Abraham Lincoln in 1860 confronted as existential a threat as Churchill as Prime Minister in 1940. A recent podcast of the Hillsdale Dialogues offers thoughtful comparisons.

Lincoln 1860, Churchill 1940

“Lincoln and Churchill found themselves challenged by wars of national survival,” writes the Lincoln scholar Lewis Lehrman. “Even though their early lives appear to be different, there are similar aspects in their educational preparation….

In June 1860, Lincoln wrote that “when I came of age I did not know much…. The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.”

Churchill in March 1949 would echo these remarks at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “I frankly confess that I feel somewhat overawed in addressing this vast scientific and learned audience.… I have no technical and no university education, and have just had to pick up a few things as I went along.”

Their observations undervalued the immense effort both had put into self-improvement. At 23, Lincoln had stated in his first political campaign that education is “the most important subject which we as people can be engaged in.” At that age Lincoln was hard at work…at the study of grammar…. By age 45 he had mastered Euclid.

We are reminded again of these shared traits by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and author and broadcaster Hugh Hewitt. On October 27th, they discussed Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union speech on the weekly Hillsdale Dialogues.

What does “demonstrate” mean?

It is ironic that the greatest speech in American constitutional history was delivered at Cooper Union, where on October 26th Jewish students sheltered or hid from fanatical “demonstrators.” That is an interesting word, demonstrate. A digression is in order, because Lewis Lehrman’s reference to Lincoln and Euclid was repeated by Dr. Arnn, who offered something Lincoln said in 1859:

Reading law, I kept coming across the word “demonstrate.” I thought at first that I understood its meaning, but soon became satisfied that I did not. What do I mean when I “demonstrate”? More than when I reason or prove? How does “demonstrate” differ from any other proof? I consulted Webster. “Certain proof,” he says it means. I thought a great many things were proved beyond a possibility of doubt without recourse to any such extraordinary process of reasoning. So I said to myself, Lincoln, you will never make a lawyer if you do not understand what “demonstrate” means. I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father’s house, and stayed there. until I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what “demonstrate” means, and went back to my law studies.

“Can you imagine any modern politician saying that?” Dr. Arnn asks. Evidently, we have somewhat obfuscated the meaning of the word “demonstrate.”

“Adamant in principle, moderate in practice”

Arnn and Hewitt deftly analyze Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech—as vital an oration as Churchill at M.I.T. in 1949 or Harvard Yard in 1943. In the beginning, Lincoln brilliantly demolishes the constitutional arguments for slavery. What catches the eye particularly today, however, are certain later paragraphs. They begin with his definition of conservatism:

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the government under which we live”; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.

True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers.

What is the modern application of Lincoln’s precepts? It is, says Dr. Arnn, to proclaim when one does not agree with “something new,” but to do so prudently: “I counseled somebody in politics lately. I said you must couple two things together, because they are of a piece. You should be adamant in principle, and moderate in practice. And in tone.”

Lincoln to Republicans

Lincoln’s concluding words at Cooper Union are immortal. He spoke first to his party, then to his countrymen. He began with moderation:

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

“Right makes might…”

Underneath that moderation lay the steel of principle:

Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man—such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care—such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling not the sinners but the righteous to repentance—such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Or as Churchill said, in a similar circumstance: “I refuse to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”

One yearns for a politician able to express their sentiments today.

Further reading

“Churchill’s Steady Adherence to His ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech, 2021.

“Churchill’s Ersatz Meeting with Lincoln’s Ghost,” 2018.

“Lehrman on Churchill and Lincoln,” 2016.

“Churchill’s ‘Vast Gaps of Knowledge,” 2017.

“Who’s that man on the horse?”…

…I asked my father at a young age. “That’s Lee—he led a Southern army in the Civil War.” He gave me a book I still have, Illustrated Minute Biographies, by William DeWitt. Published 1953, it is utterly non-judgmental. Opposite the page on Lee (“Leader of a Lost Cause”) is a page on Lenin (“Father of the Russian Revolution.”)

Among DeWitt’s 150 personalities, Lee fascinated. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs. The moral injustice which the Civil War ended didn’t initially register. Nor did the enormity of Lee’s decision over which side to support. Civil War themes were popular. We kids wore replica Yankee and rebel soldier’s caps, not really knowing much about why they fought.

But the New York City public school system taught serious history in those days, and soon corrected our ignorance. Our teachers introduced us to the great wrongs of slavery and secession. They showed us the genius of Lincoln; the skill of Grant; the valiant, brilliant resistance of Lee.

As a child of that time I was saddened over the recent rush to pull down memorials to him—“less about understanding the past than a contest to divide us,” as Dan McLaughlin wrote. A better response is to erect more statues, as Hillsdale College did for Frederick Douglass—replying to history with more history.

Allen Guelzo’s new Lee biography is unmatched as an example of history taught with balance and understanding, as it was when I went to school. George Will thinks its timing couldn’t be better: “In today’s blizzard of facile, overheated, and grandstanding judgments about the past, this unsentimental biography illustrates the intellectual responsibility that the present owes to the past.”

Woke villain

Of course the first question one asks is: Why Lee? Especially now, when he’s a leading villain of the Woke Movement? Dr. Guelzo explained in an illuminating podcast with former Speaker Newt Gingrich. He actually began in 2014, before the advent of national distemper. Fired up, he had just published a best-seller on Gettysburg.

He focused on Lee because, compared to giants like Lincoln, Grant and Sherman, he was relatively underwritten. True, there were early hagiographies, and a Pulitzer-winning four volumes by Douglas Southall Freeman in the 1930s. But otherwise the field was relatively open.

Admittedly, it’s a challenge to write about someone many consider a traitor. Guelzo, a “northern Yankee,” defines the job as “difficult biography, like writing about Neville Chamberlain.” That is part of the fascination of his book—amplified by his skill in exposing Lee’s true character, the great impulses that drove him, and the decisions which placed him athwart the nation he loved and had sworn to protect and defend.

Truant Virginian

It takes 200 pages to get to that point, and the build-up is anything but dull. Lee last saw his father at the age of six. Washington’s famous cavalry general, Light-Horse Harry Lee, onetime Virginia governor, went through several fortunes and ruined himself, spending his last years in the West Indies. That left Robert with two powerful compulsions: perfection, to make up for his father’s shortcomings; and security, which his father’s profligacy had denied him.

Only in his last five years, as the unlikely president of a small college in Lexington, did Lee achieve those goals; remarkably, he was as effective a fundraiser as a military strategist. He raised what became Washington and Lee University from bankruptcy to prominence.

Lee commanded no troops in the field until he served under Winfield Scott in the Mexican War (1846-48). He was educated at West Point, America’s premier engineering school before the Civil War. He returned later as superintendent (1852-55), hating every minute of it, for he despised paperwork and interfering politicians.

