Pantheon (47 page)

Authors: Sam Bourne

BOOK: Pantheon

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Related was the apparently harmless practice of bussing girls from women’s colleges to Harvard, Princeton or Yale to meet boys, the experience recounted in the novel by Dorothy Lake. Again, this did actually happen and is widely thought to have had a eugenic motive, encouraging the young men and women of the educated elites to meet and to mate in what one account of the period calls ‘a kind of eugenic dating service’. The Wolf’s Head Society does exist and does have a ‘tomb’ of the kind James sees, but there is no record of it having any association with eugenics. The same is true of the Elizabethan Club.

As for the rest of the story, much of that too is borne out by the historical record. The Right Club is no figment of the imagination; it did meet at the Russian Tea Room in London, with the participation of the organizations and individuals named. My Reginald Rawls Murray is fictional, but some will detect a resemblance to Archibald Maule Ramsay, the Conservative MP and anti-Jewish agitator who did indeed pen the ditty ‘Land of Dope and Jewry’, its lyrics reproduced here exactly as he wrote them. After 1940, Ramsay spent the rest of the war behind bars, interned under Defence Regulation 18B, partly because of his involvement with a suspected spy at the US Embassy.

That man was Tyler Kent, a truly remarkable character who has much in common with the Taylor Hastings of this novel. A cipher clerk at his country’s embassy in London, he became involved with the Right Club and was eventually entrusted with its membership list, kept in a leather-bound, lockable red book – which can now be read in full in
The Red Book: The Membership List of The Right Club
edited by Robin Saikia.

The young American removed from the embassy multiple secret documents, including the clandestine correspondence between Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. He passed those papers onto Ramsay, apparently in the hope that they would reach isolationist US politicians bent on thwarting FDR’s march to war. Scholars agree that had those letters to Churchill become public, Roosevelt may well have been wounded beyond recovery. In the event, they fell into the hands of German intelligence. The extracts appear here exactly as they were written. The full exchanges can be read in
Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, Volume 1, Alliance Emerging, October 1933-November 1942,
edited with commentary by Warren F Kimball.

Kent was eventually exposed. When the authorities raided his home, they found nearly two thousand stolen documents as well as the keys to the US Embassy cipher room. He was tried and sentenced and, like Ramsay, served out the rest of the war in prison. Later he resurfaced in the United States, as the publisher of a newspaper identified with the Ku Klux Klan. He is said to have died a pauper in a Texas trailer park in 1988.

The American milieu in which James Zennor finds himself in late July 1940 is, I hope, also faithful to the facts. At that time the United States in general, and the Yale campus in particular, were riven by debate over US involvement in the war. The university chaplain, the Reverend Sidney Lovett, was a pacifist; others were strongly in favour of coming to Britain’s aid.

In Washington, there certainly were senior politicians aiming to discredit Roosevelt, both to sabotage his re-election in November 1940 and to thwart his advocacy of military action. Hans Thomsen, the then Chargé d’Affaires at the German Embassy, actively sought to influence US domestic politics, backing vocal isolationists and even covertly paying for newspaper advertisements making the case against war.

It is also well-documented that the
Chicago Tribune
was the leading mouthpiece of the America First movement, formally launched in September 1940, while
Time
magazine under its campaigning editor Henry Luce, was a loud advocate for US intervention.

The novel’s earlier action is also grounded in fact. Barcelona did indeed host an alternative Olympic Games, the People’s Olympiad, in 1936 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. The battles I refer to during that conflict are anything but fictitious, with James Zennor’s war experience tallying in part with that of the real-life Esmond Romilly, in whose story I was educated by the excellent
Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly
by Kevin Ingram.

Preston McAndrew is entirely fictitious and based on no one. And yet his notion of war as a cleansing fire is, I believe, no more than the idea of eugenics taken to its logical conclusion – an idea that was utterly mainstream in the pre-war period. Painful though it is to admit, a veritable pantheon of British and American intellectual heroes believed in a theory that today would make most of us shudder.

