Eighty years ago, FDR treats King George VI to culinary diplomacy
The visit of George VI
and Queen Elizabeth to the US achieved great success when it reached Washington.
The public gave an enthusiastic welcome and President Roosevelt made it
abundantly plain that his guests were being received in the most friendly
fashion. At his country retreat Hyde Park, the King and the President swam
together in the pool that Roosevelt had had installed. Roosevelt served the King
with the first hot dog he had ever tasted in an informal picnic that advertised
a warm relationship between the heads of state better than any state banquet
could have done. Introducing the British sovereign to US working class food - the gesture was widely publicised - had instant mass appeal; it showed that FDR was over-awed by his guests could impose modern American informality on the heirs to the country's former royal rulers. There would still be immense domestic political obstacles in
the way of translating this goodwill into concrete diplomatic or military
support, but it was impossible to deny the symbolic assertion that Britain and
the US were friends.
In China the Japanese staged
yet another challenge to the standing of the western powers, in this case
Britain. Japan demanded that the British authorities in the western concession
of Tientsin hand over four Chinese who had been implicated in the murder of the
manager of a Japanese bank. They had already been temporarily detained by the
Japanese and issued confessions to the crime under torture. They would almost certainly
be executed if they once again passed into Japanese hands and the British
declined to surrender them. The Japanese army then imposed a blockade on the
concession to force the British to yield.
The British government
finally admitted – albeit unofficially – that it was planning to set up a
Ministry of Information (MOI) to respond to Josef Goebbels’s mighty operation,
should an “emergency” arise. It had been an open secret that a MOI had been in
preparation for a long time, but the scale of the savage Whitehall battle over
the issue remained well hidden. The appeasers had been desperate to avoid news
leaking of a move that the dictators would have recognised as being aimed
against them. The nomination of a new director general designate for the MOI
created a useful opportunity for the news to come out in a way that softened
the blow to the dictators. The man chosen for the job was Lord Perth, who had
recently stepped down as ambassador to Italy, where he had firmly supported the
appeasement of Mussolini. He had striven, in particular, to suppress any public
or private media comment hostile to Fascist Italy.
The Secretary of the Board
of Trade faced sharp criticism in the House of Commons for granting Frank Buchman’s
“Oxford Movement” – the evangelical Christian campaign sometimes labelled “Moral
Rearmament” - the status of a limited company. This would make it able to benefit
from gifts in people’s wills and to avoid the kind of legal challenge that had
been used to block such a bequest a few months before. The judge in that trial
had been critical of the group’s finances and expenditure such as the purchase of
tickets for the coronation. Sir Horace Wilson, the prime minister’s senior
adviser, was regarded as a supporter of the movement, but the precise reason
for the political decision in its favour remains obscure.
Comments
Post a Comment