The work he most enjoyed was building things: Savannah’s Fort Pulaski and improvements at other Army installations. In 1839 he changed the course of the Mississippi River and rebuilt the St. Louis waterfront.

Ironically, between West Point and Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton, Lee spent more early adult years in New York than in Virginia. Arlington House in Alexandria County, the Lee home for 30 years, was part of the District of Columbia until 1846, and Lee never even owned it. Yet it was Virginia which commanded his loyalty in 1861.

The hinge of fate

Lee’s fateful decisions were threefold. In February 1861, seven states seceded to form the Confederacy. On 18 April Lee turned down Lincoln’s offer to command the Union Army. “If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South,” Lee exclaimed, “I would sacrifice them all to the Union: but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?”

Scott and Lincoln assured him there was no chance of this, but the next day Virginia seceded and joined the Confederacy. Tearfully Scott begged: “For God’s sake, don’t resign.” “I am compelled to,” Lee cried. “I can’t consult my feelings in this matter.”

“There is no glimpse of Lee thinking his way through the contradiction slavery posed to the American founding or the natural rights of the enslaved,” Guelzo writes. Though he freed Arlington’s slaves, to Lee they were “personally invisible, despite their presence all around.” Late in the war, he favored offering freedom to slaves who would fight with his army, and some did. The reaction of the army was “at best ambivalent.”

Lee’s thinking began with family: All his children possessed lay in Virginia. “They will be ruined if they do not go with their State. I cannot raise my hand against my children.” If he had, the state militia might have seized Arlington (in the event, the Union did). But remaining neutral would have made him a traitor in the eyes of both sides. So Lee could only hope that Virginia would not secede. “Save in her defense there will be one soldier less in the world than now.”

Save in her defense…. A day later found Lee in Richmond, where he hoped to mediate a peaceful settlement. There was none, and on 22 April he placed himself “at the service of my native state.”

Strategist and tactician

The accounts of Lee’s campaigns are brisk and revelatory without dunning us with detail. (Unfortunately, detail is sometimes lacking in the accompanying maps.) Twice taking the war to Union territory was the right strategy, Guelzo says.

We see the agate points at which, had things gone otherwise, Lee might have forced an armistice. Guelzo discounts the rumor that Lee and McClellan, neither defeated after Antietam, considered marching jointly on Washington, confronting Lincoln and compelling a settlement.

McClellan didn’t have that much imagination. He failed to press Lee at Antietam, as Lee had anticipated. “Some day,” Lee cracked, “they’re going to have a general I don’t understand.” (Some day they did.)

Lee was overly romanticized after the war, but contrary to recent criticisms, we see an audacious strategist whose attacks when he was expected to retreat won battle after battle. Tactics he usually left to subordinates, who were not always of the first caliber. When they were, the results were astonishing.

Norman Schwarzkopf, says the author, overwhelmed Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in the 1991 Gulf War with the same sweeping flanking movement of Chancellorsville, where Lee allowed Stonewall Jackson to attack with his whole corps, risking everything—and ultimately losing Jackson himself.

Even at Gettysburg, Guelzo suggests, Lee’s strategy on day three was not all wrong. Union General Meade, broadly beaten the first two days, was actually preparing to retreat when George Pickett charged Cemetery Ridge. The rebels failed through the valor of Union troops who, though badly mauled earlier were determined not to yield. Pickett was asked later why he failed. “The Yankees fought,” he drawled.

Was Lee a traitor?

At Hampton Roads in January 1865, Lincoln met with Confederate plenipotentiaries inquiring about an armistice. There would be none, he declared, short of reestablishing “our one common country” and abolishing slavery. One asked whether that meant “we of the South have committed treason.” Lincoln replied, “You have stated the proposition better than I did.”

Dr. Guelzo is thoughtful on this question as applied to Lee. He meets the constitutional definition: “levying war against [the United States] or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” At the same time the author cites serious constitutional obstacles to convicting Lee (he was indicted, but never tried).

First, Grant had paroled Lee and his top officers at Appomattox, and a paroled prisoner-of-war cannot be classified legally as a traitor. Even Lincoln insisted that the Confederacy had no standing as a nation. It was an enemy, but not a foreign enemy. America’s greatest convulsion was a family affair—a war not only between states, but between households, kinsmen, brethren.

Conscious of his parole, Lee gave no encouragement to his indictors. He discouraged Jubal Early from a guerrilla movement which would “prolong bitter feeling and postpone the period when reason and charity may resume their sway.” He opposed a monument to Confederate war dead, which “would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating,” peaceful recovery.

Well, Dr. Guelzo says, he didn’t say that monument might not be deserved; and he took “no positive steps to cooperate with Reconstruction.” Given Lee’s devotion to his troops, for him to say no monument was deserved was inconceivable. And his last five years at Washington College were reconstructive. He never spoke at die-hard rallies, or gave encouragement to bitter-enders. But perhaps doing nothing is not enough.

“Absorbing society’s defaulters”

The nation-state with all its faults, Guelzo concludes, provides “a frail but workable insurance against the kinds of incessant dynastic, ethnic and religious warfare that used to be the common lot of the human race…. To wave away treason as a crime is to put in jeopardy many of the benefits the nation-state has conferred.”

That is a valid observation, but the author continues: “…perhaps the reluctance to pin [treason on Lee] is a token of an instinct, running back to the Constitutional Convention, to err on the side of absorbing society’s defaulters, rather than arching them to the scaffold.” He quotes the abolitionist Wendell Phillips: “We cannot cover the continent with gibbets. We cannot sicken the 19th century with such a sight.”

No, or the 21st century likewise.

Most of Lee’s class owned slaves, yet he told Confederate President Jefferson Davis that slavery was a curse that must go. But he didn’t think about when and how—nor did quite a few people, North and South. A century hence, if there are still historians, will they marvel over some of our slipshod thinking today?

Modern scolds may be outraged that Allen Guelzo has written this majestic biography. He will be called names for his trouble. But Dr. Guelzo quotes the literary critic John Gardner: “No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion.” The two have to meet, he says.

“Malice toward none; charity for all.” In their interview, Speaker Gingrich observes that Lincoln has affected him. “Yes,” says our author, “I believe so.”

Further reading

“Churchill’s Fantasy: If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”

“Robert E. Lee and the Fashionable Urge to Hide from History“

Case for  the defense: “If we allow our monuments and statues and place-names to be torn down because of our present-day views, and claims of people being offended by our built environment that has been around for decades and sometimes centuries, it speaks to a pathetic lack of confidence in ourselves as a nation. We are on the way to a society of competing victimhoods, atomized and balkanized into smaller and smaller communities, which ironically enough is something racists want too.” —Andrew Roberts

Defense of the good

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has joined many other groups and individuals in defense of the good. The good in this case is the name and legacy of Sir Winston Churchill.

