Red and Grey:
Toward a Natural
History of British
Anti-Americanism
By Peter Coates
The Eccles Centre for
American Studies
The Ninth Annual Eccles
Centre for American Studies
Plenary Lecture given at
the British Association for
American Studies Annual
Conference, 2012
www.bl.uk/ecclescentre
Published by The British Library
The design, setting and camera ready
copy was produced at The British Library
Design Office
ISBN 0 7123 4465 9
Copyright © 2013 The British Library Board
Red and Grey:
Toward a Natural
History of British
Anti-Americanism
By Peter Coates
The Eccles Centre for
American Studies
The Ninth Annual Eccles
Centre for American Studies
Plenary Lecture given at
the British Association for
American Studies Annual
Conference, 2012
www.bl.uk/ecclescentre
PETER COATES is Professor of American and Environmental History
at the University of Bristol. His books include Environment and History:
The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa [with William
Beinart] (1995); Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (1998);
Salmon (2006); American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species:
Strangers on the Land (2006) and A Story of Six Rivers: History, Culture
and Ecology (2013). Between 1988 and 1990, he was curator of the US
collections at the British Library – a time, shortly before the move to the
Library’s new site at St Pancras, when plans for the Eccles Centre were
hatching, the new building was taking shape and he worked closely
with Douglas W Bryant and the American Trust for the British Library.
He remembers taking a tour of the building site with Doug and other
Trust members.
Red and Grey: Toward a Natural History
of British Anti-Americanism
1. Introduction: Ecological imperialism: Over There and Over Here
‘Ecological imperialism’ has become a familiar concept for historians
of colonial America. Coined in 1986 by the pioneering environmental
historian, Alfred Crosby, the term refers to the impact of European flora
and fauna transferred to new-found-lands like the Americas – and their
instrumental role as unwitting allies of colonization.1 It is hard to imagine
American cuisine without beef and wheat. Yet of the ingredients from
which the hamburger ­is assembled, just one – the tomato slice – is native
to the new world.
In addition to economically useful animals and plants, however, ecological
imperialism also involved introductions that turned out to be far less
desirable than anticipated. Crosby emphasized the asymmetry of the
biotic exchange between ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds. And this was particularly
the case for species, with unintended consequences. Europe, he stressed,
had received few ‘problem’ species in return for the plethora of notorious
invasive non-natives that Europeans had inflicted on North America –
not least the ‘English’ sparrow and the ‘European’ starling, which, he
explained, ‘dispossessed millions of American birds’. 2
One of the best known animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton, a
Canadian-American nature writer who founded the Woodcraft Indians,
concerns the adventures of two ‘English’ sparrows, Randy and Biddy,
in Manhattan’s urban wilderness (1901). Well-meaning American
acclimatization societies introduced what were properly called house
sparrows (Passer domesticus) in the 1850s to combat a plague of indigenous
caterpillars that was ravaging the foliage of shade trees in east coast cities.
Unfortunately, the policy backfired (a suitable subject for a lecture on Friday
the Thirteenth!); the avian newcomers ignored the caterpillars in favour of
the kernels of grain that studded the copious quantities of horse droppings
that festooned the urban environment in the pre-automobile age. A pen and
ink drawing of a vacant bird box that accompanied Seton’s story evoked
2 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
the widespread public hostility toward this very successfully naturalized
‘feathered foreigner’ – and associated Anglophobia – at the height of the
so-called ‘Sparrow War’. Like his ‘little John Bulls’, Seton was an English
immigrant – born and raised on Tyneside in South Shields.3
In fact, the flow of troublesome and unwanted biotic traffic across the
Atlantic wasn’t quite as one-directional as Crosby and Seton implied.
A British historian of the British empire, John MacKenzie, has taken a
different view of the distribution of unwanted species between Europe and
America. For MacKenzie, Crosby’s perspective was a ‘strikingly American
one, for anyone who lives in the British Isles is almost daily brought face to
face with the fact that ecological colonialism has been a two-way process’.4
Plenty of American animals have flourished in the UK and caused
headaches. What I want to do in this evening’s Eccles Centre Lecture
is shift attention from the European species over there to the American
species over here. In Britain, controversial ‘immigrant’ animals abound,
and many of the most heavily contested are North American transplants.
2. Bio-Villains Made in America
Animals, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss reflected, are not
only ‘“good to eat”’ but also ‘“good to think”’.5 An animal is rarely just
an animal. It is a symbolic and discursive entity as well as a flesh-andblood creature. And an animal is particularly good to think with when
it is served up wrapped in the flag. The role of anti-American sentiments
in attitudes to problematic American animals is, without doubt, the least
studied aspect of the heavily studied topic of anti-Americanism in Europe.
Not one of the flurry of books on anti-Americanism, whether in Britain or
on the continent, published within the inflamed climate of opinion during
the George W Bush regime (2000-08) mentions reactions to disruptive
animals of American provenance.6
‘For some reason, the [American] people I meet in my country are not
the same as the ones I knew in the United States’, declared a Burmese
journalist in The Ugly American, the 1958 novel set in Indo-China:
‘A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go
to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously.
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 3
They’re loud and ostentatious’.7 This touches on a key characteristic of all
invasive species: whether human, animal or plant, they behave differently
when removed from their customary habitats, released from the usual
constraints of the environments within which they’ve evolved. The grey
squirrel is relatively innocuous on its home turf. There is no Japanese
Knotweed problem in Japan. Nor is kudzu (‘the vine that ate the South’)
a problem in its Japanese homeland (a phenomenon that scientists refer to
as the ‘enemy release hypothesis’). Good and fairly harmless (perhaps even
beautiful) Americans become ugly, harmful Americans when unleashed
abroad. I’ll now examine the British proclivity, past and present, to humanize
American animals through analogy with Americans and American character
traits: bigger, bolder, brasher and more bustling. By scrutinizing animals
resident in Britain yet withheld faunal citizenship – particularly the grey
squirrel – this talk is a very tentative attempt at a natural history of British
anti-Americanism.
