John is Assistant Professor of History at Duquesne University. He is an historian of the British Empire, with a particular focus on settler colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His book, Race and Imperial Defence in the British World 1870-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examined the cultural links between Britain and the self-governing Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and he is currently working on a new project on the origins of the modern Commonwealth of Nations. You can follow him on Twitter at @johncmitcham.
We often view the origins of the “special relationship” which grew up between Britain and America during the Second World War through the lens of elite British and American policymakers. This perspective overlooks the important role of powerful figures from the self-governing Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa played in forging transatlantic ties in the aftermath of Versailles. These individuals, many of whom feared the gradual decline of Britain’s global power, became the most fervent supporters of an informal alliance between a more internationalist United States and a devolved British Commonwealth of co-equal partners.
In 1917, Smuts travelled to London to represent the Union at the 1917 Imperial War Conference. Along with Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden, Smuts demanded a new direction for the war effort, including solving the troublesome Irish Question, readdressing British military operations on the Western Front, and discussing postwar political reforms. The quiet South African so impressed his British hosts that David Lloyd George offered him military command of the Middle Eastern theatre. Smuts declined the position, though he remained in London as a member of the new War Cabinet. In this capacity, Smuts became the right-hand man and “fixer” for Lloyd George. Between July 1917 and February 1918, Smuts regularly visited the Western Front, helped plan the Palestine offensive, attended the Rapallo Conference, met with Austrian peace delegates in Switzerland, and chaired the air organization committee that established the Royal Air Force.
Smuts quickly emerged as one of the intellectual founders of the Commonwealth idea. In a much-celebrated speech before both houses of Parliament, he laid out a model for a devolved empire. His Commonwealth was a global community of co-equal, self-governing states that could uphold the dual pillars of liberalism and white-supremacy.
But Smuts also saw a place for the United States in this new global order. Like many Boers of his generation, Smuts admired America for its republicanism and racial segregation policies. He also recognized the growing power of the American republic and the central role it would play in the new century. From his position within Lloyd George’s inner circle, the colonial statesman quietly embarked on a personal campaign to improve cooperation with the United States.
Instead, Smuts approached Lloyd George with an unusual proposal: that he should command the newly formed American Expeditionary Force! “Pershing is very commonplace, without real war experience, and already overwhelmed by the initial difficulties of a job too big for him,” he confided in a June 1918 letter. Smuts pointed out that Americans would never agree to a British officer commanding their troops, but a colonial officer might pass muster, especially one with a history of fighting AGAINST the empire. One can imagine a Boer commando general in slouch hat leading Doughboys in the final offensives of the war. Not surprisingly, Lloyd George declined to take up his suggestion.
Smuts subsequently pursued other avenues. During the second half of 1918, Smuts turned his attention to the issue of postwar security and the inevitable peace conference. Of course Smuts, like other Dominion leaders, harbored territorial ambitions, including control of German Southwest Africa, German East Africa, as well as neighboring Portuguese territories. Wilson and his pesky “Fourteen Points” was a barrier to a grand design for a “Greater South Africa” from the Cape to the Zambezi River. But unlike the fiery Australian Premier Billy Hughes, who balked at American idealism, Smuts actively promoted collaboration with the United States.
Smuts recognized that United States would never accede to a binding alliance with a European power. Instead, he sought to use the League of Nations as a vehicle for cementing an Anglo-American global system. In December 1918, he penned an immensely important memorandum calling for a world organization based on the evolving British Commonwealth, “which remains the only embryo league of nations because it is based on the true principles of national freedom and political decentralization.” The takeaway was clear: Wilson’s pet project for world peace could only be assured by an informal alliance between the United States and the Commonwealth. The Cabinet gave Wilson the memo during his visit to London, who allegedly found it quite inspiring.
Smuts also used his role on the committee to serve as a proxy between the British and American diplomats On many evenings he gathered in his hotel room with the British Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Robert Cecil, and Wilson’s personal confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, to smooth over differences between the two delegations.
The case of Jan Smuts points to the need to view Anglo-American security relations through an imperial and global framework. The important role of Dominion personalities in forging the “special relationship” is often overshadowed by the binary focus on American and (metropolitan) British policymakers. At the same time, Smuts represents the Janus-faced nature of this emerging Anglo-American relationship. Though a philosopher and idealist, he was also an imperialist, ardent white supremacist, and practitioner of realpolitikwho promoted a quintessentially Victorian idea of international security relationship based on white, democratic, and English (or Afrikaans)-speaking nations. The language couldn’t be any more Churchillian.
Image: Winston Churchill with Field Marshal Smuts and behind, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder (left) and Sir Alan Brooke, at the British Embassy in Cairo, 5 August 1942 via wikimedia commons.