Who would have thought, a few weeks ago, that anyone would suggest moving his statue from Parliament Square? Because it was defaced? Statues of Lincoln and Gandhi also suffered. Even the statue of Nelson Mandela is boarded up—a defense in his case from neo-Nazi demonstrators. What a world we live in.

Some advise we beat a retreat before these expressions of unlearned ignorance. Let’s fence off Parliament Square, they say. Or move the statues to museums. NO.

Please read Andrew Roberts’ “Stop this Trashing of our Monuments—and our Past”. It is one of the finest pieces he has ever written:

Churchill’s attitude to the native peoples of the British Empire, for example, is a nuanced one that cannot be summed up by three words spray-painted on his statue. He undoubtedly make remarks and the occasional joke about non-white people that today we would find completely unacceptable…. he also made equally or more disparaging remarks about Europeans too. Unlike Karl Marx, Churchill never used the N-word, which dyed-in-the-wool racists tended to in those days…. throughout his life, Churchill fought to protect the non-white peoples of the Empire.

Churchill’s life matters

We have assisted others in defense of Churchill’s good name, responding to ignorant articles full of factual distortions. One of these refuted a particularly egregious article in the June 15th Sunday Times. The Churchill Project has been in the forefront of correcting myths, distortions and lies. For example:

Not “a man of his time”

His defenders sometimes excuse Churchill by saying he was “only a man of his time.” That is not good enough. From age 25, when he argued with a Boer captor about native rights, to age 80, when he denied South Africa’s claim to Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, he was viewed as a naive progressive by the forces of repression. True, he was sometimes paternalistic. And, says Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn, “you can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense….

The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights. Therefore to say that Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember was that Lincoln and Churchill were political men. Also they were democratic men. They needed, and thought it was right that they needed, the votes of a majority. If they lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course they would be careful how they offended those prejudices.

Nothing can save us if we will not save ourselves

The time for courtesy and niceties, for backing off to avoid confrontation, for hoping things will die down, is over. The truth must refute excessive, unlearned, biased assertions. Winston Churchill was aware of this long ago, when he spoke following St. George’s Day, 1933:

“The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within… from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength…. from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals…. from acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.… Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.”

Let’s hope we have not learned nothing since then.

__________________________________

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“Who’s that man on the horse?” I asked my father at the age of about seven. “That’s Lee, ” my dad said; “he led the Southern army in the Civil War.”

He gave me a book which I still have. Illustrated Minute Biographies: 150 Fascinating Life-stories of Famous People, from the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day, Dramatized with Portraits and Scenes from Their Lives, by Willam A. DeWitt. It’s still available and inexpensive. It’s far out of date now, but still a fine read for the young.

I scoured that book—an equal-opportunity education. (Opposite Lee’s page is a page on Lenin.) It was very balanced biography for 1953—completely non-judgmental. There was no rote criticism of villains, no worship of heroes. Lee was “Leader of a Lost Cause.” Lenin was “Father of the Russian Revolution.” I think it gave me the experience Churchill described, when as a young man he read everything he could lay hands on:

It was a curious education. First because I approached it with an empty, hungry mind, and with fairly strong jaws; and what I got I bit; secondly because I had no one to tell me: “This is discredited.” “You should read the answer to that by so and so; the two together will give you the gist of the argument.” “There is a much better book on that subject,” and so forth.

Learning about Lee

Early on, the vast moral wrong which the Civil War corrected didn’t register. Civil War themes were popular. I remember us kids wearing replica Union and Rebel soldier’s caps, not really knowing much about why they fought. The New York City public school system fixed all that. In those days, public schools taught American history to a fare-thee-well.

Our teachers introduced us to the War’s great issues of slavery and secession. They showed us the genius of Abraham Lincoln; the skill of Ulysses S. Grant; the stubborn, valiant, brilliant, foredoomed resistance of Lee. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs. Before I ran into Winston Churchill, Lee was my hero. That’s why I was dumfounded and saddened, over the mad rush to pull down statues and memorials to him in an effort to deny us our awareness of history.

I hold no brief for John C. Calhoun, who argued for slavery as “the greater good,” or Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President. But I wouldn’t pull down their statues. Instead I’d put up opposite a statue of, say, Frederick Douglass (whose bronze image is on the campus of Hillsdale College). The British have this sensible approach in some places. In Parliament Square, along with Jan Christian Smuts, there’s now a statue of Nelson Mandela. And Mohandas Gandhi is there now, with Winston Churchill—silent testimony to the fact that they ended up admiring each other.

Why remember Lee?

“The Great Compromise”

Shelby Foote, a literate and readable Civil War historian, offered worthy and fine words on what he called “The Great Compromise,” in place in America at least since the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, and certainly at the final encampment in 1938:

It consists of Southerners admitting, freely, that it was best that the Union wasn’t divided. And the North admits, rather freely, that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. That is the Great Compromise, and we live with that, and it works for us. We are now able to look at the War with some coolness, which we couldn’t do 100 years ago…. All that’s over now. The Great Compromise obtains.

This is a far more sensitive and caring point of view than that of the Woke Culture. It would be regressive to replace that coolness—which took a century to develop—with the old welter of grievances that followed the Civil War.

On the tearing down of statues and symbols, Foote cited a state senator, who got her fellow senators to disallow the use of a Confederate symbol—not the Battle Flag—by the Daughters of the Confederacy. “I don’t understand that,” he said. “It’s a violation of the Compromise. It’s an arousal of bitterness. Now she, along with a great many others, do not want to be reminded. She has every right to want to hide from history if she wants to. But it seems to me that she’s trying to hide history from us—and that’s a mistake.”

Brothers

Who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning roll call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again hastily to don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the Long Roll summons us to battle.

Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise. All will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well. And there will be talking and laughter and cheers. And all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?

—Berry Benson (1843-1923), Company H, 1st South Carolina Regiment, Hill’s Division, Army of Northern Virginia

Shakespeare’s Henry: Parallels and Inspirations

Above all and first, the importance of Henry V is what it teaches about leadership. “True leadership,” writes Andrew Roberts, “stirs us in a way that is deeply embedded in our genes and psyche.…If the underlying factors of leadership have remained the same for centuries, cannot these lessons be learned and applied in situations far removed from ancient times?”

Churchill’s war speeches are—what shall we say—inspired by, remindful of, analogous to Shakespeare’s works in ancient times. First example: the enemy’s overconfidence. At Agincourt, before any fighting takes place, as the French prepare to rout the English, the Duke of Orleans opines:

Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear
and have their heads crushed like rotten apples.
You may as well say that’s a valiant flea
that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion….
It is now two o’clock: but, let me see, by ten
We shall have each, a hundred Englishmen.

