August 4, 1917 , Walter Hines Page, The United States Ambassador to Great Britain, came to Plymouth , the largest city in the west of Devon and the proud home of much naval and maritime history. His visit marked exactly three years since the start of World War I, which the United States had entered into only a few months earlier.
The British public could have easily interpreted the belated announcement from the Allied side as indifference, but while Page's fellow Americans were the object of suspicion, Page himself was well-liked and respected by his British hosts.
Walter Hynes Page tirelessly advocated for America's entry into the war, an effort that took a toll on his health— and he lived long enough to see the war's end.
Among his fellow Americans, however, some suspected that Page's Anglophilia was pathological and that his longstanding support for war with Germany was merely a symptom of his suffering.
Page traveled from his official residence in London and arrived at Plymouth Station amid cheering crowds: "The whole town's streets were lined with all its inhabitants, and many more - apparently millions of people, everyone in that part of the world, had gathered there to watch the show.
They were eager to see Page, but also to hear the speeches he had come west to deliver. Page understood that many Britons still suspected that the United States was not fully committed to the war effort and needed careful reassurances to convince them.
Page was reflecting on his The reason for his speech was that he felt he had to do something to reassure "provincial and English people" about "what we have done and what we intend to do".
However, he also felt strongly that the British wariness stemmed from a real ignorance about the United States and Americans, and that it was his and other Americans' responsibility to help eliminate that ignorance.
Page asked Wilson the president’s closest adviser Edward House (Edward House) explains: "People are eager, even pathetically eager, to hear all the details, in fact, to hear anything about America; what the British don't know about America will fill the British Museum ."
In fact, Page's speech was the first foray into the territory it planned: the text of the speech was published that year in Hodder and Stoughton's "War Pamphlets" series, titled "The Alliance of Two Great Peoples" , and had a readership far beyond its original audience.
He lamented the "massive ignorance" prevalent between the two peoples and, as a representative of Anglophiles and Americans, insisted that what was needed now was a new, fervent emphasis on cultural understanding and exchange.
Page, punctuated by cheers and applause, announced to the Plymouth audience that what was needed was a plan to overcome the mutual ignorance that divided the two countries, which should naturally sympathize with each other given the many historical moments they share.
In fact, in his view, history is absolutely necessary for this mutual understanding and sympathy and the future of Anglo-American relations. It's clear that Page believes the best means of getting this across is not through his accustomed high-level political or diplomatic channels, but through the efforts of individuals on both sides of the Atlantic.
In this case, Page recommended that a new American history textbook be urgently written and become required reading for all British schoolchildren. This is already the case in the United States, where the old anti-British hatred caused by the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 have been removed from the new history books.
For adults, popular lectures delivered by Americans in Britain and Britons in the United States could become the backbone of a new kind of public education that would reach large numbers of people.
This could be combined with cutting-edge media such as radio, and film, so that citizens of both countries can build and maintain relationships that have long been the remit of diplomats, interacting with each other through reciprocal lectures, exchanges of popular culture, personal visits and tours, and dialogue; these are the new forms of diplomacy that Page has in mind, which would mean the fusion of a shared past narrative with a future-oriented friendship.
Page's speech was timely, but more importantly, he laid the foundation for Britain and the United States' shared past. Extensive press coverage and eventual publication meant that Page's audience became a national one, but on that day he spoke to his immediate audience with great clarity and from a position of genuine knowledge and enthusiasm for the West of England, a region he was a regular visitor to due to his health.
"I can't tell you how deeply you welcomed me with your generous English and warm Devon...". He quickly moved from praising the county's decorum to praising its history. Given his immediate audience, Page naturally turned to the Mayflower Pilgrims who set sail from Plymouth in 1620. The tercentenary of
's voyage was approaching, and Page was quick to exploit the coincidence of an important historical anniversary in which Americans and British once fought on the same side: " The Mayflower sailed from here nearly three hundred years ago with its precious cargo. The American warship is back, no doubt, and The descendants of these people..."
Page's invocation of the Mayflower voyage had connotations for his Plymouth audience, but there was another tercentenary, also associated with the Devonian period , of which Page was well aware but which he did not mention when he visited Plymouth: the death of Sir Walter Raleigh.
to twentieth century , Raleigh in 's execution in 11618 is widely regarded as a travesty of history and was one of the first black marks on the reputation of the Stuart monarchs. This is a view shared by American and British commentators.
Walter Page was a native of North Carolina, whose capital was named after the distinguished sailor, explorer, warrior, writer, and courtier whose combination of physical courage, principled patriotism, and erudite intelligence is regarded as an example of the best in seventeenth-century England.
As it happens, the Devon cathedral city of Exeter is the closest city to Raleigh's birthplace, Hayes Barton. The maritime city of Plymouth further west is known as the last port of departure for the Mayflower Pilgrims.
Pure accident of history thus set the stage for two major commemorations in the context of the First World War: one in 1918 focusing on Exeter; the other in 1920 at Plymouth.
But while the Anglo-American dialogue surrounding these events was important, the local rivalry in Devon was also important, as the effort to establish a new university in the south-west was linked to the tercentenary of the Mayflower voyage and the death of Sir Walter.
As early as 1917, educational campaigners from Devon and Cornwall sought permission to establish an independent degree-granting university.
