Volume 4, Number 7 · May 6, 1965
Un-English Activities
By John Gross
Lord Haw-Haw
by J.A. Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 316 pp., $4.95
The New Meaning of Treason
by Rebecca West
Viking, 374 pp., $6.95
Hazlitt once said that half the controversies in the world are not much more than a history of nicknames. Words which might well be carved on the tomb of William Joyce; for it is scarcely exaggerating to say that Joyce's nickname cost him his life. Technically, at any rate, his conviction for treason was open to doubt. He was born in Brooklyn, never took out British naturalization papers, and became a German citizen in 1940. True, he had spent his adult life until the outbreak of war in England, claiming to be a British subject; when he applied for a passport in 1933 he made a false declaration, putting down Ireland as his place of birth, and effectively signed his own death-warrant. But holding a passport isn't quite the same thing as possessing citizenship, and in view of the legal question-mark hanging over Joyce's trial there were strong grounds for granting him a reprieve—especially since no other renegade British broadcasters were executed (apart from John Amery, the wayward son of a famous Tory politician—and he had pleaded guilty to various other charges of treason, besides broadcasting). This was the attitude taken at the time in some quarters where there was certainly no love for Joyce: by the Manchester Guardian, for instance. But the misgivings of the minority were swept aside, for in the immediate post-war climate it would have been difficult for any British government not to have hanged the man who for most people had become the walking embodiment of treason.
Review, 1919 words
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