The strong American representation among animals considered to be
natural disasters in Britain was highlighted in an audit of non-native
species conducted in 2005 by English Nature – the statutory UK
government agency responsible for wildlife and nature conservation (since
re-named Natural England). Of the twelve non-native animals wreaking
the most serious havoc – the dirty dozen – five were North American:
signal crayfish, Canada goose, ruddy duck, mink and grey squirrel. The
Environment Agency’s recent compilations of the ‘Top Ten Most Wanted
Foreign Species’ confirm this high American profile. The signal crayfish and
mink rank second and third on the list (2006). The terminology of ‘most
wanted’ has, of course, also been imported from the United States. (And
‘most wanted’ actually means ‘least wanted’!) In an arresting example from
its natural cultural habitat, a poster issued by California’s Department of
Water Resources (2005) to raise public awareness of the threat posed by the
zebra mussel personifies this freshwater bivalve by deploying the familiar
mythology of the western frontier: ‘volunteer for a posse’ to ‘arrest the
spread’ of the ‘outlaws’.
The signal crayfish exemplifies the characteristics that have equipped
various American species for competitive success. Introduced to southern
England in the early 1970s to establish a crayfish farming industry for
the restaurant trade, the freshwater crustacean readily escaped its tanks.
Relative to its native counterpart, the white-clawed crayfish, the American
4 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
cousin is bigger and more assertive. It breeds earlier and lays more eggs,
which hatch sooner. It eats a wider range of foods, is more tolerant
of poor water quality, and, to cap it off, carries and spreads a deadly
fungal disease from which it enjoys immunity. Able to crawl considerable
distances and climb substantial heights, it colonizes watercourses at the
rate of a kilometre a year. Moreover, unlike the white-clawed crayfish, it
burrows, and its excavations honeycomb river banks, rendering them liable
to collapse. The signal crayfish has also begun to colonize tributaries of
the Tweed in southern Scotland, where its taste for salmon eggs threatens
recovery of salmon stocks. In England, indigenous crayfish have been
virtually supplanted south of a line between the Severn and the Humber.
The pejorative humanization of American species by UK government
scientists, natural resource managers, journalists and members of the public
alike is incorrigible. The Environment Agency explains that signal crayfish
and mink have ‘taken advantage of Britain’s welcoming living conditions’
and ‘overstayed their environmental visa’ (2006). The British National Party
has also become a vigorous exponent of ecological nationalism as well as
a critic of human immigration. The party’s website includes a section on
‘eco-threats’ that features stories about the misdeeds of alien species and
the plight of natives. The British National Party’s legal officer recently
characterized the signal crayfish as ‘the Mike Tyson of crayfish…a diseased,
psychotic, evil, illegal immigrant colonist who displaces the indigenous
crayfish, colonises their territory and then reproduces until it totally
devastates the indigenous environment and indigenous crayfish’.8
Metaphors of the vicious, fast breeding, all-conquering alien also saturated the
earlier debate about the mink ‘menace’ in the 1970s and 1980s. A semi-aquatic
member of the weasel family, the mink, was imported to stock fur farms in the
1920s, but it proved to be an accomplished escape artist. Inmates were also
released by bankrupt mink farmers and ‘liberated’ by animal rights activists.
By the early 1950s, the mink was firmly rooted in the English countryside and
few animals were more vilified. As well as being routinely blamed by fishermen
and conservationist for the depletion of native fish and waterfowl populations,
this ‘deadly’ ‘American invader’ was heavily implicated in the declining
numbers of otter and water vole.9 The impact on the water vole has been
particularly distressing due to the automatic association with Ratty in
The Wind in the Willows (1908). Thanks to Kenneth Grahame’s novel
(Theodore Roosevelt, a great fan, was instrumental in securing publication
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 5
of an American edition with Scribner’s)10, this unlikely rodent has been
enshrined in the affections of generations of Britons: a perfect example of
charismatic mini-fauna.
Shifting from aquatic to terrestrial newcomers, the grey squirrel arrived in
Britain half a century before the mink. Nonetheless, this is the American
animal that still generates the most heated public debate. Perhaps because
it occupies the highest profile of any wild animal in the daily lives of
millions of Britons, being a co-resident of our city parks and backyards, it
represents the clearest and most present danger. The British often compare
the pestiferous grey’s misbehaviour in Britain to the North American
depredations of the uncouth and bullying ‘English’ sparrow and the
ruthlessly expansionist ‘European’ starling. Enter the four-legged, furry
and very nimble Ugly American.
3. Grey Advance and Red Retreat
The grey squirrel is Britain’s oldest American faunal immigrant, arriving in­
the 1870s, during an era of innocent faith in the virtues of acclimatization.
