American Spheres, British Zones, and the “Special Relationship”

Stone, Jeffrey P.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-15468-4_4

Jeffrey P. Stone⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media ((PSHM))

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on Anglo-American relations in the 1940s and 1950s, specifically as expressed in news cartography. The perceived “special relationship” between the two nations is questioned in light of the notable differences in their respective worldviews as confirmed by cartographic imagery. A brief postwar period of American isolationism was expressed in map projections that portrayed the US-dominated Western Hemisphere as an isolated region. Meanwhile, the dark news of a crumbling postwar British Empire, coupled with Churchill’s passionate 1946 plea for direct American aid, fostered an era of British maps designed to rally Anglo-American unity and trade cooperation. Much discussion in this chapter is dedicated to the process of Cold War geopolitical polarization and how that process differed in each nation’s news maps, in terms of both rate of production and heightened political rhetoric.

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Notes

1.
Edy Kaufman, The Superpowers and Their Spheres of Influence: The United States and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and Latin America (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 11.
2.
Susan A. Brewer, To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 163.
3.
Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 16.
4.
Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 237–238. Quote taken from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, dated December 25, 1780.
5.
Sexton, 49–60.
6.
For the wording of the Monroe Doctrine, see http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/monroe.htm.
7.
Sexton, 5, 61–62.
8.
Walter La Feber, ed., John Quincy Adams and American Continental Empire (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 109–115. See also Sexton, 62.
9.
See David Slater’s essay entitled “Space, Democracy and Difference: For a Post-colonial Perspective” in David Featherstone’s and Joe Painter’s (eds.) book, Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey (West Sussex, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2013), 72.
10.
Lester D. Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (Athens, Georgia and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 57–58, 60–61.
11.
Ibid., 90.
12.
Sexton, 163–165, 182–183.
13.
Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1890).
14.
Wilfrid Hardy Callcott, The Western Hemisphere: Its Influence on United States Policies to the End of World War II (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1968), 58–61.
15.
Ibid., 66.
16.
Ibid., 66–67.
17.
Ibid., 80–81.
18.
Sexton, 237.
19.
Both images in Fig. 4.1 were taken from online archives located at: http://www.authentichistory.com/images/1900s.
20.
Mark Twain. “To Those Sitting in Darkness” in North American Review, v.531 (February 1901): 161–176.
21.
Ross Hoffman, “Europe and the Atlantic Community” in Thought, v.20 (1945): 25.
22.
Elizabeth Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington, KY: University Kentucky Press, 2006), 2.
23.
Julius W. Pratt, A History of United States Foreign Policy (2nd ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), 367–369.
24.
Callcott, 140.
25.
Langley, 114–115.
26.
Callcott, 141–142.
27.
Ibid., 285.
28.
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10.
29.
Originally quoted in Hoffman, 25–26. See United Nations charter, Article 21, Chapter VIII, Section C.
30.
Ibid., 52–53.
31.
Ibid., 53.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Brewer, 163.
34.
Ibid., 42.
35.
Clifford H. MacFadden, Henry Madison Kendall and George Dewey, Atlas of World Affairs (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1946), 31.
36.
