Patrick Dollan
Patrick Dollan could reasonably have considered himself a fortunate man in the foreboding summer of 1939. He had been installed as Lord Provost of Glasgow in 1938 and he hoped to use his position to raise the international profile of the city. Less than a year later he was sailing to the United States where he would be the guest of the Mayor of New York City, the Republican Fiorello La Guardia, as the city staged the World’s Fair.
But Dollan was also fortunate in departing with the comfort of a guaranteed return to Europe. Many of the continent’s Jews would have been sailing at this time with no such prospect as Europe sagged under the weight of fascism. They were only the latest human wave washing up on the beaches of American sanctuary.
Dollan sailed with a party that included his wife Agnes, his secretary Isobel T MacInnes, Hector McNeil – the future MP for Greenock and one of Clement Attlee’s three Scottish Secretaries – councillor Thomas Wilson and Hugh Fraser of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce. The party put in first at Boston where they were greeted by the fire commissioner William Arthur Reilly on behalf of Mayor Tobin who was in Washington on the day of their arrival.
Such was the excitement of the Boston Pilot that it promoted Dollan to Lord Provost of Scotland in the caption that accompanied its picture of the occasion. The party was also met by Thomas K P Gibb, secretary of the American Society of the Royal Order of Scottish Clans, in what would be the first of numerous meetings with representatives of Scottish diaspora groups. There was a small colony of Glaswegians in the city and the assistant chief immigration officer was from Crieff.
Dollan noted around a quarter of the population of the city was unemployed as it struggled to break from the grip of the depression, with a majority living in wooden houses because it was cheaper and easier to use than stone or brick. Agnes visited family homes in both Boston and New York and found them to be better furnished than those in Britain, benefiting, in her estimation, from better planning, more trees and lawns that were diligently maintained. Before sailing on to New York, Dollan met with business leaders on the matter of negotiations to secure a government subsidy for the Anchor Line which had been operating a weekly transatlantic service for some 80 years.
His ship, the Transylvania, docked at New York on a Sunday morning and was boarded by representatives of the city and various Scottish societies, including royal chief Duncan MacInnes who made a welcoming speech. Dollan recalled the introductions ‘took more than hour, during which I had to wear robes and a chain for the pleasure of the Scots exiles and gratification of the New Yorkers, who had never seen such garments’.
An escort provided by mayoral cars took the party to the Waldorf Astoria where compensation for Dollan’s performance on board must have been more than adequate. The Scottish-born actress and singer Ella Logan sang for the visiting party and a dinner, enlivened by speeches from the chief of the MacDonald clan and the honorary secretary of the St Andrews Society, was hosted by the Federation of Scottish Societies. Dollan’s own address sought to give a taste of the municipal achievements of Glasgow which included, according to a report in the Order of the Scottish Clans Courier, individual reading lights on trains.
Dollan and La Guardia met at the mayor’s specially built Forest Hills complex overlooking the site of the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. Displaying the craft he had learned over several decades as a journalist for the Labour press, Dollan described La Guardia as ‘well-built, small in stature, he is as lively as a Bren gun in action’. Dollan noted his enthusiasm for sport and music, and expressed his regard for the no-nonsense way he had carried out reforms. La Guardia, for his part, respected Dollan’s desire to study the organisation of social services rather than visit nightclubs. They discussed housing, unemployment benefits and economic hardship, according to the New York Herald Tribune, and Dollan recalled the meeting lasted for two hours.
La Guardia offered Dollan the use of his quarters in the New York pavilion and invited him to inspect any city department he desired without the requirement of giving advance notice. Dollan later claimed to have worked 15-hour days for the duration of his visit, taking in fact-finding missions to every municipal department and covering an implausible 2,400 miles in and around the city. In total, he spent six days at the World’s Fair and reserved his greatest praise for the pavilion of the United States Government which included a section on the operation of New Deal policies.
Reflecting his practical inclinations and also the non-doctrinaire character that predominated in the Scottish Labour movement, Dollan wrote: ‘There was more socialism in this section than in a dozen volumes of Karl Marx and I congratulate the officials in doing more socialist propaganda than all the agitators had been able to do in twenty-five years’. The UK pavilion attracted around six million visitors over a period of three months and Dollan approved of the decision to emphasise culture and education over industry and commerce.