It quickly became naturalized and rapidly expanded its range. The belief
that this success was inimical to the native red squirrel’s welfare took hold
while it was still being released. The leading British squirrel researcher of
the 1920s, A D Middleton, a zoologist at Oxford University, reported the
deep seated belief among the human residents of areas colonized by greys
that the red ‘has been reduced in numbers or driven out by the introduced
aliens’. Middleton reported the rumour – completely unsubstantiated – that
the male grey castrated its red counterpart by biting off its testicles. Equally
fanciful rural folklore held that male greys were massacring red squirrel
litters and interbreeding to produce a hybrid offspring that was more grey
than red.11 In 1936, twenty-six county councils distributed more than
5,000 posters beseeching the public to ‘kill the tree rat’. In 1937, it was
designated an official pest because of damage to hardwoods, cereal crops
and fruit trees. A subsequently introduced bounty system lasted until 1958,
but hardly dented vibrant grey numbers.
A nationalistic element has long been more or less inseparable from this
consternation. Just as BP pointedly became British Petroleum again in
6 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
the United States in April 2010 (at least within the White House and on
Capitol Hill), in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of
Mexico, it was not just a grey squirrel but an American grey squirrel. And
not just a tree rat but an American tree rat. On the opening page of his
landmark study of the grey squirrel in Britain (1931), Middleton remarked
that ‘I know of more than one patriotic Englishman who has been
embittered against the whole American nation on account of the presence
of their squirrels in his garden’.12 And forty years later, in a letter to The
Times (21 October 1971), the owner of a terrorized woodland garden
admitted that ‘in respect of the alien grey immigrant I plead guilty to racial
discrimination’. Though the native grounds of Sciurus carolinensis are by
no means confined to the territory of the United States, there are relatively
few British references, even in zoological literature, to the North American
grey squirrel or the Eastern grey squirrel of North America. And references
to a Canadian grey squirrel are conspicuous by their complete absence.13
This demonization did not escape American attention. The New York
Times reported the Forestry Commission’s investigation in the late 1920s
of the grey squirrel’s impact on timber resources. The reporter reckoned
that prejudice was so strong that it was unlikely to receive a fair appraisal.
A year later, the New York Times drew attention to the many ‘outbursts’
against the ‘gray invader’ triggered by ‘patriotic’ naturalists, foresters and
agriculturalists.
Integral to the grey’s vilification was the rehabilitation of its alleged victim,
which is not only smaller and less prolific, but also portrayed as gentler
and ‘cuter’. The red squirrel is distributed across Eurasia, from Portugal
to Japan, but there are seventeen sub-species – one of which is endemic
to Britain. As various commentators pointed out in the 1920s, the
‘attractive American stranger’ was mischievous and destructive – though
no more so than the pesky red squirrel.14 Yet with a little help from one of
Beatrix Potter’s most beloved animal creations, Squirrel Nutkin (1903),
the red has been converted from forester’s scourge into national animal
emblem. As Hilda Keen has observed, the red squirrel has assumed a
hallowed position in the pantheon of Englishness alongside red phone
boxes, warm beer, and cricket bats.15 Very John Major!
Potter tried to capitalize on Squirrel Nutkin’s popularity with a follow-up
story about a grey squirrel who she described as ‘little, fat and comfortable’
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 7
and called Timmy Tiptoes. Timmy’s national origin is not mentioned. Nor is
the story’s North American setting. But since the cast of characters includes a
bear and a chipmunk, this is clearly not the Lake District, which, at the time
– 1911 – was still beyond the grey frontier line. Though Timmy and his wife,
Goody, drink tea like good British squirrels, the story was a flop.
Once known simply as the ‘common’ squirrel, by 1945, the red was highly
uncommon south of the Scottish border. A prominent British natural history
writer lamented that ‘our island race’ was confined to ‘islands’ of conifer
plantations amidst a ‘sea of grey squirrel country’.16 The Lake District,
home of Potter and Squirrel Nutkin, was one of those islands – a besieged
fortress of a species whose numbers have plunged to c. 160,000 (down from
c. 12 million on the eve of human colonization), whereas the grey’s British
population currently stands at about 2.5 million (of which 2 million are
in England). Though England’s largest surviving red colony – c. 9,000 – is
housed in Kielder Forest, Northumberland, another stronghold is the red
squirrel reserve in the pinewoods at Sefton on the Lancashire coast, just
north of Liverpool, at Formby, about 40 miles from Manchester. I was born
and raised in this neck of the woods, so red squirrels were part of boyhood.
4. The Grey Scare and Red Crusade
Riding to the rescue like the 7th Cavalry in the 1956 Western movie are
the hereditary members of Parliament’s upper chamber. Perhaps because
they feel a large dose of empathy with a fellow endangered species, British
aristocrats like few things better, it seems, than discussing the grey’s
infamy and the red’s plight. Today’s ‘British’ squirrels are in fact mostly
descended from continental European specimens brought over in the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century for restocking purposes,
as native red populations plummeted for reasons unrelated to the arrival
and spread of the grey American cousin. But the ‘native’ squirrel’s political
champions are immune to this irony. During a typically impassioned
House of Lords debate in 1998, Lord Inglewood of Cumbria identified the
creature as the ‘most lovable and loved of our British native animals’.17
In the Lords’ squirrel debate of 2006, Lady Saltoun of Abernethy
pronounced the red’s innate superiority. Cloaking the iconic national
8 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
animal in the admirable qualities of a better class of person, she observed
that they are ‘rather like quiet, well behaved people, who do not make a
nuisance or an exhibition of themselves, or commit crimes, and so do not
get themselves into the papers in the vulgar way grey squirrels do’.18 This
was a particularly fine example, if in sublimated form, of a distinctive
form of anti-Americanism traditionally associated with the British
establishment – the anti-Americanism of cultural condescension.19
The distinction between squirrels in Britain and British squirrels is subtle
but crucial. Speaking in the debate of 1998, Lord Rowallan observed that
‘we should not encourage them merely because they are beautiful animals…
They have another advantage – they are British’. By 2006, the hapless red
was even more embattled. For Lord Inglewood, desperate times demanded
drastic measures. He urged Jamie Oliver, who’d recently launched his
campaign to revolutionize British school dinners, to add the grey squirrel
to the canteen menu. Because ‘unless something radical and imaginative is
done…Squirrel Nutkin and his friends and relations are “going to be toast”’.