See Richard Francaviglia’s book Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2011).
37.
Robert Hathaway, Great Britain and the United States: Special Relations since World War II (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 10–11.
38.
Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 61.
39.
Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 359.
40.
Sexton, 63.
41.
Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine: 1826–1867 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1933), 193–252. See also Sexton, 133.
42.
For an excellent account of Schomburgk’s survey, see D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).
43.
Ibid., 199–200.
44.
Sexton, 238.
45.
C.J. Bartlett, British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 62. See also Hathaway, 13.
46.
J. Robert Wegs and Robert Ladrech, Europe Since 1945: A Concise History (4th ed.) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 6–7.
47.
Ibid., 7.
48.
Ibid.
49.
Robin Edmonds, The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in Peace and War (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991), 388.
50.
Ibid., 389.
51.
Ibid., 388.
52.
Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War (2nd ed.) (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992), 42.
53.
For the wording of this speech, see http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/churchill-iron.html.
54.
Japan’s expansion in the Pacific is the major exception to this statement. Japanese World War II–era military attacks on the US possessions of Alaska and Hawaii underscored this exception.
55.
Guntram Henrik Herb, Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda, 1918–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), passim, and Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (2nd ed.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 99–107.
56.
Nancy Mitchell. The Dangers of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3, 41. Sexton, 225.
57.
Herb, 2.
58.
Facts In Review, v.3, n.13 (April 1941): 182. See Monmonier, 107.
59.
Pratt, 353–354.
60.
See J.B. Harley’s essay “Deconstructing the Map” in John Agnew’s Human Geography (New York: Blackwell, 1996), 422–443.
61.
Slater, 72.
62.
Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Pimlico Press, 2005), 5.
63.
Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 134. Sexton, 238.
64.
Brewer, 163.
65.
Sexton, 237.
66.
“Greenland: A Warning to Axis—What Occupation of Danish Colony Means to Hemisphere Defense” in U.S. News and World Report, v.10, n.16 (April 14, 1941): 16–17.
67.
Ibid., 17.
68.
U.S. News and World Report, v.11, n.3 (July 18, 1941): 11.
69.
Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1997), 203.
70.
British colonial areas in the Americas by 1945 included the Bermuda, Jamaica, the Windward and Leeward Islands, Barbados, Trinidad, Tobago, the Bahamas, British Guiana, and British Honduras. This is excluding the contested areas of the Falklands Islands and a short-lived claim to a section of Antarctica.
71.
Newsweek, v.24, n.17 (Oct. 23, 1944): 68.
72.
F.S. Northedge and Audrey Wells, British and Soviet Communism: The Impact of a Revolution (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), 103.
73.
Sydney Morrel, Spheres of Influence (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), 92–93. Morrell argues that although outgoing Prime Minister Churchill pressed for continued hegemony in Iran, the British presence there was largely commercial and not heavily regulated, while the British government’s involvement continued to be indirect.
74.
Randall Bennett Woods, A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 291.
75.
See map entitled “Middle East Oil Map” in Serial Map Service, v.7, n.9 (June, 1946): map 360.
76.
Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (London: Associated University Presses, 1979), 58–59.
77.
Woods, 291.
78.
Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 133.
79.
Woods, 10.
