ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS

The alliance between the United States and Great Britain, developed in tentative stages even before Japan, Germany, and Italy drew the United States into the war, had from its beginning both built-in tensions and elements making for cooperation. The tensions came in part from their divergent histories and perspectives, in part from their differing situations and strategies. The United States had gained its independence in a long and bitter war with England, a war which had affected the country more deeply than any conflict except for the civil war. The country's national anthem recalls to its citizens an incident from their next war with England, and at later times in the nineteenth century there had been further serious friction about boundaries in the northwest and northeast, about fishery rights and British support of the Confederacy in the civil war, about rivalries in Central and South America, and about projects of some Irish-Americans to seize all or parts of Canada to hold hostage for the freedom of Ireland from British rule.

This last source of friction relates to the role of the Americans of Irish descent, who had become very numerous partly because of developments in Ireland during the middle and second half of the nineteenth century, and who were becoming increasingly influential in American politics in the first half of the twentieth century, especially because of their concentration in a number of large eastern and mid-western cities, where their role was crucial to the Democratic Party coalition which dominated American politics in the 1930s. Although their overt hostility to Britain was diminishing somewhat, it remained a factor in the picture.

Furthermore, Americans generally extended their antipathy for their own former colonial masters to the whole colonial concept. If they had generally very little idea of the extent to which Canada, Australia, New Zealand and what was then called the Union of South Africa were in fact fully in charge of their own internal affairs, they had no doubt that India and the other colonial possessions of Great Britain were not. Having themselves through Congressional action in 1936 decided to withdraw from the one great deviation from their own anti-colonial tradition, the Philippines, they could see no reason why the British should not do likewise.