Animal analogies are things Churchill deployed, but that is not the connection here. That passage smacks of his 1941 speech to the Canadian Parliament about the French generals in 1940. Remember how he quoted them? “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” And his response: “Some chicken!. . .Some neck!”

1415…

At the siege of Harfleur, before Agincourt, Churchill writes in his History that the British were badly outnumbered, yet “foremost in prowess.” And Shakespeare quotes King Henry:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead …
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips …
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

This is echoed in Churchill’s war memoirs, where he writes: “Once again we must fight for life and honour against all the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined, and ruthless German race. Once again. So be it.”

…1940

And in his peroration to his outer cabinet on 28 May 1940—the speech that ensured Britain would not seek an armistice with Hitler: “We shall fight on, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Hugh Dalton remembered: Churchill’s ministers stood shouting, slapping him on the back, while tears poured down his cheeks, and theirs. A.P. Herbert wrote:

Mr. Chamberlain, after all, was tough enough, and since the war began, had been heart and soul with Mr. Churchill. But when he said the fine true thing it was like a faint air played on a pipe and lost on the wind at once. When Mr. Churchill said it, it was like an organ filling the church, and we all went out refreshed and resolute to do or die.

“A Little Touch of Harry in the Night”

On the night before Agincourt, King Henry tours the English camp incognito, to gauge morale. The scene recalls Churchill’s 1899 account of the night before the Battle of Omdurman. Or Churchill’s visits with the troops in North Africa, before D-Day, and in France. But the closest analogy, I think, is in 1941. That was when President Roosevelt sent his confidant, Harry Hopkins, to Britain, to tell him if the UK was still worth backing.

Hopkins traveled up and down the land, devastated by the bomb damage he saw. Everywhere he went, he observed grit and determination, and faith in final victory. Hopkins had no doubts. In Glasgow, introduced by Churchill, he famously quoted the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go,” and he added, “even to the end.” Churchill wept.

We few…

Back in London, Lord Beaverbrook hosted Hopkins and the press at Claridge’s. “We wondered,” a Beaverbrook reporter said, “as our cars advanced cautiously through the blackout toward Claridge’s, what Hopkins would have to say. [He went round] the table, pulling up a chair alongside the editors and managers…and talking to them individually. He astonished us all, Right, Left and Centre, by his grasp of our own separate policies and problems. We went away content. And we were happy men all.”

We few, we happy few…

To many who heard or read his words—FDR, Beaverbrook, Robert Sherwood, even J. Edgar Hoover, who had FBI agents present—Hopkins reminded them of Henry V, touring the camp before Agincourt:

With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty,
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks…
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.

1415 and 1940

William F. Buckley Jr. said, “It was not the significance of victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster. It is the roar that we hear when we pronounce his name…. The Battle Agincourt was long forgotten as a geopolitical event, but the words of Henry V, with Shakespeare to recall them, are imperishable in the mind, even as which side won the Battle of Gettysburg will dim from the memory of men and women who will never forget the words spoken about that battle by Abraham Lincoln.”

I think that might be true. It is the words, not the battles, that make the blood run faster in times to come. On the eve of Overlord in June 1944, General Ismay was reminded of Henry’s words at Agincourt:

He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.

Ismay heard one parachute commander say as he entered his aircraft:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed,
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

Of course that was a time, as I’ve said, when almost every Briton knew Shakespeare. And it was also a time, as Churchill added, “when it was equally good to live or die.”

Old Men Forget

In the same act, Henry tells his soldiers:

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages,
What feats he did that day….

In early 1943, writes Lewis Lehrman, “Churchill paraphrased those words to soldiers of the Eighth Army, who had defeated Rommel: ‘After the war, when a man is asked what he did, it will be quite sufficient for him to say, ‘I marched and fought with the Desert Army.’”

Churchill wrote in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples: When one of Henry’s officers “deplored the fact that they had ‘but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work to-day,’ the King rebuked him and revived his spirits in a speech to which Shakespeare has given an immortal form:

If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

Compare that to May 28th again, or to Churchill’s greatest speech, 18 June 1940: “if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

“Collective Consciousness”

It was no coincidence, Jon Meacham writes, that

he tied the trials of the present to the collective consciousness of the world to come. Men will still say was a call to arms reminiscent of Henry V with the image of how the tale would be told from generation to generation. This story shall the good man teach his son [became] “Be brave now, and the future will cherish your memory and praise your name”—an impressive, if risky, means of leadership, for under stress not all of us are like Bedford and Exeter.

Churchill’s history records the King’s actual quoted words: “‘Wot you not,’ he said, ‘that the Lord with these few can overthrow the pride of the French?’ He and the few lay for the night.” On 20 August 1940, Churchill spoke of another small, outnumbered band, the RAF fighter pilots: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed, by so many, to so few.”

Crispin’s Day

Remarkably, Churchill in his speeches or History never quoted from Henry V’s grand climacteric, the Crispin’s Day speech. In fact, writes Geoffrey Best, “he made far fewer historical and literary references than a more commonplace performer might have done. But the effect was to reproduce the congratulations addressed by Shakespeare’s hero to the Englishmen lucky enough to be with him at Agincourt.”

In his History, Churchill offers lines that are not Shakespeare’s: “The King himself, dismounted…and shortly after eleven o’clock on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, he gave the order, ‘In the name of Almighty God and Avaunt Banner in the best time of the year, and Saint George this day be thine help.’ The archers kissed the soil in reconciliation to God, and, crying loudly, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Saint George and Merrie England!’”

Since he’d written those words already, who can say that Churchill didn’t remember them in his 19 May 1940 speech, “Be Ye Men of Valour?” There he said: “Our task is not only to win the battle but to win the War…for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means.” More modern language—but the sentiments are the same.

Constables of France

In the 1944 movie the Constable of France (Leo Genn) is not an empathetic figure. He is arrogant, imperturbable, impassive and phlegmatic—and supremely confident of victory. Then with the battle almost lost, he insists on returning to the fray and dying in combat.

I think Churchill recalled this character when he wrote about Charles de Gaulle, during the fall of France in June 1940. Churchill tells us how, among the defeatist French, he came across this “impassive, imperturbable…tall, phlegmatic man.” On the last of those meetings before France surrendered, prompted I think by a recollection of the strongest French character in Henry V, he said of de Gaulle: “This is the Constable of France.” And so he was.

Acts of Union

Toward the end of the play, after wooing Katherine, Henry promises they will sire, out of Saint Denis and Saint George, celestial patrons, one of France and the other of England,

a boy, half French, half English,
who will go to Constantinople
and take the Grand Turk by the beard!

