On 18 March 1941 Duff Cooper, the British Minister of Information, sent a short but important letter to the President of the Board of Education. In it he discussed the lack of American studies in British schools and universities and called upon the Board urgently to consider ways of improving the situation. On the face of it, the moment was hardly propitious for minor educational reform. Britain was fighting on alone against Germany and Italy, the Battle of the Atlantic had worsened, and new setbacks were about to befall British armies in Libya, Greece and Crete. Yet Duff Cooper's suggestions were adopted with an alacrity that was remarkable by Whitehall standards. An ambitious programme to promote the study of America was quickly set in train for elementary and secondary schools, followed, though more slowly and less successfully, by action at the university level. Throughout, the Ministry of Information and the Board of Education enjoyed the enthusiastic support of other Government departments, particularly the Foreign Office, and of outside bodies including the BBC and Oxford University Press. Also closely involved were the American Ambassador, John Winant, several US Consuls around Britain and distinguished American historians such as Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. These developments constitute an important and neglected episode in the story of American studies in Britain. They also offer an interesting sidelight on the place of cultural diplomacy in the foreign policies of the British and US Governments during World War Two.

“I'll tell you God's truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways — and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West? ” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

Does Gatsby know where San Francisco is? If he does, his response is an odd gesture. “Epic theatre is gestural,” wrote Walter Benjamin of Brecht. Gatsby, too, is gestural: as Nick Carraway would have it, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him” (p. 2). Except that Gatsby's gestures are broken, and by Gatsby himself. To “tell … God's truth” he raises his right hand — isn't that taking the truth a little too seriously? When speaking of loss he pauses in the right place; indeed, in a place so right that the addendum “all dead now” might just be bad acting, not lying. The creator of a criminal network operating Richard Godden is Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, England.

Zenith comprises three cities. At the outskirts is Floral Heights, a streetcar suburb of Dutch colonial houses three miles from downtown. Central Zenith, a commercial-retail focus of fireproof ten- to thirty-five-story office towers of Indiana limestone or yellow brick and stores selling everything from dictaphones to scarves, hums with speculative prosperity. On suburb and downtown Sinclair Lewis focuses almost all of the action of his 1922 novel Babbitt. But between Floral Heights and Babbitt's high-rise real estate office is a third city, an industrial zone Lewis calls South Zenith, although it encircles the city center. South Zenith is “a high-colored, banging, exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar, high-perched water tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great Northern and wheat-plateaus, the Southern Pacific and orange groves.” It is a place of foundries, automobile factories, shops where five thousand men work under one roof, a place threaded with high-speed railroads.

However much reviewers argued about the character of Babbitt and his lifestyle, philosophy, and usefulness as a “type,” few questioned the setting of the novel. Indeed, newspapers in five cities, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Duluth, and Minneapolis, each proclaimed that its municipality was the prototype of Zenith, and Minneapolis actually celebrated a “Babbitt Week.”

The culture of the equestrian nomads of the Great Plains was relatively short-lived. The more sedentary inhabitants of the plains — the Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Wichita — had cultures stretching back hundreds of years. By contrast, that of the mounted hunting tribes — the Kiowa, Comanche, Crow, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux — developed rapidly with the acquisition of the horse, flourished for perhaps a century, then began its death throes under the pressure of white settlement and the catastrophic effects of European disease. The destruction of the buffalo herds removed the plains nomads' economic base, and their whole civilization finally collapsed in military defeat at the hands of the United States Army. Older, white-oriented studies of Indian history tended to concentrate on the years when this culture was in decline and to neglect earlier periods and developments. Such an approach is understandable, and to some extent inevitable, given the historical sources available, but it conveys an inaccurate impression of the situation on the Great Plains prior to white settlement. This paper considers the Plains Indians in their heyday and examines intertribal trade and warfare at a time when the spread of horses and guns was causing great upheavals in native power structures.

Non-Indian powers on the peripheries of the Great Plains tentatively penetrated the region and largely determined the flow of horses, trade, and guns, while their conflicts caused shifts in location, allegiance, and power among the tribes.

In analyzing the thought of the 1930s, historians have usually concentrated on the reactions of various liberal and leftist critics of Roosevelt's New Deal reform programs. A few, however, have stressed that in opposition both to the New Deal's regulated welfare capitalism and to the left's many-faceted demands for a more openly radical program, the period also witnessed some significant theorizing that remained conservative and even reactionary. Considerable attention, for instance, has been given to the Nashville Agrarians who in November 1930 published I'll Take My Stand, their ardent manifesto of Southern cultural independence from the capitalistic, urban-industrial north. Yet it is not so well known that the Jeffersonian social theory they espoused was the basis for a broader, national effort to promote the decentralization of American government and industry and to foster greater economic self-sufficiency through a wider distribution of property. For ten years, 1937–1947, the journal Free America served as an organ for this “decentralist” movement.

