On June 7, 1939, the Royal Navy battleship HMS Empress of Australia steamed into the Hudson River and docked in New York, carrying the first reigning British monarch ever to set foot on American soil. King George VI, accompanied by Queen Elizabeth, had crossed the Atlantic for a four-day state visit to the United States — and then a longer stay in Canada — that would become one of the most consequential courtesies of the twentieth century. Ostensibly a goodwill tour to mark the opening of the World’s Fair and to thank America for its friendship, the visit was, in the private understanding of the principals, something more: an act of alliance-building with an isolationist United States on the eve of the world’s second great war. Four months later, Britain was at war. June 7, 1939 was the last state occasion of the peace.
The King Who Stuttered
George VI’s journey carried a personal weight beyond protocol. He had become king unwillingly in December 1936, when his brother Edward VIII abdicated; painfully shy and afflicted with a severe stammer, he had been thrust into a role he never wanted and a crisis — the Abdication, the looming war — he could not escape. By 1939, with war visible on the continent, the monarchy had become one of Britain’s instruments of statecraft, and the king its reluctant, dutiful face. The American tour was his idea of that duty made manifest: to meet President Roosevelt, to address the American people directly, and to make the case for the democracies before Congress and before the public — a case Britain’s government could not officially make while America clung to neutrality.
Hot Dogs at Hyde Park
The tour’s genius lay in its informality, engineered by Roosevelt himself. After the official welcomes in Washington — where the king became the first British monarch to address a joint session of Congress, in a speech broadcast across America — the royal couple were spirited to Roosevelt’s family home at Hyde Park, New York, for a weekend deliberately stripped of pomp. The famous moment arrived at a picnic: the king was served a hot dog, American mustard and all, and ate it with visible and photographed enjoyment. The image ran in every newspaper in the country. American popular culture had adopted the British king; the isolationist wall had been breached by frankfurter. The queen’s remark afterward — that America was “a great country, a very great country” — completed the charm offensive.
Four Months Before the Storm
The visit’s deeper purpose was accomplished quietly. In private conversations at Hyde Park, Roosevelt assured the king that America would support Britain in any war with Germany, and the two discussed the naval and material assistance that would indeed flow after 1940 — the destroyers-for-bases deal, Lend-Lease, the Atlantic Charter, all of which descended from the trust established in June 1939. The royal couple continued to Canada, where the king signed Canada’s declaration of war separately in September 1939 — a constitutional act that symbolized the Commonwealth’s shared stake. The hot-dog picnic had been the diplomacy; the rest was history.
Legacy
George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s 1939 visit entered Anglo-American memory as the founding handshake of the “special relationship” — the first of the wartime and postwar royal progressions that made the monarchy a working instrument of British diplomacy. The king’s stammer, his courage at the microphone and his refusal to leave London during the Blitz made him, by war’s end, a figure of genuine popular love on both sides of the Atlantic; his daughter Elizabeth’s 1951 visit to Washington repeated the formula. Eighty-seven years after the Empress of Australia docked in New York, the Hyde Park hot dog remains the most effective state dinner in diplomatic history — four months before the world it was meant to save went up in flames.
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