Dollan’s admiration for La Guardia’s route to power was also made evident and it is possible he saw a little of Labour’s own struggles in Glasgow to overcome the combined forces of the Liberals and Conservatives in La Guardia’s 1934 triumph over the Democrats’ Tammany Hall machine. The American press were happy to refer to Dollan as ‘the Scottish La Guardia’, perhaps in reflection of the political change he had effected, more likely because the journalists and their readers knew nothing about him and needed a label of convenience. Agnes regarded La Guardia as an improvement on his predecessors when it came to gender politics, remarking acidly that the Tammany machine had little interest in women beyond securing their votes.
La Guardia’s wife, in contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt, was considered to have a low public profile but Agnes credited her with exerting influence in the background on housing reform, and issues affecting women and children. The cultural facilities impressed the Dollans to the extent that Patrick stated working-class people in New York were more fortunate than the middle-class residents of Kelvinside. He also recorded attending a philharmonic concert in an area of the city he likened to Calton, which in that period echoed mainly to the sounds of gang fights. Dollan was impressed by the ambition of New York but not sufficiently so to prevent him recording it contained 600,000 unemployed and more than 500,000 families living in slums or congested houses.
Scots were found in a number of prominent positions across the machinery of city administration: the president of Queen’s Borough Council, the commissioner of docks, the commissioner of prisons and welfare, the chair of standards and appeals and the president of the Board of Water Supply were all credited, by Dollan at least, as being of Scottish origin. He later wrote: ‘The census gives those of Scots nationality as forming a small proportion of the population but they have no reason to complain about the responsibilities entrusted to them.’ Questioned on the possibility of returning to Scotland, all those encountered by Dollan expressed an unwillingness to leave the United States, although it might be surmised they probably enjoyed successful careers in administration or business. There was also unanimous support for La Guardia, perhaps reflecting a sense of deference to Dollan’s host. Hector McNeil visited Harlem in the company of officials from the New York Housing Authority but was not much impressed by the conditions endured by the area’s largely African-American population. One development he considered worthy of commendation was the Harlem river houses and their attached facilities which included play areas, nurseries and workshops where people could learn trades.
In contrast to the isolationist crouch of the country, Dollan remarked that the people he met, while being generally pro-British, were ‘not sympathetic to the policy of the British government and state frankly our kneeling attitude towards the dictatorships was unworthy of a nation that led the world in search of democracy’. Anticipating the judgement of history, the previous year’s agreement at Munich was viewed as a particularly shameful acquiescence to the appetites of nazism and Dollan endured an uncomfortable evening on Broadway as appeasement was ridiculed. Reflecting the popularity of this opinion, Dollan found the Czech pavilion at the World’s Fair to be well-attended, with its completion being supported by £20,000 in American donations.
He claimed not to have raised the potential for American involvement in a European conflict but was nonetheless confident, on the basis of various discussions, that it would bring its weight to bear on the side of the democracies. Writing with considerable foresight in 1940, he argued that the UK must abandon any lingering superiority complex towards the United States and work to win its co-operation should it hope to maintain a fragment of its own status. It must have been a source of considerable satisfaction to Dollan that one of the important milestones on the road to American involvement in the war took place in Glasgow in January 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt’s special envoy Harry Hopkins delivered a speech at the North British Hotel after a dinner with Winston Churchill in which he vowed to achieve such an outcome.
With the outbreak of war following soon after Dollan’s visit, any hope he had of reshaping Glasgow’s services in line with studied observation was necessarily sacrificed to the demands of a city preparing for conditions of total war. If there was an obvious practical benefit it was from the publication of the booklet ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ in 1940 to raise funds for the Glasgow central war relief fund. The war also frustrated plans for a reciprocal visit from La Guardia, the prospect of which had been raised in New York, but Dollan’s American links were not terminated entirely. One of the first events to affect Glasgow was the U-boat sinking of the Fairfield-built SS Athenia on 3 September. Twenty-eight Americans were among the dead, A number of others made their way to Glasgow, where they met Dollan in the company of a young John F Kennedy.
By Alasdair McKillop | September 2015