80.
Ibid., 30.
81.
Brewer, 164–165.
82.
Woods, 13–14.
83.
Brewer, 165.
84.
GBCP membership was 12,000 in 1941, and rose to 65,000 in 1942. See Northedge and Wells, 152.
85.
David Childs, Britain since 1945: A Political History (New York: St, Martin’s Press, 1979), 35. The GBCP won two seats in the 1945 general election. See Northedge and Wells, 104.
86.
See ad for Sunday Times reporter Rebecca West’s article entitled “Facts Behind the Witch-Hunts” in the New Statesman and Nation, v.45, n.1150 (Mar. 21, 1953): 345.
87.
See ad for the News Chronicle in the New Statesman and Nation, v.50, n.1277 (Aug. 27, 1955): 241; see ad for Collet’s Bookshop in New Statesman and Nation, v.50, n.1287 (Nov. 5, 1955): 578.
88.
See J.F. Horrabin’s map set in the London Tribune, n.450 (Aug. 10, 1945): 7.
89.
U.S. News and World Report, v.18, n.21 (May 5, 1945): 13.
90.
Time, v.45, n22 (May 28, 1945): 21.
91.
See Richard H. Ullman’s essay entitled “America, Britain, and the Soviet Threat in Historical and Present Perspective” in William Roger Louis and Hedley Bull (eds.), The ‘Special Relationship’: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 103.
92.
David Reynolds, “Rethinking Anglo-American Relations,” Royal Institute of International Affairs, v.65, n.1 (Winter, 1988–1989): 94.
93.
H.C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations (1783–1952) (London: Odhams Press, 1954); Reynolds, 94.
94.
Leon D. Epstein, Britain – Uneasy Ally (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); Reynolds, 94.
95.
Louis Liebovich, The Press and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944–1947 (New York and London: Praeger, 1988), 2.
96.
Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1944); see Newsweek, v.24, n.2 (Jul. 10, 1944): 96.
97.
New Statesman and Nation, v.31, n.783 (Feb. 23, 1946): 131.
98.
Woods, 293.
99.
Bartlett, 68.
100.
Hathaway, 12–13.
101.
See map entitled “Reshuffle” in Time, v.47, n.4 (Jan. 28, 1946): 26.
102.
Hathaway, 13.
103.
Ibid., 14–15.
104.
Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 359. See also Bartlett, 69–70, 74.
105.
See these maps in the following issues of Serial Map Service: “BOAC,” v.7, n.6 (March, 1946): 63–64; “British Empire,” v.7, n.7 (April, 1946): map 352–353; “French Empire,” v.7, n.8 (May, 1946): map 356–357; and “European Passenger Transport,” v.7, n.12 (September, 1946): map 370–371.
106.
A good example is the economic map of Australia in Serial Map Service, v.2, n.5 (February, 1941): map 67.
107.
See ad for Barclay’s Bank of London in Spectator, v.183, n.6331 (Oct. 28, 1949): 569.
108.
Paterson, 62–66.
109.
Gaddis, 301–302.
110.
Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 108.
111.
Ibid.
112.
Ibid., 108–109.
113.
Ibid., 109.
114.
Sean Greenwood, “Frank Roberts and the ‘Other’ Long Telegram: the View from the British Embassy in Moscow, March 1946” in Journal of Contemporary History, v.25, n.1 (January 1990): 110.
115.
Ibid., 111.
116.
Ibid., 114.
117.
Ibid.
118.
Ibid., 115.
119.
Sebastian Haffner, “The Communist Curtain: ‘Russian Sphere of Influence in Europe’” in Serial Map Service, v.8, n.10 (July 1947): 162–163.
120.
Ibid., 162.
121.
Ibid.
122.
Ibid., 163.
123.
Ibid.
124.
Ibid.
125.
Ibid., map 416.
126.
Aldo Cassuto, “Ports and Politics” in Time and Tide, v.30, n.15 (Apr. 9, 1949): 345.
127.
Ibid.
128.
Time, v.47, n.11 (Mar. 18, 1946): 24.
129.
See map entitled “How The Communist Vote Has Varied In Europe’s Elections” in NYT, v.95, n.32,278 (Jun. 6, 1946): E5; see map entitled “The Split In Europe Between East And West” in NYT, v.97, n.32,796 (Nov. 9, 1947): E1.
130.
Newsweek, v.32, n.4 (Jul. 26, 1948): 30.
131.
See map entitled “Marshall Plan Giveaway To Europe” in American, v.148, n.2 (August 1949): 24–25; see map entitled “Voice Of America” in American, v.150, n.1 (July 1950): 26–27.
132.
Time and Tide, v.28, n.35 (Sept. 13, 1947): 976.
133.
Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 6.
134.
Ibid., 49–51.
135.