On 21 February 1947, the US Government was informed of Britain's decision to terminate aid to Greece as from 31 March 1947. This produced a flurry of activity culminating in President Harry Truman's address to Congress on 12 March 1947 in which he requested $400m. aid for Greece and Turkey and pronounced the Truman Doctrine, thereby commiting the United States to the worldwide containment of Communism by means of American aid to nations threatened either by Communist insurgency from within or by Communist aggression from abroad. Debate on the Greek-Turkish Aid Bill and on the implications of the Truman Doctrine was one of the important sources of Secretary of State George C. Marshall's speech at Havard University on 5 June 1947 which initiated the idea of the Marshall Plan, the four year programme (1948–52) of American Aid to sixteen European nations designed to build up the economics of these countries and to lessen the prospect of Communism gaining strength within them. Was Britain's sudden withdrawal of aid from Greece determined simply by financial weakness, or did British policy have a more positive and subtle aim, namely to induce the United States to commit itself decisively to a policy of containment in both its political and economic form? The British Foreign Office papers for the late 1940s, as well as the papers of other government departments such as the Treasury, which are now open as a consequence of the thirty year rule, facilitate a better understanding of British policy in 1947–48 and of the British view of American policy in those years, in particular with regard to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

American planning in the twentieth century has been dominated by a meliorist approach to environmental problems. This dominance has been challenged, more or less ineffectively, by a more radical tradition. The sharpest exchange between the two took place in the interwar years in the city and state of New York, respectively the nation's largest metropolis and then its most populous state. The problems of city and state were the problems of the new industrial-urban nation in microcosm. They attracted the attention of the leading figures in each camp and led to an abortive proposal for a state plan on the part of the radicals or insurgents and, in terms of its implementation, a much more successful Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (1921–30), the work of meliorist planners. This essay explores the problems of the metropolitan region in the interwar years, the alternative strategies put forward, the controversies between the opposing schools of thought and their relative successes and failures.

In the London Quarterly Review for January 1814 appeared a long and brilliantly written review of an anonymous American pamphlet entitled Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, which had been published in New York some four years earlier. The pamphlet, indeed, was only of passing interest to the Quarterly. The real issue was the moral condition of the United States, an enemy which had to be dealt with during the coming year first militarily then diplomatically. The British reader was to be assured that the Americans should be handled no less severely than the French. To this end, the essayist revealed the distressing truth: through Gallic influence the Yankees had become imperialists, and the mania pervaded every aspect of life in the States. It followed that such a people should be chastised without scruple — whatever their English affinities. American magazines called the review a “collected mass of calumny and falsehood against a whole nation,” a “nefarious tissue of calumnies on the American character,” a copy of “all the effusions of malevolence, misrepresentation, and ignorance” which the Quarterly could find against “American taste, customs, morality, and literature.” Even a few notable Britons were embarrassed: the venerated Wilberforce called on John Quincy Adams in London to explain that the Quarterly's opinions of the United States were not those of the British people, and Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate and a major contributor to the magazine, told young George Ticknor in Paris after the war (a conflict that the Tory Southey had supported enthusiastically) that nothing in his literary career had caused him more mortification than “being thought” the author of the piece.

When she was twenty-one, Willa Cather wrote, “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one. An artist can know no other purpose than his art.… The feminine mind has a hankering for hobbies and missions.” From the outset of her writing career as a journalist, Cather was intensely conscious of what to her seemed a difficult anomaly: being a serious writer and being a woman. She believed that women were conditioned to think and write in a literal and “horribly subjective” fashion, so that their literary productions were “an infernal mess.” When she embarked on a full-time writing career at the age of thirty-nine, she insisted that to avoid a feminine mind, one must avoid a feminine way of life:

One must have the power of refuse most of the rest of life … to be free, to work at [my] table — that is all in all. …. There are fates and fates but one cannot live them all. Some would call mine servitude but I call it liberation. Miss Jewett too, turned away from marriage.

Cather's single-minded determination to succeed and her uncompromising way of life that would ensure success as a writer rather than a woman writer prompted her to reject her background in her first pieces of fiction. She lived in rural southern Nebraska for seven years, from the ages of ten to seventeen, and in some early short stories she portrayed small-town life on the Plains as narrow, spiritually crushing and dominated by terrible physical hardship.

Jennifer Bailey is Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD.

Five years after William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow bitterly debated the descent of man before the world's press at the Dayton, Tennessee, “monkey trial,” the New York liberal weekly The Nation brought news to its metropolitan readers that “A new battle on evolution is raging in the South. This time, however,” wrote Harry Schacter, “the issue is not religious but economic… The battle is between the small retailer, taking the fundamentalist position, against the chain store, an exponent of modernism in distribution.” The “chain-store menace” was, Schacter judged, “the question most talked of below the Ohio.” Not just in the South, but from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, hundreds of organizations sprang up in the winter of 1929–1930 to urge all good citizens to “trade-at-home” by boycotting the “foreign-owned, community-wrecking” chain stores. Dozens of anti-chain newspapers were rushed into circulation, while broadcasters emulated the example set by the undisputed leader of the enemies of the chains, Shreveport radio station owner W. K. Henderson. In all, the agitation was carried on “with a virulence which has not been matched in business since those early days in the Pennsylvania oil regions when the ‘independents’ rose up in their wrath against John D. Rockefeller's ‘Anaconda,’” and although the full passion of revivalist fervour lasted but a few months, the agitation proved to be the prelude to a decade of bitter legislative struggle between chains and independents.

