Adams to Richardson

LONDON--They had Harvard night at the American Embassy here in early November. Bernard Bailyn, Winthrop Professor of American History, was in town to lecture to a crowd of several hundred in connection with the traveling exhibit, "Franklin and Jefferson," now at the British Museum.

"I will not demean the previous lecturers in this series by saying that we have saved the best for last," said Charles R. Ritcheson (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1947-48), cultural attache to the American Embassy in London.

"But it gives me great pleasure to introduce a man who is such a great ornament to the history department at my university, which is also the Ambassador's alma mater."

Elliot L. Richardson '41, Ambassador to the Court of St. James and Secretary of Commerce designate, "unfortunately could not appear" to introduce Bailyn as planned. That morning a picture of Richardson beamed from the center of page one of The Times (of London). Its caption referred to an article on page eight: "Overseas--Mr. Elliot Richardson says he has no Ambition to Stand for United States VicePresidency."

Bailyn followed Ritcheson's lead and introduced his lecture with extended witticisms about Harvard's role in British-American relations. The predominantly British audience responded with polite laughter, straining to understand the humor.

Soon, however, Bailyn's delightfully revealing historical vignettes forced the Redcoats to surrender their traditional reserve. Bailyn first told the story of an unruly English lad, sent by his parents to America and Harvard in hopes that he would straighten himself out. George Downing, Class of 1645, who returned to England as an adult, did go on to make his name here but never fully reformed. Bailyn noted that the Encyclopedia Britannica, rarely a source of exaggerated rhetoric, stepped out of character to say of Downing: "His character was marked by treachery, servility and ingratitude." The Britannica went on to report that a "George Downing" became a proverbial expression in New England to denote a false man who betrayed his trust. Downing Street, where the Prime Minister lives, was named for this Harvard man in what Bailyn termed a payoff for his political betrayal of Richard Cromwell.

Bailyn also explained how upstart Harvard figured in the "contamination of the idea of American history" at Cambridge University. Leading lights there decided not to create a chair of American History and even refused funds offered for that purpose. (The thorn in the offer was that Harvard would select the scholar to fill the chair.)

Moving from the extemporaneous to his prepared text, Bailyn marched with flourish through his theory of the roots and growth of the Revolution. He pointed out the absence of revolutionary intent at the outset of the movement for constitutional and legal reform in the colonies, and stressed that "it was not even a bourgeois revolution." It grew out of no social challenge and presented no assault on established values, he said.

He stressed the continuity of British and American liberal thought, and said that the Revolution put into effect reforms that were idealized in Britain but could never have been enacted there. This "transforming effect of the American Revolution," Bailyn said, for years dominated and fired the lives of patriots he alternately termed "giddy," "able," "brilliant" and "enthusiastic." He waxed eloquent in expounding his vision of the continuing American Revolution, which, he concluded, had transformed the United States "incrementally" up to the present day.

As applause thundered from the audience, Bailyn walked across the stage, took a seat between the British and American flags, and settled back as Ritcheson, in the tradition of British toastmasters, extolled his presentation. Then the British gambit. "Professor Bailyn has kindly agreed to answer a few questions," Ritcheson delicately offered.

A pin-striped gentleman rose to his feet. "Sir!" he intoned. "Would you say that the new American institutions that you have so carefully described took the place of the established church which you Americans chose to eliminate--so that your Supreme Court became a kind of papacy?"

The audience cheered.

Bailyn crossed his legs and said he had never considered this view, paused, and said the question went beyond the scope of his lecture. A fluent few sentences more satisfied the audience, if not the questioner.

"From what you have said, wouldn't one be forced to conclude," a second voice queried, "that this revolution of yours was in fact a British Revolution in America?" (Flurry of whispers.)

"If you like," Bailyn observed. He reaffirmed his earlier point about the impossibility of similar reform in Britain. "But if you like," he allowed.

"A question from Professor Esmond Wright!" Ritcheson declared. Silence descended. Heads turned toward the celebrated director of the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London, an authority on the loyalists during the Revolution, and still known for his outspoken Tory stands as a former member of Parliament.

The silvery haired, distinguished man with a plastic poppy in his lapel (commemorating the end of World War I) rose to address the company. A brief "First of all I'd like to join in the general adulation over your distinguished talk" led into a series of platitudinous challenges which, the professor alleged, conflicted with Bailyn's remarks. Then, a dizzying, anglophilic puree of revisionism: "Can you really say that this was a 'revolution?' ...And when the call came to Washington to extend the revolution south of its border, to Latin America--the answer was no...So wouldn't it be more useful for historians henceforth to refer to this not as the 'American Revolution' but as a quite natural movement in favor of the independence of the American portion of the British Empire?"

By the time heads had turned back toward Bailyn, he had crossed the stage and once again taken his place behind the lectern. Harvard's historian felt, in fact, that there had been an American Revolution.

"Sorry about that question. Really fine lecture," Wright was overheard to tell Bailyn at the reception in an adjoining room, as Ritcheson whisked the two of them off for a photograph with tall Lord Robbins, an imposingly preserved economist who had been distinguished even in the time of Lord Keynes.

British and Indian waiters glided around the room serving iced American cocktails. Bowls of popcorn, peanuts and potato chips decorated tables. A U.S. history class from the American School in London filed past. Uninitiated visitors to London wondered where to find bonfires--it was Guy Fawkes Day. Long-separated Harvard graduates found each other. The entire American economic history faculty of the prestigious London School of Economics was seen in one place at one time. The Embassy's pay telephone box was found to be out of order. An Arab with a heavy accent wondered aloud whether Bailyn's accent was "Jewish." An American said she thought it was more "Boston."

In the spirit of USIS functions, Americans spread their winning cheer throughout the reception. Small groups of Britishers, chatting around the room, puzzled over the barrage of Harvard references that had come before. At least one group received an American explanation. "You see, in America we have these powerful centers of learning," a self-appointed authority said obvious disapproval. "Their graduates run the whole country." As she explained this "American phenomenon," her listeners had reason to wonder whether she had ever heard of Oxford or Cambridge.

Finally the crowd flowed out the way it had come in, past the formica tables where British guards had searched all parcels for bombs, not far from the awesome portraits that chronicle the ministers and ambassadors from the United States of America to the Court of Saint James, from the time of revolution to the time of the present, from John Adams to Elliot Richardson.