Marthe Bibesco, the Rumanian princess, in a good little 1950s book on Churchill, noticed this comparison: “And here we have,” she wrote, “in defiance of chronology, already predicted, the day after Agincourt, the Dardanelles expedition, which, in 1915 during the alliance between France and England will be so near to Churchill’s heart.”

She then cites words of the priest at the altar, Ye shall be two in the one flesh. “All those who know him,” she wrote, “would be prepared to swear that Churchill had this whole scene of Shakespeare’s in mind when he undertook that nuptial flight on 11 June 1940… The man who came that evening to ask for the hand of France in marriage offered her people dual nationality, with two passports, the right to vote in both countries, the pooling of the armed forces, in a word a true wedding!”

That’s a bit of a stretch—Churchill did make that offer, the Act of Union. But he little expected that it would be accepted, or have much effect, and it didn’t.

For Them Both, “It was Always England”

As Churchill goes on to write, Henry V’s French union was not to last. Churchill in old age likewise lamented that he had accomplished much, only to accomplish nothing in the end. And yet, what a self-description he offers us, writing of the King in 1938, not published until 1956. Henry V, he wrote:

was no feudal sovereign of the old type with a class interest which overrode social and territorial barriers. He was entirely national in his outlook: he was the first king to use the English language in his letters and his messages home from the front; his triumphs were gained by English troops; his policy was sustained by a Parliament that could claim to speak for the English people. For it was the union of the country [that gave Britain her] character and a destiny.

Is that not a description of Churchill himself? I think, if only subconsciously, he meant it to be.

His old friend Desmond Morton surmised that

for Churchill, it was always England…And thus Churchill was its man. He had never moved away from such a world…it had caught up with him from behind, a back slip in time. This was Henry V and all the great music of Shakespeare in the tribal soul….he saw himself mirrored in the pool of England. And England in him.

Perspective of History: Address to the Churchill Society of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Sir Winston’s 144th birthday, 30 November 2018 (Part 3). We were kindly hosted at Earnscliffe by the British High Commissioner, Susan le Jeune d’Allegeershecque.

Perspective, 144 Years On

Concluded from Part 2…. “The great movements that underlie history—the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures—are powerful, almost determinant,” wrote Charles Krauthammer.

Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different. In recent times, only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability… Take away Churchill in 1940 [and] Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.

Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory over Nazi barbarism, but he was uniquely necessary He then immediately rose to warn prophetically against its sister barbarism, Soviet communism. Churchill is now disparaged for not sharing our multicultural modern sensibilities. His disrespect for the suffrage movement, his disdain for Gandhi, his resistance to decolonization are undeniable.

But that kind of perspective is akin to dethroning Lincoln as the greatest of 19th century Americans because he shared many of his era’s appalling prejudices. In essence, the rap on Churchill is that he was a 19th century man parachuted into the 20th. But is that not precisely to the point? It took a 19th century man—traditional in habit, rational in thought, conservative in temper—to save the 20th century from itself.

* * *

The originality of the past century lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror—a breathtaking catalog of political creativity. And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon? Yes, it was the ordinary person, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was the great leaders: Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, de Gaulle, Truman, John Paul II, Reagan, Thatcher. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning.

And we have his words, digital and in print: 20 million of them, once The Churchill Documents are complete, spanning an age from the cavalry charge at Omdurman to astronauts on the moon. Remember, when Neil Armstrong stepped off his lunar lander, Churchill’s books were still being published posthumously. As they are still.

“The roar when we pronounce his name…”

William F. Buckley Jr. spoke about those words to us in Boston—is it possible?—almost a quarter century ago. “It was not,” he said,

the significance of victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster. It is the roar that we hear when we pronounce his name. It is simply mistaken that battles are necessarily more important than the words that summon us to arms…. The Battle of Agincourt was long forgotten as a geopolitical event, but the words of Henry V, with Shakespeare to recall them, are imperishable in the mind, even as which side won the Battle of Gettysburg will dim from the memory of men and women who will never forget the words spoken about that battle by Abraham Lincoln. The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and mind; the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy.

Churchill’s words were indispensable to that hour, Britain’s finest, whatever the glories or disappointments that came after. And so today the perspective of history on Winston Churchill is unchanged from half a century ago.

“He sweetened English life”

Why is that? Several explanations. One answer is by the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow:

A bad thing is the ability to sense what everyone else is thinking and think like them,” Snow said. “This Churchill never had, and would have despised himself for having. A good thing is the ability to think of many matters at once, their interdependence, their relative importance and their consequences…. Not many have such insight. He did. That was why he could keep us going when we were alone. Where it mattered most, there he was right.

And Snow reminds of today when he says: “People wanted something to admire that seemed to be slipping out of the grit of everyday. Whatever could be said against him, he had virtues, graces, style. Courage, magnanimity, loyalty, wit, gallantry—these are not often held up for admiration. He really had them. I believe that it was deep intuition which made people feel that his existence had sweetened English life.”

“Nothing Surpasses 1940”

Churchill did build his own myth. And he said himself: “Nothing surpasses 1940.” Nineteen forty dominates his reputation: ask any politician who admires him, and they all speak of his finest hour. Regardless of a career that lasted half a century. Despite holding almost every high office, writing fifty books and two-thousand speeches; despite the most imperishable words in English since Shakespeare—there stands 1940.

It is a tremendously powerful image. We see him in the shattered streets of blacked out London—or sitting on a rooftops, defying the Luftwaffe—sometimes seated on a chimney, smoking out those in offices below. He included Canada when he said those were the greatest days our peoples have lived. And there he remains, in a romantic chamber of the heart, where it is always 1940.

“Civilization”

But there is more perspective to Churchill than that, as we constantly preach to those who know only 1940. It is his statesmanship, his devotion to liberty. That’s the perspective of Hillsdale College, Andrew Roberts, and so many others, and should drive societies like this one. 1940 is part of it—but really just a derivation. Here’s Dr. Larry Arnn on Churchill’s thought and statesmanship. See what you think of it.

What he wanted to preserve was, actually, civilization. If you think about that word it means Rembrandt and Plato and Shakespeare. But before that and first, it is cognate with the word for citizen. It means the rule of civilians. In 1938 when Hitler ruled, that’s what Churchill said it meant, in a beautiful commencement address. You should all go read it. It’s on our website. It’s about this long, and it’s one of the prettiest things he ever said.

And he said, what does it mean, civilization? It means that consent of the governed, the rule of law, is central every thing that we mean by civilization. And force—the strongest in the land—does not rule. It means we rule. Ordinary folk.

And there is good reason to think their common sense is still intact. And you can study the career of Winston Churchill—a monarchist, and an imperialist—and find many places where he said, over and over, that in the end, only the people are going to get it right. Because they have a right to. Because they are equal souls, and may not be governed except with their consent. That’s what I think is at stake. In 2018, as in 1940. That’s what the rule of law means. I think that’s what we could be losing.