Red squirrel defence groups are spreading at the rate of the grey squirrel
itself. The Red Squirrel Survival Trust’s patron is HRH The Prince of
Wales and Save Our Squirrels, a campaign operated by Red Alert (since
renamed Red Squirrels Northern England), received National Heritage
Lottery funding (2006) to operate sixteen reserves in northern England.
Drawings of red squirrels by personalities from the worlds of music,
comedy, sport, television and radio, stage and screen, were auctioned
on the Internet in September 2000 to raise money for Red Alert. At
the moment, though, only the movement’s militant tendency endorses
the philosophy of ‘eat a grey to save a red’ (which I’ve translated into a
catchphrase of which I’m really proud: ‘if you can’t beat them, eat them’). 20
On the firing line of the northeast frontier is the estate of Lord Rupert
Redesdale, a Liberal Democrat whose seat in Northumberland, which
borders on Kielder Forest, is graced by a remnant stock of red squirrels. For
many British countryside enthusiasts and nature lovers, the grey squirrel
is inauthentic – an impostor upsetting the nation’s natural status quo.
Redesdale’s sidekick, Paul Parker, is a plain speaking Geordie whose mission is
elegant in its simplicity: to kill grey squirrels. The self-styled ‘Verminator’ and
his vainglorious extermination crusade featured in the television documentary,
‘Squirrel Wars: Red versus Grey’, shown on Channel 4 on 9 July 2009.21
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 9
The popular case against the grey squirrel in the UK is so entrenched
that it is largely impervious to research suggesting that its initial spread
was not in fact responsible for the red’s decline. Red squirrel populations
have a long history of fluctuation. They were under stress in many parts
of England before the grey’s advent because of disease and the retreat of
coniferous woodland. Rather than displacing reds, greys usually advanced
into emptied territory. (Ironically, the firm conservationist preference, on
ecological and aesthetic grounds, for native deciduous trees, works to the
grey’s advantage. Reds cannot digest acorns as readily as greys.)
A surprisingly outlet for these revisionist findings was a children’s book. The
Further Exploits of Mr. Saucy Squirrel (1977). The author was Woodrow
Wyatt, a former Labour MP, who became a Conservative life peer in 1987.
The central character is a dapper squirrel whose rural seat is a beech tree
near Devizes in Wiltshire. Despite his impeccably English dress, manner
and pursuits, Saucy Squirrel is actually a grey squirrel. Asked if he is ‘a good
English squirrel’ when he goes shopping for a bowler hat, he replies: ‘Dear
me. I’m always being asked that question. We are not the old kind of English
squirrel people call the red squirrel. But we’ve been here a long time now’.
Nor does he suffer from an identity crisis or divided allegiance: ‘We came
from America so long ago that we are now properly naturalised English. I
don’t sing “The Star-Spangled Banner”...I sing “God Save The Queen”’.
Mr Saucy Squirrel is also at pains to explain that the ‘English’ squirrel was
already in trouble when its American cousin arrived: ‘We just took over
in various places that they’d already left’.22 Wyatt’s charming picture of
Anglo-American co-existence and harmony is nevertheless rather overdone.
Greys may not be entirely responsible for the reds’ decline, but they probably
prevented recovery. Moreover, most greys now carry a virus – squirrelpox –
that kills reds by turning their brains to mush within a fortnight.
5. Squirrels and Anti-Americanism
Nonetheless, even-handed squirrel researchers face an uphill struggle. The
grey continues to serve as a handy scapegoat. Here are just a few recent
examples of the cultural construction of an unsavoury Yankee critter – a
portrayal that, according to Andrew Tyler, director of Animal Aid, reflects
10 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
the British public’s mentality that ‘the only good squirrel is a red squirrel’. 23
An entry on the internet blog of a self-described ‘Tennessee expat and long
term London resident’ reflects on the pervasive feeling that the grey is UK
Public Enemy Number One. The immediate prompt was the Great Squirrel
Debate in the House of Lords on 23 March 2006. At that time, Americans
who had been living in London for years were reporting their first abusive
treatment, whether or not they voted for Bush or supported the invasion of
Iraq. As a twenty-nine-year old woman exclaimed: ‘some people just fly off
the handle without even talking to me – it’s as if they had been waiting to
run into an American all day to let their feelings out’. Within this hostile
climate of opinion, the Tennessean wondered whether the assault on the
grey squirrel was a ‘further sign of rampant anti-Americanism among the
British elite’. 24
For some analysts, the only genuine sort of anti-Americanism is that of the
ruling classes. 25 They dismiss ‘popular’ anti-Americanism as a sporadic,
non-systemic phenomenon. Yet the grey squirrel arguably serves as a
common enemy against which Brits from all walks of life can unite. A
feature in the New York Times (2006) about inter-national couples profiled
an American woman and her British husband who live in London. Whereas
her staunchly Anglophile family readily accepted her British fiancé, her
future mother-in-law made a point, at their first meeting, of bringing to
her attention the ‘awful American gray squirrels’ that were ‘chasing all the
lovely English red squirrels out of Britain’ – a reaction the daughter-in-law
attributed to reflexive anti-Americanism (until she read up about the grey’s
exploits). 26
Another strategy in the campaign against the grey is arguably less
vulnerable to accusations of knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Those who
position themselves as pro-red rather than anti-grey package their cause as
part of a broader effort – a broader effort to preserve national and regional
distinctiveness and to protect embattled minorities in a world of rampant
globalization. A pro-red stance therefore entails the same commitment
to the survival of local heritage, community identity and the ethos of
diversity that invests the championing of local cheeses and apples against
the tasteless universalism of international agribusiness. Grey squirrels are
like Red Delicious apples - examples of the new age of the Homogenocene,
toxic to gastronomic, cultural, and ecological pluralism. Meanwhile, red
squirrels are like tasty local cheeses with names like Stinking Bishop, or
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 11
rare apple varieties with equally peculiar names like Polly Whitehair and
Bloody Ploughman. Grey squirrels are like Granny Smiths from Chile and
McDonald hamburgers from cattle raised in former Brazilian rainforest:
symbols of tasteless, imperious universalism. In this respect, anti-grey
squirrel sentiment is as much about anti-globalization as anti-Americanism
(or, at least, American-led globalization).
