“ This Chicago Business ”

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 114, 11 February 1928, Page 17

“ This Chicago Business ”

“Big Bill Thompson” and His Anti-British Campaign

“Certain essentially English things will stick to this Continent which all the censoring and burning of books in the world cannot terminate. These things include the English language, English law, English literature, and, greater and above all, the English conception of Government.”—Sir Esme Howard, British Ambassador to the United States.

THE campaign of Mr. William Thompson, the Mayor of Chicago, against Britain and King George has not been taken very seriously this side of tile Atlantic. Even the suggested burning of the books given by Queen Victoria to the Chicago Library has aroused feelings of pity rather titan resentment, for it is realised that it Is the policy of an individual and a small section of the American community. “It is a strain,” says the New York World, “on our sense of humour to know that when a political gang wants to lay its hands on the contracts and jobs on a school system, the way to go about it is to stir up as much’ hatred as possible against a foreign government. It is alarming to know that political morals and political mentality arc low enough anywhere to tolerate such clownish knavery.

“The theory that education is gradually preparing us for democracy may still be true. But these dumb hysterical movements are altogether too numerous to justify much complacency. There are too many of them and they come too frequently to be regarded as freakish and insignificant.

“This Chicago business is no morcunique than was the Dayton business. What is happening in Chicago could happen here and in many other places. It has happened in many places, though perhaps a little less spectacularly, and apparently the intelligence of the community' is disorganised and either too preoccupied or too indifferent or too lazy to assert itself against these barbarian raids. “The kind of mentality now being exhibited in Chicago is a dangerous symptom of the condition of popular government. For here, brutally and unashamed, we have a demagogue rising to power by appealing to the very lowest prejudices of the people. We have the educational system of a great community treated with utter contempt. We have an indecent disregard for honest scholarship. We have greed and ambition masquerading as patriotism. “How long can popular government endure on a foundation of this kind?” The “New Republic” gives the following explanation of “Big Bill’s” campaign. It says - “One hundred per cent. American patriotism, like the other fundamentalisms, is feeling the effect of a growing inattention on the part of the public. It cannot live without presenting its protagonists with an enemy whom they can hate. For a while Germany served its purpose, and anybody who did not wish to destroy everything German was constructively anti-American. “The next tyranny was, of course, Bolshevism, and inasmuch as the Bolshevist state survives, the majority of American patrioteers still vindicate their love of country chiefly by seeking to purify it of anything but hatred and wrath for this pernicious heresy. Nevertheless, anti-Bolshevism is also becoming shop-worn, and the pugnacious American is gravely in peed of some more tangible and accessible stone on which to whet his patriotic sword. “Why not England? The British Empire is the only great power, Japan possibly excepted, which is in a position seriously to damage or threaten the United States. Since 1921, the British admiralty has taken advantage of a defect in the naval agreement of that year to regain a part of its former supremacy at sea. The American patriotic tradition is accustomed to be more anti-English than anti-anything else.

“At a time like the present, when it is hard to find a political war-cry with any popular appeal, it is probably inevitable that politicians here and there

will try to capitalise the considerable fund of anti-English prejudice which still lingers somewhere in the minds of so many ordinary Americans. “Ridiculous and offensive though, it be, it is likely to remain for a long time a minor and occasional but troublesome note in American politics. It provides demagogues in the larger cities with a cheap and easy way of profiting by the unpopularity in the tenement districts of the exclusive upper classes. In all such American cities there is a climbing population of foreign birth or descent which is condemned to a position of social inferiority by the older inhabitants, and which is extremely sensitive about it. “It is the equivalent in contemporary America of the class of semioutcast frontiersmen who first occupied the new land and who, as they moved west, always carried with them a sense of class grievance. These people provide an audience for the demagogues who cannot rise to power except by exploiting class prejudices. They relish violent attacks on the well-to-do minority, usually of older British stock. “When they applaud denunciations of King George, they are not, in many cases, expressing suspicion and hatred of the English. They are satisfying their grudge against the older established Americans, who arc socially and intellectually much more intimate with the upper classes in England than they are with the lower classes in America.” “There is no more signal illustration,” says the “Daily Telegraph,” “of the need of improved understanding between the two peoples than this matter of the teaching of history, by which the patriotic apprehensions of Mr. Thompson have been aroused. "It is true that in a number of cases in recent years American history text-books have been re-written in the sense of endeavouring to present a truthful account of what happened when the American Colonies declared their independence and secured it by force of arms, rather than preserving the historical legend in which George 111. and all his subjects have'so long figured as.merciless oppressors and the colonists as a race of heroes without human blemish of any kind. “In New’ York and other States, before Mr. Thompson took up the matter, fundamentalists of patriotism were calling for legislation making it a penal offence to tamper with that legend; and it may be long enough before we see the end of it and of its undeniable influence in the shaping of American mentality. “But what is realised by very few’ in the United States is that the history of the American Revolution is, and long has been, taught in all British schools as from the American point of view; that no attempt is made to disguise the ineptitude of the. policy that forced the colonies to revolt; that full justied is done to the Americans’ military achievement; and that Washington, in particular, is as much a hero in our eyes as in those of American patriots. "Of the inculcation of prejudice against the makers of the Revolution there is not the slightest trace in our text-books, and the whole subject is treated in such a way as to inspire respect and good feeling towards the people of the United States. These arc plain facts, and they have hardly received enough attention from those in both countries who are working for the development of Anglo-American friendship. “The teaching of that chapter of history in the schools is among the ‘one or two things’ which, as Sir Esme Howard suggests, may be found worthy of imitation in the United States.”