Be For That…

I think Churchill’s admirers today should be for that. And they should adopt whatever are the best means in front of them to get that. I think that should be the main focus of Churchill studies, as he passes from the hero of 1940 to the ranks of the great thinkers on statesmanship.

I’ll end with the aforementioned Bill Rusher, speaking to us in Banff. He quoted Coventry Patmore, a 19th century poet who, like Churchill, and General Wolfe of Quebec fame, lived in Westerham. Sir Winston said: “The Romans have often forestalled many of my best ideas by thinking of them first.” Similarly, I concede my best ideas to others smarter than me, to Larry Arnn, Bill Rusher, and Coventry Patmore.

“As long as humanity admires courage, eloquence and tenacity,” Bill Rusher said, “Churchill will be remembered and honored—and these are virtues which will come into fashion again, ladies and gentlemen. That is why he would enjoy a little quatrain by Patmore. I always like to end my talks with it, because it is upbeat, optimistic and true.

For want of me the world’s course will not fail.

When all its work is done, the lie shall rot.

The Truth is great and shall prevail,

When none cares whether it prevail, or not.

“Red Herrings” are part of what quotemaster Nigel Rees calls “Churchillian Drift.” (Click here for the full description.) Several other Churchill sites use my Red Herrings appendix to furnish their own lists of things Churchill never said. This is all to the good. The more who know the truth, the better for history.

Note: A complete list of Red Herrings to date is posted and regularly updated in four parts on this website. Start by clicking here.

AZ Quotes

Dozens of readers have sent email attachments from a website called AZ Quotes. They ask: “Are these accurate?” The answer: Not a lot. AZ Quotes is a serious purveyor of “Churchillian Drift.” I don’t think there is a larger batch of fake Churchillisms anywhere. This is no modest collection. To paraphrase Churchill, it has much to be modest about.

AZ doesn’t hide its goal to be quote king of the Internet: “To ensure that we have the biggest quotes collection of all (and this is true), we’re digging up books, newspapers, magazines and interviews—any source that can give us a good quote.” Indeed so! Apparently any source that can “give us a good quote” is fair game to AZ, no matter how wrong. “Digging up” is apposite.

AZ Quotes claims to care about accuracy: “…it’s an important thing for any quote and any quotes website. Every quote we add to our website we pick up manually and then check. Unfortunately, there can be mistakes: if you’ve found any such bogus quotes, report it to us immediately. Immediately, please!” Good grief, where do we start?

Castaway in Churchillian Drift

The alleged Churchill remarks posted by AZ Quotes take up (at this date) fifty-one browser pages. At about twenty-five per page, that’s roughly 1275 in all. Sporadically, attributions are provided—but not often. I would rather have an appendectomy than examine all 1275. I did look at the thirty-four most commonly sent by readers. Of these, three are fully attributable to Churchill.

To be charitable, eight are roughly approximate, but seriously muddled. Some are cobbled from different appearances, or bowdlerized out of all resemblance to Churchill’s actual words. Others are taken from other speakers. To claim Churchill said it makes a quote more interesting. AZ attaches his name to quotations from Charles de Gaulle to Cordell Hull. They must have reasoned: who cares what Cordell Hull said?

Twenty-three of these thirty-four AZ Quotes bear little or no relationship to anything Churchill uttered. They do not track in the ever-widening store of digital references compiled by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. This file includes 30 million published words by Churchill and in his Official Biography. It adds 50 million more words in books, memoirs and speeches about him. Ultimately, Hillsdale hopes to offer access to this index to students, researchers and scholars on its Churchill website.

I’ve posted my complete updated list of “Red Herrings” as a public service. It may be an antidote to what I’m reading on AZ Quotes. Arrgh! Pass the hemlock.

The Top Ten

AZ Quotes continues to add entries. They seem to post quotations willy-nilly, some perhaps sent by readers, with no attempt to verify. Some duplicate or slightly revise others. Here are the first thirty-four, in the order most often encountered. An asterisk denotes new entries for the next “Red Herrings” appendix in Churchill by Himself. “CBH” denotes current references in that book. Bold face denotes three quotations AZ Quotes actually gets right. (Stand up!)

*1. Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions. ✸ No attribution.

2. You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones to every dog that barks. ✸ From a 1923 speech, but Churchill was quoting someone else. He preceded this by saying, “As someone said…” AZ also mangles the quote. Correctly: “As someone said, you will never get to the end of your journey if you stop to shy a stone at every dog that barks” (CBH 579). 

*3. Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision. ✸ No attribution. 

4. A nation that forgets its past has no future. ✸ No attribution. Possibly muddled from “…if we open a quarrel between the past and present we shall find that we have lost the future” (18 June 1940, CBH 24).

*5. The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible. ✸ No attribution. 

* * *

6. If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart. if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain. ✸ No attribution. Mangled from the usual erroneous version: If a man is not liberal in youth he has no heart. If he is not conservative when older he has no brain (CBH 576).

 7. Socialism is [the] philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. ✸ Inaccurate. The words through “envy” are from a 1948 speech (CBH 394). The rest are incorrectly transcribed from a 1945 speech (CBH 13).

8. There is nothing government can give you that it hasn’t taken from you in the first place. ✸ Inaccurate. Correctly “…Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away…” (1903 Speech, CBH 393.)

9. The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. ✸ No attribution. He had far more respect for the average voter (CBH 573).

10. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. ✸ No attribution. Often credited to Lincoln, also without proof. Click here.

The Next Worst

*11. A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest. ✸ No attribution and out of character for Churchill, who was not given to sexist wisecracks. (See also #30.)

 12. A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. ✸ No attribution. See “Churchill on the Optimist and Pessimist.” (CBH 578.)

*13. If Britain must chose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea. ✸ Incorrect. Actually referred to choosing between de Gaulle or the Free French and Roosevelt. The correct quotation: “Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt” (de Gaulle, Unity, 153). See “EU and Churchill’s Views.”

*14. One man with conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions. ✸ Not Churchill but Alfred George Gardiner, quoted by Robert Rhodes James in the introduction to Churchill’s Complete Speeches: “One man with a conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions, and Mr. Churchill always bursts into the fray with a conviction so clean, so decisive, so burning, that opposition is stampeded” (Complete Speeches vol. I, 12).

15. The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery. ✸ Inaccurate. Correctly: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” See #7 above (CBH 13).

* * *

16. However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. ✸ No attribution. See “Mr. Stern, Mr. Trump…” (CBH 580).

*17. You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. ✸ No attribution.

18. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. ✸ Not Churchill but Cordell Hull and incorrectly transcribed. Correctly: “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.” Also, Churchill would likely have said “trousers” not pants or breeches. See “Galloping Lie” (CBH 476).