However, when plans for the two tercentenaries were discussed, the potential arose to establish links with the United States, thereby providing American financial support for the Devonian University. The question was whether Exeter or Plymouth, Raleigh or the Pilgrims would get the spoils. The
Tercentenary events are a case study in the interplay between transnational, regional and local dimensions in commemorative culture and historical narratives, with Page being a key figure in both Tercentenaries, as were the local delegations in Exeter and Plymouth respectively.
In this context, the discourse of the British nation plays a far less important role than local or regional historical narratives and their international connections, however fragile the latter may often be.
One of the more neglected aspects of twentieth-century memorial scholarship is the creation of educational institutions that serve as the material and lasting legacy of historical commemoration. Both the Mayflower and Raleigh tercentenaries sparked discussion about the possibility of establishing new universities at Plymouth and Exeter, founded on the lines of modern democracy and at least in part with American donors, students, and scholars in mind.
On the anniversaries of Raleigh and the Mayflower, the connection between British regionalism and internationalism superseded any national goals or agendas as the two cities competed to become regional leaders in higher education, each claiming significance in the United States.
Historians have long recognized that public commemoration and construction of the past, managed by a group of "elites," can feed into discourses of national unity and shared memory in the public imagination.
From the nineteenth century onwards, so-called ' public history' discourses were often understood as key components of nationalist and exceptionalist agendas, with historical anniversaries, anniversaries and centenaries having a huge appeal for the British public, in part because they could support national unity.
But equally, a strong focus on historical narratives can lead to local and regional tensions, with nationhood deployed as a rhetorical flourish whose audience is simultaneously international and local.
As recent scholars of the 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary have emphasized, internationalism was high on the agenda of architects of large-scale commemorations, even when events or figures were deeply "British" in character.
Although scholars differ on the extent to which history and the past occupied the public imagination during the dramatic changes of the twentieth century, recent research clearly demonstrates that a fascination with the past pervaded the entire period, especially at the local grassroots level.
Roland Quinault highlights the elite nature of many commemorations of the period, while Paul Readman demonstrates the depth and breadth of the period's historical culture by showing how ordinary men and women were deeply involved in local history.
We can also see this trend in the growth of preservation movements, historical tourism, commemoration crazes, and popular and even participatory history, with an added component of increasingly commercialized mass media.
In the early twentieth century, there was a large amount of academic research on British history and culture. Within it is a thin but vibrant strand of historiography that focuses specifically on the importance of the past in transatlantic, Anglo-American contexts.
As Erik Goldstein, Melanie Hall, and T. G. Otte have shown, the years before and after World War I provided many opportunities to commemorate shared Anglo-American moments that served to symbolize their future.
Diplomatic historian Brian Etheridge identifies "memory diplomacy" as a special form of political effort that seeks to use historical and cultural exchanges to achieve diplomatic purposes.
Arguably, the case studies I present here help to show that the precise meaning and mechanisms of memory can be best understood at a local level, with the role of individuals and institutions, and a focus on local dynamics such as educational provision, helping to complicate the seemingly simple story of national exchanges.
On a higher political level, historians of Anglo-American relations have emphasized the importance of a common conception of the Anglo-Saxon race. This may be exaggerated, especially by intellectual historians who emphasize particular segments of society. Changes in racial and demographic composition have led to complex forms of identity construction in the United States itself, as well as in its relationships with other nations.
Anti-British sentiment had been a mainstay of nineteenth-century American politics, and despite the apparent rapprochement in some quarters after the war, there remained strong feelings of dissatisfaction on the American side.
Irish immigrants and the Irish independence movement pushed this high, and newly arrived co-religionists from other ethnic groups were likely to sympathize with these movements far more than British interests. After the war, anxiety about British imperialist designs continued unabated, and even grew.
But the vitriol was reciprocated in the UK, too, as Page's reflections on the Plymouth trip show. One way to balance the appeal of Anglo-Saxonism to some American and British diplomats with the skepticism of citizens is to deploy it alongside the more transferable abstract values of justice, the rule of law, and democracy, all of which can be seen as integral to British and American identities.
Given the sheen of liberalism, the symbolic importance of historical events and artefacts, notably the Magna Carta, lends itself to an international "Anglo World" discourse.
However, due to the widespread appeal of the democratic, liberal values thought to be embodied in Magna Carta, it serves as a near-universal symbol regardless of its origins on the alien world of medieval Runnymede.
Remarkably, the Magna Carta and the great documents of American sovereignty, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, were cited throughout World War I, beyond an English-speaking audience.
As David Monger (David Monger) has shown, this was significant in the context of the European war, in which the common attributes of "supranational" helped to strengthen European loyalties.
Supranational symbols, while in some cases associated with racialized Anglo-Saxonism, can also transcend these literal tribal names.
But uncovering the true power of the past requires looking at local material realities, considering the importance of direct links between British provinciality and transatlanticism, and the kind of relationship offered here adds much-needed nuance to Anglo-American relations, which can rightly be seen as involving two subsidiary national identities under one ethnic rubric, rather than a series of local and regional identities that depend on historical narratives and ethnic relations.
The period after the First World War was one in which Britain was searching for its role in an international future, and the United States was a key partner in that future. But at the same time, localities have their own agendas, hopes and ambitions, and sometimes these conflict with the larger national agenda.