Is anti-Americanism primarily a conservative trait, as suggested by the
aforementioned Tennessee expat, or essentially a feature of the British
left? A few years ago, there was an article in The Spectator, a conservative
British magazine, about the plucky reappearance in London of the tea shop,
amidst the sprawling American empire of a coffee shop chain. The author
who happened to be a former student of mine (though I taught him long
before I became obsessed with squirrels) – confessed that Starbucks is
‘liable to bring out unworthy feelings of anti-Americanism in me’. Casting
around for an evocative analogy, he portrayed Starbucks as ‘the Yankee
grey squirrel of the high street, which has reduced our native tea and coffee
shops to a few redoubts in the North’. 27
Debates about American bio-villains are riddled with anthropomorphism
of this stripe. The most familiar critical device, unsurprisingly, is to
humanize these non-humans through analogy with a ‘friendly invasion’.
The invasion in question is not that of the rich American heiresses in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which – as Simon Jenkins
explained in 2010 in the 15th Annual Douglas W Bryant Lecture at the
Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library – fuelled a bout
of anti-American hysteria in the British press. 28 I am referring to the influx
of US troops during World War Two: 3 million in total between January
1942 and December 1945. GIs stationed in Britain were famously described
as ‘oversexed, overpaid, overfed, and over here’.29 As you all know,
this celebrated cliché encapsulated the envy and resentment of British
males toward strapping, ebullient American servicemen. Bearing gifts of
nylon stockings, lipstick, chocolate, cigarettes and chewing gum, they
undoubtedly enjoyed a huge advantage in the mating game.
Permit me two quick asides at this point! GIs may have been overfed. But
some who hailed from the backwoods of the eastern seaboard nevertheless
craved an authentic taste of home – so much so that they were willing to
offer top dollar – as much as five shillings – for a grey squirrel. The grey
12 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
squirrel was a popular game animal on the east coast and in parts of
Appalachia squirrel brain was a particular delicacy. 30 Meanwhile, wartime
Britons boiled up grey squirrel for dog food. 31
And while on the subject of dogs, I recently discovered the collection of
articles that John Steinbeck wrote while serving as the New York Herald
Tribune’s special correspondent in Europe in 1943. In one despatch from
England, he reflected on the GIs’ habit of planting vegetable gardens on
the edges of airfields and barracks. What they really wanted to grow
were green corn, peppers and tomatoes – not the puny, hard little English
tomatoes, but big American beefsteak tomatoes bursting with juice
and vitality – like themselves. They even tried raising water melons and
cantaloupes. The cool and damp English summer soon brought them down
to earth, however, and they resigned themselves to raising peas, potatoes,
cabbages, carrots and turnips. No danger of horticultural imperialism in
reverse. With wicked brilliance, Steinbeck reflected on the deep English
fear of vegetables – unless, that is, or, should I say, until, they are boiled
to death – safely reduced to grey sludge. Here is the sentiment that
concluded this particular letter to America: ‘It is strange to an American
that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are
brutal to vegetables. It is just one of those national differences that are
unfathomable’.32
For some students of anti-Americanism, the ‘over here’ variety exemplifies
the largely benign and jocular popular form. 33 I think it has more bite.
The phrase is certainly no innocuous relic. It has proved highly adaptable,
surviving the post-Cold War closure of US bases in Britain. A major
reason for its retention of cultural currency is surely the robust condition
of transplanted species such as the grey squirrel and the regular arrival
of vibrant new species. The transfer of the phrase from people to animals
has been almost effortless. The richness of existing associations has
made the ‘over here’ phrase a weapon of choice in the rhetorical arsenal
of environmental managers. According to an Environment Agency press
release, the signal crayfish and mink are ‘over sized, over sexed and over
here’, from the standpoint of white-clawed crayfish and water vole (2006). 34
This practice echoes that particular strand of anti-Americanism that
focuses on national character traits, portraying Americans as cocksure,
vulgar, unrestrained and overly competitive. 35
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 13
6. Conclusion: Squirrels and the Special Relationship
How seriously should we take the language of anti-Americanism that colours
British expressions of hostility to the grey squirrel? How closely do responses
to American animals mirror attitudes to Americans and the activities of the US
government? We can chart the peaks and troughs of recent anti-Americanism
in Britain with some degree of accuracy. We obviously need to distinguish
between disapproval of specific US policies and widely held favourable opinion
of the United States in general. It is entirely possible to be both anti-American
and pro-America. With this caveat in mind, the Vietnam War nonetheless
represents a fairly unambiguous high point of hostile sentiment.36 Then,
during the Clinton presidency (1992-2000), the profile of anti-Americanism
was comparatively low. This was certainly the verdict in the late 1990s of the
British journalist and historian, Paul Johnson, a Mancunian who was a great
admirer of the United States. In the 1960s, Johnson edited the New Statesman,
but swung to the Thatcherite right in the late 1970s and began writing for The
Spectator. In 2006, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s
highest civilian award, alongside B B King and historian David McCullough,
author of two Pulitzer Prize winning biographies – on Harry Truman and
John Adams.37 In 1997, Johnson toured Britain to promote his mammoth,
thousand-page epic survey, A History of the American People. On that tour,
he encountered minimal anti-Americanism. He was delighted to report that
‘overpaid, over-sexed and over here’ was no more than a ‘historical curiosity’,
incomprehensible to Britons under the age of forty.38
Johnson’s verdict on the imminent demise of anti-Americanism in Britain
proved to be premature. The Bush presidency and the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq precipitated a powerful resurgence. Yet this particularly virulent most
recent strain does not explain the high degree of hostility to the grey squirrel
over the past decade.