During the post-Civil War decades, the major Eastern literary magazines – the Atlantic, Scribner's, Harper's – came to serve, in Malcolm Cowley's phrase, as the “principal voices of the genteel era.” The business of the magazines – with Boston's Atlantic at the head – was delivering “culture” to the middle class. As Walt Whitman wrote in his essay “Personalism,” published in The Galaxy in May 1868, “The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.” But in pointing out that the culture everywhere advocated by American writers was based largely on European models, Whitman exposes a pathetic irony: “Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition – never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation – more loftily elevated as head and sample – than they are on the surface of our republican States this day.” In their slavish worship of European models and consequent devaluation of the native, American writers had become the high priests of a thin and bloodless “culture” that was distributed abroad through the magazines.

Whitman shrewdly recognized, as Alan Trachtenberg has written, that genteel culture had become an instrument of “social control.”

In October 1938, Edmund Wilson advised Malcolm Cowley to get out of politics, both “revolutionary and literary alike… because what you're really practicing is not politics but literature…. ” Within two years, in the wake of the Hitler—Stalin pact and war, Cowley had withdrawn from radical politics. In early 1940, politically confused and dispirited, he wrote to Wilson:

I am left standing pretty much alone, in the air, unsupported, a situation that is much more uncomfortable for me than it would be for you. Since my normal instinct is toward cooperation. For the moment I want to get out of every God damned thing.

Cowley publicly announced his resignation from the League of American Writers in August 1940. He had helped to create the League in 1935 and had once been one of its officers. Deciding to avoid all further public political debates, he retreated to his Connecticut farmhouse. “Anyone who was as close to the radical movement as I was is going to be deeply shaken by breaking connection with it,” he explained to his close friend Kenneth Burke. “At that point the religious metaphor is absolutely accurate. You leave a church, and like a defrocked priest you can't think about anything else for a while.”

Avery Brundage liked to say that revolutionaries were not bred on the playing field. That theme neatly expressed Brundage's distrust of any challenge to the established political and social order he cherished and garnished his speeches to countless audiences during the forty years in which he was the single most powerful figure in both the American and international Olympic movements, first as president of the American Olympic Committee (1929–1953), and then as president of the International Olympic Committee (1952–1972). Although the Iron Chancellor of amateur sport regarded himself as the last true defender of the strict separation of sport and politics, he also frequently insisted that more than the future of amateur sport was at stake in shielding sport from political manipulation. Upon sport for sport's sake depended the healthy psychological valuation of individual effort and excellence that was at the very heart of a democratic way of life. Moreover, fit bodies and competitive spirits were in Brundage's view essential for the continued success of American capitalism at home and abroad. Though he never acknowledged the political coloring of his vision of the Olympics, he regarded them as a kind of international mission for spreading democratic values in the continuing ideological battle between Communism and the American way of life.

Because it dramatizes victory, defeat, struggle against nature and other competitors, sport is a potent symbol constantly under pressure to lend its emotional power to other causes.

In his second annual message to the Congress on 2 December 1851, President Millard Fillmore defended his administration's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Although “lawless and violent mobs” had resisted federal officers trying to enforce the statute, he happily noted that resistance was sporadic and ineffectual:

I congratulate you and the country upon the general acquiescence in these measures of peace which has been exhibited in all parts of the Republic … [T]he spirit of reconciliation which has been manifested in regard to them [the 1850 compromise measures] in all parts of the country has removed doubts and uncertainties in the minds of thousands of good men concerning the duration of our popular institutions and given renewed assurance that our liberty and our Union may subsist together for the benefit of this and succceding generations.

Fillmore also received support from both the Democrats and Whigs; at their national conventions in 1852 they pledged to honor the Compromise of 1850 and earnestly hoped that sectional differences would wane.

In the early 1970s, a number of Vietnam veterans sought publication for a collection of veterans' creative writing which they felt could make an important contribution to a political understanding of the war in Indochina. However, efforts to find a commercial publisher for their anthology met with no success. Their conviction that this literature both deserved and could find a substantial audience led these writers to establish their own independent publisher for the literature of Vietnam veterans, the 1st [sic] Casualty Press. In 1972, the Press published an anthology of veterans' poetry, Winning Hearts and Minds (or WHAM as it is often called), edited by Larry Rottmann, Jan Barry and Basil T. Paquet; it was followed a year later by Free Fire Zone, an anthology of short stories edited by Rottmann, Paquet and Wayne Karlin. As their epigraph, both volumes were given the quotation: “In war, truth is the first casualty.”