Cinematic Support for the Anglo-American Détente, 1939–43

Abstract

The question of whether Great Britain was a democracy was a question of some importance in the period between 1937 and 1945. In retrospect it might appear a curious sort of question to be asking whilst the world was aflame, but it was there by the very nature of the relationship between Great Britain and the United States, both historically and at that particularly crucial period. As part of the inflated self-estimation of the United States, the average man and woman in the street — the so-called John and Jane Doe of George Gallup’s ever-questing polls — believed that America was ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’; about ‘England’ (meaning Great Britain) they were not so sure. After all, England had been the tyrannical power against which American democracy had rebelled one hundred and fifty years earlier. Had England really changed? England was still being portrayed as an Imperialist Power subjugating the Poor Irish (a view particularly strong amongst the police forces of Boston, Chicago and New York). Moreover England was also imprisoning the courageous brown little Mr Ghandi — the loincloth-clad George Washington of his country who was peacefully fighting the power of the British Raj. Also any country which did not pay its world war one debts could not be trusted; indeed, only Finland could be trusted!