life and custom in both urban and

rural homes throughout broad regions of the Middle West. The success of these

broadcast programmes, which could not have been approached by any other medium

of communication, is amply substantiated by their popularity and the correspon-

dence and friendship they have developed between American listeners and broad-

casters in Britain. By their revelation of typical British men and women as people

whose daily lives and work and aspirations are not unrecognisably dissimilar from

those of 100 per cent Americans, they have done much to remove local delusions

on the subject of British habit and character.

"The mention of radio recalls music, and in view of the meagre British participa-

tion in Cincinnati's general development it is pleasant to be able to record a notable

British contribution in the field of the arts by Mr. Eugene Goossens, who has for

some dozen years directed and conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

"On the subject of the press, the student of American institutions cannot fail to

mark and be puzzled by the qualitative disparity between the newspapers of one

city and another. The balance, informed criticism and good writing which have

made, for instance, the Courier Journal of Louisville one of the outstanding news-

papers of the United States are not matched in Cincinnati, a larger city. The Bing-

ham family have, indeed, brought to the building-up of the Courier Journal into

a high quality newspaper a large part of the money and effort, which other pub-

lishers devote to securing advertising and pecuniary profit. The close associations

 

11. Consul Tandy was very probably referring to the difficulty which American audiences

had in understanding unfamiliar English dialects.

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288                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

of the family with Britain have been a great asset to the British cause, although

there are those who believe that the paper's management is in danger of overplaying

its hand in this particular. Under the present regime of Mr. Mark Ethridge, who has

been consistently friendly and helpful to the work of the consulate in the Louisville

area, its policy displays marked Liberal characteristics, not only in foreign affairs

where, indeed, it exhibits some of the typical wrong-headedness of the American

Liberal in these unfamiliar regions, but also in domestic matters, especially by ad-

vocacy of the south's pleas for removal of economic discrimination and champion-

ship of fair practices for the coloured citizen. Here it challenges powerful vested

interests and, enjoying a publishing monopoly in Louisville, may provoke bitter

opposition in the conflicts for which opposing forces are now gathering. By com-

parison with the Courier Journal, the editorial comment of the Cincinnati Enquirer

displays a marked pedestrian quality, although it has recently improved considerably

since the paper's able and aggressive foreign editor returned from war service. The

Cincinnati Times-Star, the Taft paper, in spite of some reflections of the Senator's

stubborn and unimaginative obtuseness, fails in general to reflect the more repre-

hensible features of mid-western prejudice, largely owing to the personality of its

publisher, Mr. Hulbert Taft, who delights in the self-styled appellation of "pro-

British isolationist." Mr. Taft likes to see Britain taking a strong line. Unlike the

majority of his publishing colleagues he thoroughly approved of British action in

Greece in the winter of 1944-45, for which he was at some pains to discover alleged

precedents in the Philippine compaign of 1899. Notwithstanding a nominal isola-

tionism, the Times-Star's comment on foreign affairs is on the whole sane, balanced

and well-informed, reflecting the able and conscientious work of the Rhodes scholar

who writes it.

"To speak of religious matters, Dr. Henry Wise Hobson, the Episcopal Bishop of

Southern Ohio, has taken an active interest in the American assumption of respon-

sibility for Anglican foreign missions during the war and paid an official visit to

England on the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury last year. He staunchly

supported the Allied cause before America's entrance into hostilities and displayed

signal courage in the face of opposition in doing so. Many think that he is likely

to be the next or next-but-one presiding Bishop. The Episcopal communion in this

region is not, however, large. A far more numerous membership attaches to other

Protestant denominations, some of whose pastors were born in Britain and most

of whom offer a friendly and receptive welcome to a British representative. The

Catholics of Cincinnati are estimated at 40 per cent of the city's population. Arch-

bishop McNicholas, their leader, a Dominican presiding over one of the older sees

of the United States, is intellectually one of the outstanding members of the North

American hierarchy. Neither by tradition nor inclination is the Catholic Church

in the United States particularly disposed to friendliness towards Britain, for suffi-

ciently comprehensible historical reasons.

