Dominic Sandbrook
KING DUBYA
The Eagle and the Crown: Americans and the British Monarchy
By Frank Prochaska (Yale University Press 256pp £25)
In Defence of America
By Bronwen Maddox (Duckworth 192pp £14.99)

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In 1839 a disgruntled reader wrote to the United States Magazine, describing a trip he had recently taken to Philadelphia. 'When I landed,' he wrote, 'I fancied I was in some city in the English dominions.' On the wall facing the docks he saw a gigantic poster announcing that a portrait of the British Queen was still on show at the Masonic Hall. A little further on, in the window of a barber's shop, he saw 'a variety of hair brushes, with portraits of "Her Most Gracious Majesty" on them'. In the exchange he noticed a marble bust with familiar regal features; stopping to buy soap at a perfumer's, he caught sight of a range of 'Queen Victoria soaps'. The city, he complained, might as well be renamed 'Victoriadelphia'.

Since the whole point of the American Revolution was to throw off the supposedly tyrannical rule of the old country, its excesses apparently embodied in the terrible despotism of George III, the enduring American love affair with the British monarchy has often puzzled foreign observers. In the Yale historian Frank Prochaska's lucid, thoughtful and entertaining book, however, all becomes clear. He reminds us that royalist sentiment was always deeply embedded in the soil of the early republic, even among many Founding Fathers themselves. Benjamin Franklin, a keen advocate of separation who even compared George III to Nero, had for much of his life been a fervent admirer of the monarchy, boasting that his King was 'the very best in the World and most amiable'. In his personal copy of his book on electricity, Franklin had even written 'God preserve him', meaning the King. Although he tried to cross out the words during the Revolution, the damning evidence remained.

Even after the long and bloody struggle for independence, most Americans had surprisingly warm feelings about Britain and its monarchy. By the time of George III's death, despite a second war in 1812, the King had been sufficiently rehabilitated to be honoured in the American press as a Christian gentleman and family man, far from the tyrant of wartime propaganda. Twenty years later, Tocqueville wrote that Americans were obsessed with their British ancestry and aristocratic connections, an observation that still holds true today. And when Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, American obsession with the monarchy reached fever pitch. The grizzled old soldier and former president Andrew Jackson even developed a minor crush on the new Queen, fancying himself her protector and calling her his 'little good friend' - sentiments which, it is fair to guess, left her distinctly not amused.

As a study of this strange relationship, Prochaska's book works superbly. Almost every page offers some entertaining or surprising factual nugget: I had no idea, for instance, that the future Edward VII's American tour in 1860 was such an enormous public relations coup, banishing the presidential election from the headlines and attracting crowds of 30,000 people in Detroit and around half a million in New York City. Public interest was scarcely smaller during Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887: tens of thousands of Americans travelled to London for the pageant, while in New York there were fireworks, choral services and eulogies aplenty. And Prochaska points out that despite the changing demographic makeup of the United States, the romance shows no sign of cooling: Time's special edition on the death of Diana sold 1.2 million copies, becoming easily the most popular issue in the magazine's history.

For Prochaska, this love affair has more serious implications. He argues that despite its republican trappings, the United States is essentially a monarchical nation, describing the Constitution as the Loyalists' revenge and pointing out that the president, effectively an elected sovereign, enjoys far more real power than the supposed despot George III ever did. Many Americans wanted to call George Washington 'His Excellency' or 'His Most Serene Highness'; even today, most Americans treat the presidency with far more respect than Britons do the monarchy. All this, he concludes, reminds us how much the United States still owes, both culturally and politically, to Britain. 'All the talk about America's cultural diversity', he suggests, 'simply cloaks the underlying Britishness of American values'.

These days, however, few Britons seem very keen to acknowledge the relationship. Bronwen Maddox, formerly the Washington bureau chief and now the foreign affairs commentator of The Times, tells a funny story about an eminent British economist who turned down her offer of a whole salmon from Seattle's famous market as she was about to fly home to Britain. 'The ones from Scotland are better', he said smugly - oblivious to the fact that, as Maddox puts it, 'the great wild rivers of the Pacific Northwest produce incomparably better fish than the disease-ridden, artificially coloured pens off the Scottish coast'.

That anti-Americanism has become both more widespread and more thoughtless in recent years is beyond dispute. Five years ago, for example, Margaret Drabble wrote: 'My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease ... I now loathe the United States ... I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history.' Disliking burgers - which, when properly made and cooked, can be very fine things indeed - seems downright perverse. But as Maddox points out, anti-Americanism has now gone beyond mere opposition to George W Bush's disastrous policies; in some papers, it is more like a great scream of adolescent pique and spite.

Her book is an attempt to redress the balance, and what makes it so engaging and refreshing is that, almost uniquely for a book on modern American life, it is written with brisk clarity and common sense. Unlike one or two British historians and politicians, Maddox is no fawning sycophant who worships everything cloaked in the Stars and Stripes. She is properly scornful of the Bush presidency, of American indifference to climate change and of American arrogance and ignorance of the outside world. But she is full of admiration for American prosperity, tolerance and diversity. She marvels at the sheer size, success and ingenuity of the American experiment. And she points out that the alternative to American global supremacy - a world dominated by titanic rogue states like Russia and China, bristling with xenophobic resentment and indifferent to democratic values - would be incomparably worse.

Bronwen Maddox's conclusion is rightly optimistic. If the next president dismantles Guantanamo, outlaws torture, works to persuade Congress of the need for greater environmental responsibility, and reaches out to his European allies, she suggests, then Washington's image will soon recover. With realism, tact and humility, she argues, the transatlantic relationship can flourish once again, as it did in the days when Andrew Jackson and Queen Victoria were the best of friends - in his mind, at least.