*19. Life can either be accepted or changed. If it is not accepted, it must be changed. If it cannot be changed, then it must be accepted. ✸ No attribution.

20. We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. ✸ Inaccurate. Correctly: “Can a people tax themselves into prosperity? Can a man stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle?” (1904 speech, CBH 387.

Jackpot: Three out of ten right

*21. I’d rather argue against a hundred idiots than have one agree with me. ✸ No attribution.

22. Islam is more dangerous in a man than rabies in a dog. ✸ Inaccurate. Correctly: “Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy” (CBH 464).

23. In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet. ✸ Correct! WSC once remarked: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened” (CBH 486).  

*24. Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut. ✸ No attribution.

25. An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. ✸ Inaccurate. Correctly: “Each one [of the neutral nations] hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last” (Broadcast, 1940, CBH 262).

* * *

26. Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they a free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage. ✸ Right again. AZ Quotes is on a roll! (CBH 99.)

27. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled— the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome. ✸ Two in a row! This gives us hope, but not for long (CBH 464).

 28. You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” ✸ No attribution, but very popular (CBH 574).

*29. I no longer listen to what people say, I just watch what they do. Behavior never lies. ✸  No attribution.

*30. Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds? [Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course.”] Would you sleep with me for five pounds? [“What kind of a woman do you think I am?”] We’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price. ✸ No attribution. Who invents such stuff?

We shall go on to the end…

31. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” ✸ No attribution (CBH 576).

32. Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon. ✸ Roughly right but the last sentence is invented. Correctly: “Only a handful see it for what it really is—the strong and willing horse that pulls the whole cart along” (1959 speech, CBH 392).

*33. A nation that fails to honor its heroes soon will have no heroes to honor. ✸ No attribution.

*34. It is better to do something than to do nothing while waiting to do everything. ✸ No attribution.

There are fifty more pages of alleged Churchill on AZ Quotes. One day if I have nothing else to do, I will investigate further. Help, anybody!

Frederick N. Rasmussen of the Baltimore Sun, an admirer of Sir Winston, told a story years ago, which has just floated back. Rasmussen wrote:

Experts in the field of spectral phenomena claim that Maryland and Washington are rich in sightings…. A ghost story dating to the Civil War that has persisted through the years is that of repeated appearances of Abraham Lincoln, who has been seen standing in a window of the Executive Mansion staring toward Virginia, as he had done often during the war. Even Churchill, who thought nothing of taking on Hitler and Mussolini, was not happy when assigned to the Lincoln Bedroom. Quite often, he was found in a vacant bedroom across the hall the next morning.

There are endless Lincoln ghost stories. Churchill’s encounter would have occurred during one of his stays in the White House during the Second World War.

Naked encounter?

Lincoln Bedroom

Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Churchill to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was “the favorite of most male guests,” recalled J.B. West, the chief usher. But upon his arrival on 22 December [1941], the Prime Minister rejected the bed, so he wandered the second floor, “tried out all the beds and finally selected the Rose Suite,” where SDR [Sara Delano Roosevelt] and the Queen [Elizabeth the Queen Mother]  had resided.  —Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume III, 409.

***

Mrs. Roosevelt had arranged for [Churchill] to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, then located off the West Hall, the favorite of most male guests. However, he didn’t like the bed, so he tried out all the beds and finally selected the Rose Suite at the end of the second floor.  —J. B. West & Mary Lynn Kotz, Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies.

***

When Eleanor showed Churchill to the Lincoln Bedroom (not then as famous as it was to become during the Clintons’ occupancy of the White House), he turned it down, claiming the bed did not suit him. Making himself at home from the start, Churchill then looked over the other available rooms. Alert as ever to opportunities, he chose a bedroom across the hall from Harry Hopkins’ almost permanent rooms, the Rose Room on the second floor, where Queen Elizabeth had slept on her on her 1939 visit with King George VI. —Cita Stelzer, Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table.

Reality

“It is true,” writes Mr. Lehrman,

that Harry Hopkins had been occupying the so-called Lincoln Suite.  Mr. Churchill was happy with the Rose Suite, as it was directly across the hall from Hopkins. It would seem that the powers that be thought Mr. Churchill very important they showed him the Lincoln Bedroom out of deference, Hopkins notwithstanding. Fortunately, it seems Mr. Churchill did not like the bed, thus no cause for disturbing Hopkins. Churchill was more than satisfied with the Rose Suite, immediately across the hall from Hopkins, primarily because it gave him immediate access to Hopkins, with whom he already had a very special relationship.

So, unless the ghost of Mr. Lincoln was in the habit of switching rooms, he is unlikely to have appeared in Churchill’s bedroom. Even less likely did the apparition appear as Churchill was emerging from his bath. By the way, his baths though frequent did not occur late at night. The Lincoln Bedroom wasn’t so named until 1929. Before then it was the “Blue Suite.” Lincoln used it as a study, not a bedroom. According to the White House Museum the bedroom furniture was moved in by President Truman in 1945.

Mr. Stern himself offers only one Churchill quote and gets it right: “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” (Colliers, 28 December 1935.)

Bingo! That’s an obscure one. Forgive him for vastly exaggerating Churchill’s alcohol intake. (WSC’s “six whisky sodas” were described by his private secretary as “scotch-flavored mouthwash.”)

A Stern list…

The list of Presidential tweets quoting Churchill, as provided by Mr. Stern, suggests a middling score on the accuracy meter. Many fall into the category of “Churchillian Drift.”

These are pure fiction: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life” … “If you’re going through hell, keep going” … “Socialists think profits are a vice. I consider losses the real vice” … “Success is not final, failure is not fatal” … “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” … “However beautiful the strategy you should occasionally look at the results” … “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference” … “Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.”

So who coined those? Who knows?  As a wise man once said: “If you don’t know the author of a choice quote, credit it to Churchill, Einstein, Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. Everybody will be impressed, and they all said so much that nobody knows the difference.” But Churchill rarely indulged in gratuitous flatulence and preaching.

* * *

Some of the President’s Churchill tweets are close, but Churchill’s exact words are better: “Each one [of the neutral nations] hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last” (20 January 1940) … “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary” (7 March 1916) … “The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion” (21 September 1938) …“…never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense” (29 October 1941).

The President’s versions of these were minor deviations, but he did get one exactly right: “The price of greatness is responsibility.” (Harvard, 6 September 1943). We all of us might ponder that one.

Churchill in Nashville, 1932

Winston Churchill was here on his 1932 lecture tour. He especially liked Nashville, Atlanta, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Ann Arbor—the latter not too far from Hillsdale College. “And who would miss Chattanooga,” he wrote, “lying in its cup between the Blue Ridge and Lookout Mountain?”