It is of course tempting to conclude that British attitudes to the grey squirrel
tell us as much about perceptions of Americans and America as they do about
the creature’s actual exploits. The independent existence that the hegemonic
British view of the grey squirrel seems to possess fits with the main thrust
of recent studies of anti-Americanism in Europe, which contends that the
phenomenon is an overall orientation with deep and extensive cultural and
ideological roots, possessing its own momentum (endemic), rather than a
14 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
response tailored to specific events and policies (circumstantial).39 Back in
1952, political scientist Milton Graham distinguished between hard core
and soft core anti-Americanism, identifying the former as ‘sizable group…
that can be expected to be anti-American at all times’.40 Insofar as a ‘hard
core’ of anti-Americanism does exist, then perhaps it exists with reference
to the grey squirrel. At the risk of aligning myself with the Fox News
channel host, John Gibson, who refers to ‘Hating America’, post-September
11, as the ‘new world sport’41, I am a strong believer in the role of antiAmericanism as a recreational phenomenon, a pursuit (by no means ‘soft’)
that fulfils a deep psychological need, involving the release of tension rather
than the search for a solution.
Still, in the final reckoning, what grey squirrels do matters as much as what
they stand for. According to research conducted recently for the English,
Welsh and Scottish governments, the grey squirrel ranks tenth on the list
of costliest invasive species from an economic standpoint.42 The rodent
barks trees, preys on garden plants, digs up bulbs, raids bird’s nests, and
chews telephone wires and electric cables. This animal so readily conflated
with human Americans displays in bucketfuls that American quality that
Paul Johnson so greatly admired: ‘obstinate individualism’.43 Above all,
though, its presence is resented because it is blamed for the red squirrel’s
marginalized status.
The grey squirrel has become a furry embodiment of rapacious US
multinationals and chauvinistic US foreign policy. But I suspect that,
because of the continuing decline in red squirrel numbers and the perceived
connection with the grey squirrel’s undaunted expansion, it would be
almost as unpopular if Al Gore or John Kerry had become president in
2000 or 2004.44 It is a boisterous creature with a sense of entitlement – a
trait that some, not least the American woman in the audience during my
lecture, even interpret as an arrogant streak – that acts as if it owns the
world. Having said that, the language of criticism would surely have been
far less racy if Walmart and Starbucks had never crossed the Atlantic.
Anti-grey squirrel rhetoric is resolutely predictable, with enduring points
of reference. At the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) AGM
meeting an hour before this lecture, BAAS chair Martin Halliwell noted
the most welcome ‘Obama Bounce’ that had boosted application rates for
American Studies degree courses following the Bush slump. As yet, there
is no evidence that Obama’s popularity in Britain has rubbed off on these
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 15
grey bêtes noires. To adapt a line from Cohan’s ‘Over There’, ‘The Yanks
Have Come’. And, however much we may regret this, they are here to stay.
So is this creature fated to remain forever American in the British mental
and physical landscape?
Finally, at the end of the day, bear in mind that, overall, the official course
of British-American relations has continued to run more or less smoothly,
unruffled by any number of allusions to brash, unbridled and super-sized
beastly American beasts. And I daresay that they will continue to do
so. I am basing this confidence partly on a reverse example: an incident
involving a British animal, previously mentioned, over there. The strength
of American antipathy toward the ‘Cockney’ sparrow in the late nineteenth
century did not escape the notice of the British consul in Baltimore. In fact,
he thought it was a sufficiently serious matter to bring to the attention of
the Foreign Secretary (the Marquis of Salisbury) the ‘universal’ if largely
unfounded ‘ill-will’ toward the bird. But there was nothing in the consular
records at Kew to suggest any follow up action.45
I am also basing my confidence on the stance of Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan (1957-63). I paid a second visit to the National Archives in
Kew in the autumn of 2011, a time of year when the grey squirrels were
particularly vivacious in the woods fringing the Thames and in nearby
Kew Gardens. This time, I wanted to consult the records of the Ministry of
Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF). Macmillan, a countryman with a large
estate in Sussex, was mightily exercised by grey squirrels and badgered
his secretaries of agriculture with memos complaining that they were
“swarming again”, demanding to know “what are you doing about grey
squirrels?”46 But Macmillan’s fixation on a squirrel that was in Britain but
not of Britain did not prevent the repairing of British-American relations
after the rift over Suez, nor spoil his congenial relations with Eisenhower
and Kennedy.
16 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
Notes
1.Alfred W Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; The Biological Expansion of Europe, New
York, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
2.Alfred W Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of
1492, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, p. 211.