Three generations on, we take pride in the belief that the Second World War was fought out of moral revulsion at the ideas embodied by the Nazis. The awkward truth, however, is that intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply in thrall to a set of principles we would now regard as horribly close to Nazism. This fact, one of the last great secrets of the Anglo-American elite, has lay buried for more than seventy years. It may be time to exhume it and give it proper examination.

Acknowledgements

First thanks must go to James Purnell, who in a chance remark mentioned the mother of a mutual friend who had been evacuated to Yale as a child during wartime. That child turned out to be Juliet Hopkins, who was kind enough to speak to me about her experiences more than seventy years ago. I should stress that the speculation as to the true motives behind the rescue effort offered in
Pantheon
is mine rather than hers.

Felicity Tholstrup proved a patient guide around Oxford, conjuring up how that city might have looked in wartime. Dr Michael Freeden, a former tutor of mine, was gracious enough to play teacher again, sharing his wisdom on the history of eugenics. I read his insightful paper
Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity
nearly fifteen years ago and it surely helped plant the seed that grew into
Pantheon.

In New Haven, Michael Morand spent many long hours showing me around Yale as well as introducing me – over tea at the Elizabethan Club – to the university archivist Judith Schiff and its pre-eminent historian, Professor Gaddis Smith. Both were extremely generous with their knowledge, but I am indebted especially to Professor Smith for sharing with me the chapter on eugenics at Yale from his upcoming history of the university. The hair-raising quotations cited by my fictional Dr Curtis were unearthed by the very real Gaddis Smith.

Two other scholars deserve my thanks. Dr Nigel Townson of the Complutense University of Madrid guided me expertly on the history, language and geography of Spain during the Civil War. Professor Tony Badger, Master of Clare College, Cambridge, became a virtual co-conspirator on the US political dimension of the novel, pointing me to both the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence and the figure of Tyler Kent. Oxbridge academics do not get unalloyed praise in this novel, but I have only the warmest respect for Tony Badger.

The great American journalist Jacob Weisberg shared his expertise on the ideological dispositions of the US press in 1940, while Jo Rodgers was kind enough to cast an American’s eye over the manuscript. Additional thanks to my former Guardian colleague, the irrepressible Tim Radford, for joining my search through the eugenics canon; Steve Coombe, for advising on matters of intelligence and surveillance; to Rebecca Lloyd-Evans for getting her hands on a key quotation; to Scott Barlow of the BT archives for guidance on 1940s telephone numbers; and to the staff of the British Library for directing me to the relevant parts of the Mass Observation Archive, which shed so much light on everyday life in the Britain of this period.

Thanking Jonathan Cummings is a pleasure that only becomes greater with repetition: once again, he proved a gifted plunderer of the archives and a constant comrade. Jonny Geller knows the word ‘agent’ does not do justice to what he does: he is a regular source of inspiration and moral support as well as being the very best in his business. At HarperCollins, Jane Johnson, backed by the ever-dependable Sarah Hodgson and Emad Akhtar, lived through this novel with me, once again proving herself to be an exacting editor who somehow manages to combine rigour with encouragement. That I have not yet driven her mad is a tribute to her rather than me.

Finally, I want to thank my wife Sarah not only for her love, but also her wise counsel. She and our two boys, Jacob and Sam, had to put up with so much during the gestation of this book: I am more grateful than I can say. In the end,
Pantheon
is about a husband and father who realizes that it is family, above all, that makes life worth living. That’s something I realized long ago.

Jonathan Freedland, October 2011

By the same author

The Righteous Men

The Last Testament

The Final Reckoning

The Chosen One

Copyright

HarperCollins
Publishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins
Publishers
2012

Jonathan Freedland asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

EPub Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 978 0 00 741365 2

This novel is a work of fiction inspired by true events. Some characters are based on real people but their personalities and actions are entirely the works of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of the characters to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidential.

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