*     *    *

"Cincinnati is a Jewish centre of some importance; the original home of American

Liberal Judaism; the seat of an influential Hebrew Theological Seminary, over-

shadowed somewhat in recent years by rivals on the eastern seaboard, and the resi-

dence of several prominent Jewish clergymen. Rabbi James Heller, the most out-

standing of these, a zealous and outspoken Zionist and chairman of the United

Palestine Appeal, toured Palestine extensively this year. His is likely to be one of

the more importunate voices in the rising insistence of American Zionist agitation.

• 10
 

Cincinnati, 1945                                                     289

 

The Jewish community of Cincinnati, originating chiefly from Eastern Germany

before the setting in of the full flood of indiscriminate trans-atlantic migration, is on

the whole of a rather higher calibre than that of other American cities, and it partici-

pates actively and constructively in civic affairs and in organisations devoted to social

problems, the preservation of the charter form of municipal Government, of which

Cincinnati was a pioneer exponent, and also the foreign policy association. This

relative superiority and sense of civic responsibility does not, however, render the

Jewish element fundamentally any more acceptable to the remainder of the com-

munity. Here, as elsewhere, the personal and communal virtues of individual Jews

seem unable to resolve the complications of Jewry's basic and universal problem.

"There is a Mohammedan place of worship in Cincinnati, presided over by a

British Indian subject. Since the city boasts no oriental population of any size, the

composition of the congregation is a matter of legitimate curiosity and, indeed, of

surprise, consisting, as it does, largely of negroes. It is not clear by what attraction

these were proselytised from their traditional attachment to the fervours and devo-

tions of the emotional Christianity, which is the negro's distinctive contribution to

the American religious scene. A prominent Punjaubi Moslem visitor, who viewed

the phenomenon with satisfaction, once told the writer that he considered Islam

a most suitable religion for American negroes, since its fundamental doctrine of

the equality of men before their Creator was admirably fitted to sustain and inspire

their pending struggle for civil, economic and social rights.

"Of the negro problem Cincinnati, a meeting place of north and south, affords

opportunities for close and intimate study. Here it must suffice to state that there

has been a large coloured influx from the south in recent years and that in spite of

inevitable overcrowding and exploitation, coloured gains have been made. Negroes

have won the right of admission to municipal housing projects from which their

exclusion was originally intended, and there is a reasonably healthy community in-

terest in their welfare. At a recent rally the largest public dinner ever held in the

city, advocating racial tolerance and fair treatment for the negro, a mixed white

and coloured attendance, which included many guests of civic, professional and

religious prominence, sat down together at table. The stresses of the coloured prob-

lem, although by no means dormant, are less intrusive and vehement than in the

larger industrial centres. Professors of sociology in the universities are inclined to

take an academic view of the difficulty and to prophesy its ultimate disappearance

in the assimilation of the two races. To the question of Wilberforce's critic: 'You say

"My black brother": Would you like to say "My black brother-in-law"?' The more

tenacious exponents of this theory reply that, while at the present time relatively

few whites would knowingly marry coloured blood, miscengenation at lower levels

is constantly taking place and, with the dilution effected by time, is inevitably des-

tined to extend upward through the social structure. Such speculations concern a yet

far-distant future. For the present the observer can but conclude that he confronts

a problem, which seems destined to develop into the United States' major internal

preoccupation and one for which at this stage there appears to be no radical or per-

manent solution.

"Normal foreign trading has been at a standstill during the war years, but Cin-

cinnati has close commercial contacts with Britain. Several industrial corporations

of consequence, among them the largest of the machine tool manufacturers, the

Cincinnati Milling Machine Company, the American Laundry Machinery Com-

pany, and Proctor and Gamble (Ivory Soap) own United Kingdom subsidiaries.

• 11
 

290                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

The area exported substantially to Britain before the war and the trade-mark Cin-

cinnati stamped on its machine tools has impressed the city's industrial importance

upon many a worker and visitor in the war factories of Britain. To look at the other

side of the ledger, it is still too early to secure a clear picture of the potentialities for

United Kingdom exports. Here, as throughout the United States, there are demands

for those quality goods, now in such short supply, for which Americans have always

been ready to pay high prices: shoes, china, linens, textiles, whiskey. As one depart-

ment store manager said in response to a trade enquiry: 'What have you got to sell?