U.S. News and World Report, v.20, n.22 (May 24, 1946): 21.
136.
Ibid., 19–21.
137.
Gaddis, 309.
138.
Paterson, 52.
139.
See map entitled “Three Worlds and their problem spots” in Newsweek, v.27, n.5 (Feb. 4, 1946): 35; see map entitled “Marking Time” in Time, v.48, n.16 (Oct. 14, 1946): 31; see The New York Times, v.96, n.32,558 (Mar. 16, 1947): E1.
140.
Ladrech and Wegs, 17.
141.
Ibid.
142.
Ibid.
143.
Greenwood, 117.
144.
Charles Wighton, “Buses Pass Blockade: German Railwaymen Get Order, ‘Be at the Ready,’” in Daily Express, n.15,248 (Apr. 29, 1949): 1.
145.
See maps entitled “The Occupation of Germany,” U.S. News and World Report, v.18, n.24 (Jun. 15, 1945): 23; “Master Strokes: Overlord, Anvil,” Newsweek, v.26, n.16 (Oct. 15, 1945): 56; “Berlin: Allied Zones of Occupation,” Time, v.46, n.2 (Jul. 16, 1945): 29; “Chart of U.S. Zone,” Time, v.47, n.25 (Jun. 24, 1946): 26.
146.
See maps entitled “Cold War Crystallized: Western Union v. Russian Satellites,” in Time, v.51, n.5 (Feb. 2, 1948): 16; “Piece by Piece,” in Time, v.51, n.10 (Mar. 10, 1948): 26; “Russian Travel Barrier in the Berlin Area,” Time, v.51, n.15 (Apr. 12, 1951): 35; “Marshall Plan Giveaway to Europe,” in American, v.148, n.2 (August, 1949): 24–25; “Watch on the Rhine,” Newsweek, v.34, n.24 (Dec. 12, 1949): 34.
147.
See map entitled “Playing With Fire?” in Newsweek, v.32, n.4 (Jul. 26, 1948): 30.
148.
Doenecke, 162.
149.
D.F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins, 1917–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1961) vol. 2, 584.
150.
Roderick Farquhar and John K. Fairbank, The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) vol.14, “The People’s Republic, Part I: the Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965,” 64.
151.
Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001), 154.
152.
See map entitled “Lost Horizon?” in Time, v.52, n.23 (Dec. 6, 1948): 28.
153.
“War of Two Worlds: Results of the Summer Campaigns” in Newsweek, v.34, n.18 (Oct. 31, 1949): 24.
154.
Kathryn P. Weathersby, “Should We Fear This?: Stalin and the Danger of War with America,” Cold War International History Project: Working Paper No. 9 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2002), passim.
155.
Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank, Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 97.
156.
Ibid., 116.
157.
Ibid., 120–121.
158.
Ibid., 114–115.
159.
See map entitled “What We’re Up Against” in Newsweek, v.36, n.3 (Jul. 17, 1950): 14.
160.
Saturday Evening Post, v.225, n.12 (Sept. 20, 1952): 37.
161.
Fortune, v.49, n.5 (May 1954): 105.
162.
U.S. News and World Report, v.39, n.11 (Sept. 9, 1955): 23.
163.
Time and Tide, v.29, n.3 (Jan. 17, 1948): 65.
164.
Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (eds.), Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 112.
165.
Daily Express, n.15,390 (Oct. 12, 1949): 4.
166.
Newsweek, v.34, n.17 (Oct. 24, 1949): 36.
167.
Osgood and Frank, 153.
168.
Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 156.
169.
Osgood and Frank, 157–161.
170.
Osgood, 82, 137 and 164. See also Hanson W. Baldwin’s article “Military ‘New Look’” in the New York Times, v.103, n.35,073 (Feb. 2, 1954): 11.
171.
Osgood, 165.
172.
Lewis and Wigen, 6.
173.
Ibid., 57.
174.
See maps entitled “Lost Horizon?” in Time, v.52, n.23 (Dec. 6, 1948): 28; “Two Worlds” in Time, v.55, n.1 (Jan. 2, 1950): 34–35; and “In the Shadow of the Sickle” in Newsweek, v.36, n.14 (Aug. 14, 1950): 25.
175.
David M. Watry, Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill, and Eden in the Cold War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), passim.

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Stone, J.P. (2019). American Spheres, British Zones, and the “Special Relationship”. In: British and American News Maps in the Early Cold War Period, 1945–1955. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15468-4_4

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