3.Ernest Thompson Seton, ‘A Street Troubador: Being the Adventures of a Cock
Sparrow’, in Lives of the Hunted, New York, Charles Scribner’s, 1901, p. 125; Peter
Coates, ‘Eastenders Go West: English Sparrows, Immigrants, and the Nature of Fear’,
Journal of American Studies, 39 (2005), pp. 447, 451.
4.John MacKenzie, ‘Editorial’, Environment and History, 7/3 (2001), p. 253.
5.Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham, London, 1964 [1962]), p. 89.
Widespread use has adapted the phrase to read ‘good to think with’.
6.These studies include Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why Do People
Hate America?, London, Icon Books, 2003; J F Revel, Anti-Americanism, London:
Encounter Books, 2004; Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe:
Culture, Diplomacy and Anti-Americanism, New York: Berghahn Books, 2005; Denis
Lacorne and Tony Judt, With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006; Andrei S Markovits, Uncouth Nation:
Why Europe Dislikes America, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007); Russell
A Berman, Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem, Stanford: Hoover
Institution Press, 2008.
7.William J Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American, New York: W.W. Norton,
1999 [1958]), p. 145.
8.Lee John Barnes, quoted in George Monbiot, ‘How British Nationalists got their
Claws into my Crayfish’, The Guardian, 1 October 2009, at www.guardian.co.uk/
environment/georgemonbiot/2009/oct/01/crayfish-bnp
9.Though the adoption of organochlorine pesticides (dieldrin and aldrin) for sheep
dipping and seed dressing from 1955 was arguably a more important cause of the
precipitous decline in otter numbers during the mid-1950s, the otter’s disappearance
undoubtedly assisted the mink’s spread. On the Western Isles of Scotland, a five-year
eradication campaign was successfully concluded in 2001.
10.Jackie C Horne and Donna R White, eds, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the
Willows: A Children’s Classic at 100, Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press, 2010, xx.
11.A D Middleton, ‘The Ecology of the American Grey Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis
Gmelin) in the British Isles’, Proceedings of the General Meetings for Scientific Business
of the Zoological Society of London, 54/2, 1930, pp. 812, 837. 839; A D Middleton,
The Grey Squirrel: The Introduction and Spread of the Grey Squirrel in the British
Isles, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, v, pp. 1-2, 7, 9, 71-75.
12.Middleton, The Grey Squirrel, p. 1.
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 17
13.Is there a special relationship between American animals and the British? As a general
rule, in the absence of fraught relations between the country of origin and the host
nation, the debate about an invasive species is likely to operate within much stricter
economic and ecological parameters. There is far less mileage in criticizing a North
American grey squirrel, let alone a Canadian grey squirrel. Apart from those that hail
from North America, most invasive species in Britain currently derive from Asia. So
it is not possible to compare responses to American invasive species with attitudes to
organisms from European countries with which Britain has often experienced rough
relations, such as France and Germany.
14.H B Wyatt, ‘On the American Grey Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) in the British Isles’,
The Essex Naturalist, 20 (1932), pp. 189-205.
15.Hilda Kean, ‘Imagining Rabbits and Squirrels in the English Countryside’, Society &
Animals, 9/2 (2001), p. 164
16.A Tittensor, ‘What Future for the Reds?’, Country Life, 166/4292 (25 October 1979),
pp. 1394-95.
17. H
ansard (Lords), 25 March 1998, Session 1997-98, 587, Column 1318,
www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld199798/ldhansrd/vo980325/text/
80325-10.htm#80325-10_head0
18. H
ansard (Lords). 23 March 2006, Session 2005-200, 680, Column 362,
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldhansrd/vo060323/text/60323-04.
htm#60323-04_head1
19.Milton D Graham, ‘Anti-Americanism, British Garden Variety’, Antioch Review 12/2
(Summer 1952), p. 221; Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational,
New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2003 [1995], p. 410; Jessica C E GienowHecht, ‘Always Blame the Americans: Anti-Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth
Century’, American Historical Review, 111/4 (October 2006), p. 1069.
20.Various restaurants of repute have started to include grey squirrel on their menus.
See Linzi Watson, ‘Game Dealer rustles up recipe for red squirrel conservation’,
Cumberland News, 17 October 2008; Nigel Burnham, ‘Eating the enemy’, The
Guardian, 18 March 2009.
21. www.channel4.com/programmes/squirrel-wars-red-vs-grey
22.Woodrow Wyatt, The Further Adventures of Mr. Saucy Squirrel, London, G. Allen &
Unwin, 1977, pp. 78-80. Wyatt’s daughter, Petronella – to whom this and his earlier
squirrel book, The Exploits of Mr Saucy Squirrel (1976) is dedicated, puts the case
for accepting the grey squirrel in ‘The Red and the Grey,’ The Spectator, 287/9047, 29
December, 2001, p. 49.
23. Interview, BBC Radio 4, 29 January 2001.
24.‘Anti-Americanism “feels like racism”’, BBC News, 16 April 2006, at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4881474.stm; ‘The Vol Abroad’, ‘Squirrelly Lawmakers’,
at http://thevolabroad.wordpress.com/2006/03/24/squirrelly-lawmakers/
18 Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism
25.Herbert J Spiro, ‘Anti-Americanism in Western Europe’, Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 497 (May 1988), p. 124.
26.­S Emling, ‘Meet the Family: Complexity and Stress at Holiday Time’, New York Times,
10 January 2006.
27.George Trefgarne, ‘Is it Time for Tea?’, The Spectator, 303 (20 January 2007), p. 65.