When can you deliver it? We'll buy all we can get.' In such an atmosphere the

continuing failure of consignments to materialise in any substantial quantity is dis-

tinctly discouraging. There are also indications of a demand for regional agency

representation, direct buying, and a trend to break away from the importing suprem-

acy of New York. These should be worth careful study if, as it claimed, they can

afford possibilities of covering the growing interior markets of the United States more

intensively and obtaining that additional 50 per cent of export trade, which one way

or another Britain must secure to live.

"It may be confidently asserted that the new United States posts came into being

too late. When the British Consulate at Cincinnati opened, America had been in

the war more than a year. During the stormy pre-Pearl Harbour days, as in the

years of mounting tension between 1933 and 1939. the British side of the story was

seldom heard in this part of the country. Intermittent attempts to fill the void were

made by consular officers stationed at a distance, or a senior official from Washing-

ton or the speakers of the B.I.S. But contrary voices were more often and more

loudly in evidence. The small local branch of Bundles for Britain worked under

great difficulties, and in late 1941 saw its membership and headquarters subjected

to violent abuse and picketing. British representation lacked a visible symbol. The

chill winds of depression and economy had swept away most of the subordinate posts

in the United States (of which Cincinnati was one) in the early thirties. Yet it was

precisely during those years that Hitler was striding to power and the powder-keg

of world aggression was touched off in the Far East. Looking back now it is easy

to see that, rather than abolish these posts, the authorities might profitably have

strengthened them against the impending storm. During the same decade and well

into the war period, German Consulates in the United States were continually ex-

panding their establishments and extending their influence. It was a false economy

which permitted our case to go by default throughout such crucial years.

"It would therefore in the opinion of the writer, be a mistake to close the new

United States posts now that they have been opened. To do so would invite the

inevitable charge that we inaugurated them when we needed American help and

shut them up when the danger was past. On the other hand it is appreciated that

finding incumbents may well present insurmountable difficulties during the next few

years. If career officers are not available, however, it would be preferable to carry

on with non-career officers rather than permit what has been built up to lapse. The

years ahead may well find Anglo-American relations subjected to sharper strains

than any they have yet experienced. These Middle Western outposts serve not only

for the projection of Britain, but, as listening posts in a region that, with its increas-

ing wealth and importance, its substantial industrial and agricultural production and

growing market opportunities, will justifiably take itself more seriously in the future.

"The public relations posts are unlikely, even in the years of peace, to provide

"The public relations posts are unlikely, even in the years of peace, to provide

• 12
 

Cincinnati, 1945                                                      291

 

a sufficiency of that type of office work which has hitherto given the consular officer

the rationale of his official existence. Their opportunities are of another kind. If,

as Mr. Churchill has prophesied, and as indeed seems inevitable, the affairs of Bri-

tain and the United States are likely to become mixed up, to march together rather

more in the future than they have done in the past, it is a matter of vital consequence

that the two peoples should understand each other as they are. Not only should the

British point of view be presented in the United States; it is no less important that

the life and opinion of the North American continent's vast, diverse interior regions

should be studied at close quarters and correctly interpreted to Washington and

Whitehall. We must never incur the danger of estrangement from the United States.

For us, as for them, ignorance is a luxury we can no longer afford; for beyond doubt

in the world of to-morrow its penalties will be even more swift, certain and catas-

trophic than those of the stern ordeal we have jointly surmounted after so protracted

a struggle and by so narrow and critical a margin.

*     *    *

"Nor can the full flavour and diversity of the American scene be savoured except

by unremitting and assiduous travel; by train, plane, car and, most rewarding of all,

by bus, where the common denominator of discomfort presents opportunities for get-

ting to know one's fellow travellers far superior to those afforded by the faster and

more luxurious methods of conveyance. It is recounted that formerly a British con-

sular officer, attached for several years to the largest consular post in the United

States, was known to boast that he had never set foot on the American mainland:

for he worked on Manhattan Island, lived on Staten Island and took his holidays on

Long Island. Such an attitude, inconceivable today, is happily unlikely to receive

encouragement in the future. Indeed it is to be hoped that appointment to one of

the smaller posts in the United States may come to be sought and regarded as a

privileged opportunity to make a modest contribution to the extension of that mutual

understanding and respect, so necessary to continuing co-operation between Britain

and the United States, which is the essential prerequisite of any broader interna-

tional concord and without which there is no hopeful prospect for world order or

enduring peace."

• 13