At one of its dinners in London in 1926, the Pilgrims Society utilised some of the technological advances associated with the ‘Americanisation’ of Europe to send the world's first transatlantic commercial ‘radio picture’. Unfortunately, due to ‘static or other trouble’ caused by a storm on the American side, the transmission of a photograph of the top table at the London event took nearly an hour and a half longer than expected to arrive at the New York offices of the Radio Corporation of America. As the previous chapter demonstrated, this was not the first time that the image of the Pilgrims Society and the cause with which it was associated encountered difficulties while crossing the Atlantic. This chapter will demonstrate that nor was it the final time. The later 1920s were years of great flux and confusion, both domestically in Britain and in the US, and also on the wider international stage. This period represented a nadir in relations between the two countries and resulted in the Pilgrims coming under even greater public scrutiny and criticism in the US than ever before. This chapter will look at some of the other ways in which the Pilgrims related to the popular American anti-Britishness mentioned earlier. Chicago's socalled ‘McAndrew Trial’ of 1927 – when the city's mayor launched an enquiry into the use of allegedly harmful pro-British schoolbooks – is a particularly instructive example, and demonstrates that the Society was understood by many Americans to wield a perceptible influence on Anglo-American relations. This chapter will show that that influence was not always imagined.

As before, difficult Anglo-American relations only served to give new impetus to the Society's semi-official public diplomacy role. In a speech to the New York Pilgrims to mark their twenty-fifth anniversary in 1928, Harry Brittain noted that the Society's events had ‘almost assumed the status of State functions’ and that it was the group's ‘duty in every way to develop a personal contact between our respective peoples, and with untiring patience on either side, tackle the difficulties as they arise’.