28.Simon Jenkins, ‘Anti-Americanism in the 21st Century’, The British Library,
17 May 2010, The Fifteenth Annual Douglas W. Bryant Lecture under the Auspices
of The Eccles Centre for American Studies, p. 1.
29.David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-1945,
London, HarperCollins, 1995, xxiii. The inspiration for this phrase (also popular in
Australia and usually attributed to the British war-time entertainer, Tommy Trinder,
though his role was probably that of popularizer rather than originator) was the song,
‘Over There’, which George M Cohan wrote shortly after the American declaration
of war on Germany in April 1917. ‘Over Here!’ is a 1974 Broadway musical by the
Sherman brothers, about a rail journey across the US during World War Two. The GIs,
in turn, described the British as ‘underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower.’
30.Oxford University squirrel researcher Monica Shorten – a keen consumer of squirrel pie
and fried squirrel - reports that American and Canadian GIs were prepared to pay up to
five shillings a head: Shorten, Squirrels, London, Collins, 1954, p. 58.
31. Stephen Tallents, letter to the editor, The Times, 2 December 1946.
32.John Steinbeck, ‘Growing Vegetables’ (15 July 1943), in Once There Was a War,
London, Penguin Classics, 2007 [1958], pp. 71-74.
33. Spiro, ‘Anti-Americanism in Western Europe’, p. 124.
34.Environment Agency, ‘Top Ten Most Wanted Foreign Species’, 3 August 2006,
www.environment-agency.gov.uk/news/1444976
35.Milton D Graham, ‘Anti-Americanism, British Garden Variety’, Antioch Review 12/2
(Summer 1952), pp. 217-28; W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World, or,
The Trend of the Twentieth Century, New York, Horace Markley, 1901, pp. 334,
442-44. Nowadays, the unsavoury qualities of being loud and crude (as well as lewd
and inebriated) are just as if not more likely to be qualities that American commentators
associate with Brits.
36.Bear in mind, though, that opinion polls involving fifteen nations that registered strong
general disapproval of US policies in Vietnam also indicated a widely held favourable
opinion of the United States in general: Leo P Crespi, ‘West European Perceptions of the
United States’, Political Psychology 4/4 (December 1983), p. 720.
37.As an environmental historian currently working on rivers, I note that McCullough’s
first book (1968) was about the Johnstown Flood of 1889, when the South Fork Dam
burst on the Little Conemaugh River.
38.Paul Johnson, ‘The Decline and Fall of Anti-Americanism in Britain’, The Spectator,
279 (1 November 1997), p. 30.
Red and Grey: Towards a Natural History of British Anti-Americanism 19
39.Rob Kroes, ‘European Anti-Americanism: What’s New?’, Journal of American History
93/2 (September 2006), pp. 417-31.
40.Rob Kroes, ‘European Anti-Americanism: What’s New?’, Journal of American History
93/2 (September 2006): 417-31.
41.John Gibson, Hating America: The New World Sport, New York, William Morrow,
2004.
42.James Meikle, ‘Rabbits Named Britain’s Most Costly Invasive Species’,
The Guardian, 15 December 2010.
43.Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1997, p. 65.
44.The continuing success of the grey squirrel and other species like the signal crayfish is
unconnected to the global advance of American military and economic might. These
animals possess their own agency and momentum. Yet is also worth remembering that
fortunes decline as well as rise. As the otter stages a comeback in Britain, thanks to
cleaner rivers, there are signs that American mink are in retreat.
45.W F Segrave to the Marquis of Salisbury, 23 August 1889, Reports, Consuls General
at New York, Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Diplomatic, Consular, Commercial and
Treaty,1889, FO 5/2060, National Archives (Public Record Office), Kew, Richmond,
UK (NA).
46.Harold Macmillan, 3 January, 29 February and 15 August 1960, PREM 11/3196,
MAF, NA.
Eccles Centre for American Studies Plenary Lectures at the British
Association for American Studies Anual Conference
2004‘Maybe Nothing Ever Happens Once And Is Finished’: Some Notes
on Recent Southern Fiction and Social Change, by Richard J Gray
2005Evaluating the Foreign Policy of President Clinton – Or, Bill Clinton
Between the Bushes, by John Dumbrell
2006At Home at the Wheel? The Woman and her Automobile in the
1950s, by Maggie Walsh
2007Postmodernism vs. Evangelical Religion in Post-1960s America,
by Richard King
2008
John Cage Was All The Rage, by Peter Dickinson
2009The Special Relationship: What Does America Teach Us About
Ourselves?, by Janet Beer and John Snow
2010‘America, Empire Of Liberty’ And The Challenges Of ‘Popular’
History, by David Reynolds
2011The First Financial Crisis of the Twenty-First Century: Lessons
for America, by Nigel Bowles
THE ECCLES CENTRE was founded by David and Mary Eccles in 1991.
Based at the British Library – which houses one of the world’s foremost
collections of American books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers and
sound recordings – the Centre has two broad aims: to increase awareness
and use of the Library’s North American holdings, and to promote and
support the study of North America in schools and universities in the
United Kingdom.
The Centre’s programme includes lectures, conferences, concerts, seminars,
teacher and student events and web based study resources. The Centre
works in co-operation with the Library’s American curatorial team, with
members of the American Studies community in the UK, and with other
partners interested in the advancement of knowledge about America.
The focus of the Eccles Centre is on North America, in particular the US
and Canada, but can extend to include the hemispheric, comparative and
international topics in which the US and Canada play a major part.
Full details of the Eccles Centre’s programme can be found at
www.bl.uk/ecclescentre