BR TO DONALD G. BRENNAN, 28 APR. 1952
BRACERS 11788. ALD. McMaster. Russell 15 (1995): 41–2
Edited by K. Blackwell

Dear Mr. Brennan,1

Thank you for your letter of March 26. I will admit at once that the 2 statements you quote are somewhat too sweeping.2 I ought to have confined them to the right wing of the Republican party. I do not find anything to object to in Eisenhower’s views on international affairs, and if he becomes President,3 I think he will shape American policy wisely, but at the time of writing the contest between him and Taft4 remains undecided.

There are some points in your letter which call for comment. In the first place I have never been a Marxian.5 My very first book,6 published in 1896, contained a vigorous attack on Marx, and I have never since mentioned him except critically.

As to American opinion in general, I found that you in common with other people who live in Cambridge, Mass., are scarcely aware of opinion in less enlightened parts of America. The phrase which I quoted about yapping Yahoos was typical of most newspapers outside New York, Boston and Washington. You seem to think that the point of view embodied in such phrases is no more influential in America than the point of view of Bevan7 in this country. In this I am afraid that you are quite mistaken. In travelling about America I have found that those who hold views similar to those which you express dare not give utterance to them except in the depths of the most inviolable privacy. I have found almost all the newspapers that I have seen in America spreading lies about the condition of England under the Socialist government.8 I have found these lies believed by almost everybody. Kind friends have sent me food parcels under the impression that I am starving. When I inform people who think themselves enlightened that British wage earners and their children have been better nourished in recent years than ever before, I am thought to be engaging in mendacious propaganda. My American friends, with few exceptions, use “democracy” as synonymous with “capitalism” and when I say that England is a democracy they refuse to admit it, not because of the King and the House of Lords but because the undesirable activities of plutocrats are somewhat curbed.

I have no wish to promote a conflict between British socialism and American capitalism, but American capitalism has been promoting such a conflict by dishonest and unscrupulous methods from which it results that the British can only co-operate with America as slaves and not as free men. If Anglo-American co-operation is to continue, as I most profoundly hope that it will, it is essential that Americans should tolerate an internal economic policy in this country which they do not wish to see adopted in the United States.

I think if you were to live for some time in any Middle Western State or in California, you would realize that you have been living hitherto in a little island of enlightenment by no means typical of your country.

Yours very sincerely

• 1

  Mr. Brennan Donald G. Brennan’s letter is filed in RA1 720. BR’s reply has been published in BRA 2: 48–9. A copy was kept at RA2 340.184042. Brennan identified himself as a low income student at MIT with a great interest in BR’s writings but a Republican.

• 2

  2 statements you quote are somewhat too sweeping The two statements are: “The Republican Party is so ardently nationalist that it has to vilify all other nations, even those that are most necessary to the success of American policy” and “The Republicans apparently feel that if American could only prosper by causing other nations to prosper, then it would be better to fail” (NHCW, pp. 69, 70).

• 3

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, 1953–61.

• 4

  Taft In a close race Robert A. Taft (1889–1953) lost the Republican Party nomination to Eisenhower. Taft represented isolationism.

• 5

  I have never been a Marxian Brennan had described BR as “the world’s leading Marxian socialist”.

• 6

  My very first bookGerman Social Democracy (London: Longmans, Green, 1896).

• 7

  Bevan Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960), leader of the left wing of the Labour Party, resigned as Minister of Health in April 1951 in protest against the rearmament programme.

• 8

  Socialist government The Labour Party had governed in 1945–51. Churchill’s Conservatives had regained power in the October 1951 general election.