East, west, north, and south he rode the rails, “living all day on my back in a railway compartment and addressing in the evening large audiences.” His theme was Anglo-American unity. He concluded, rather startlingly for someone with his background: “It is the hardest work I have had in my life.”

Aside from making money—something he was always short of in those days—he was keen to visit battlefields of the Civil War, which he would describe in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. At Murfreesboro, he observed “the greatest bravery by both sides.” The Federals lost 9000, Braxton Bragg’s Confederates over 10,000. “The Federal hold on Nashville was unshaken, and Bragg withdrew to cover Chattanooga. Murfreesboro gave the impression of a drawn battle….”

Churchill viewed the Civil War as Lincoln did, “with malice toward none and charity for all”—as a milestone toward what the Constitution calls “a more perfect union.” He understood and admired the courage and devotion of both sides. I doubt he would approve tearing down any of their statues. But that’s just my opinion.

And because he had studied the Civil War, he knew on December 7th, 1941 that World War II was won. He didn’t attempt to guess how long it would take. But he knew for certain that  “America was in the war, up to the neck, and in to the death.”

Current Contentions

Alas, this noble spirit is the subject of current contentions, and bad movies from “Dunkirk” to “The Crown.” Not a month passes when he is not accused of something dreadful, from alcoholism and racism to misogyny and warmongering. Confronting this busy industry is the purpose of my book.

Critics often set Churchill up as the savior of 1940, then tear him down with a familiar litany: his self-centeredness; his liking for gas warfare and carpet bombing; the rude things he said about Hindus or Jews or Muslims; his disdain for the uncivilized, meaning anyone other than card-carrying Englishmen.

The assault is both personal and political. The personal includes charges that he was a school dunce, a failure in marriage, avid for conflict. There are side-claims about his parents. Lord Randolph died of syphilis. Lady Randolph slept with 200 men. His brother Jack was not Lord Randolph’s son.

Policy critiques range from what he did—like defending Antwerp and attacking the Dardanelles—to what he didn’t do—not bombing Auschwitz, not feeding occupied Europe, not stopping the Bengal famine.

Where do people get these notions? The scholar Harry Jaffa said that detraction of the great has become a passion for those who cannot suffer greatness—a skewed vision of the egalitarian principle, the theory that there are no great figures, we are all the same.

We may not claim that Churchill was infallible. It diminishes him to treat him as superhuman. On some topics in the book, accomplished scholars have catalogued his failings. I acknowledge these. But I offer certain exculpatory, but more obscure facts.

What to Know

The first thing to know about Churchill is that there is more to him than 1940. Sir Martin Gilbert, his great biographer, wrote: “As I open file after file of Churchill’s archive, from his entry into Government in 1905 to his retirement in 1955, I am continually surprised by the truth of his assertions, the modernity of his thought, the originality of his mind, the constructiveness of his proposals, his humanity, and, most remarkable of all, his foresight.”

The “macro-Churchill” thought deeply about the nature of humanity and its institutions. The “micro-Churchill” helped to solve intractable problems. In 1921, he helped to secure Irish independence. In Cairo around the same time, he drew boundaries of today’s Middle East.

This was an act some say we should not thank him for. Yet he established a stable Jordan, which is there yet. He confirmed Britain’s commitment to a Jewish national home, which is also there. Churchill also proposed a Kurdish homeland. Let us, he said, “protect the Kurds from some future bully in Iraq.” That’s just Winston being silly, the Foreign Office said. We’ll never have any trouble from Iraq.

In the 1930s he opposed self-government for India, and lost. He then sent a message to Gandhi… “Use the powers that are offered. Make the thing a success.” Gandhi actually admired Churchill. Since 1906, in fact. “I have a good recollection from when he was in the Colonial Office,” Gandhi said. “I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”

Liberal Reformer

As a young statesman, Churchill campaigned for a “minimum standard” guaranteed by the state. But he called socialism “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, the gospel of envy.” He strove to help the needy while not dislocating the system that generated that help. “Churchill’s writings and speeches are full of reflections and philosophy that offer food for thought,” wrote the historian Paul Addison. “It is rare to dis­cover in the archives the reflec­tions of a politi­cian on the nature of man.”

In the first part of the book, covering Churchill’s early youth, I consider his mother’s supposed indiscretions, the parentage of his brother Jack, his early troubles with education, and what really killed Lord Randolph Churchill. But I think you’ll most enjoy Chapter 1—the lighthearted myth that Churchill was part Native American. Like Elizabeth Warren. He himself believed this, and was proud of it.

* * *

Continued in Nashville (2):The Myth of Churchill’s American Indian Ancestors

Note: Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality is now available in paperback, with a lower price for the Kindle edition.  Click here.

“We think we are wholly superior people,” said the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. The 50th and 75th Anniversaries of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg were poignant, inspiring moments. The words spoken of those occasions give cause to wonder. In the welter of emotions, have we forgotten what we need to remember?

“We may be given to meet again…”

Shelby Foote:

We think we are wholly superior people. If we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we’d never have fought that Civil War. But since we did fight it, we have to make it the greatest war of all times. And our generals were the greatest generals of all time. It’s very American to do that.

“Who knows,” Berry Benson, a Gettysburg veteran asked, as his narrative drew towards its close, “Who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning roll call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again hastily to don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the Long Roll summons us to battle.

“Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise. All will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well. And there will be talking and laughter and cheers. And all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?”

The Civil War “is not ‘was,’ it’s ‘is.'”

Barbara Fields:

William Faulkner said once that history is not “was,” it’s “is.” And what we need to remember is that the Civil War “is” in the present, as well as the past.

The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future also established a standard that will not mean anything until we finish the work.

“Under One Flag Now”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gettysburg, 3 July 1938:

On behalf of the people of the United States I accept this monument in the spirit of brotherhood and peace.

Immortal deeds and immortal words have created here at Gettysburg a shrine of American patriotism. We encompass “The last full measure of devotion” of many men and by the words in which Abraham Lincoln expressed the simple faith for which they died.

It seldom helps to wonder how a statesman of one generation would surmount the crisis of another. A statesman deals with concrete difficulties—with things which must be done from day to day. Not often can he frame conscious patterns for the far off future.

* * *

But the fullness of the stature of Lincoln’s nature and the fundamental conflict which events forced upon his Presidency invite us ever to turn to him for help.

For the issue which he restated here at Gettysburg seventy five years ago will be the continuing issue before this Nation so long as we cling to the purposes for which the Nation was founded—to preserve under the changing conditions of each generation a people’s government for the people’s good.

The task assumes different shapes at different times. Sometimes the threat to popular government comes from political interests, sometimes from economic interests, sometimes we have to beat off all of them together.

But the challenge is always the same—whether each generation facing its own circumstances can summon the practical devotion to attain and retain that greatest good for the greatest number which this government of the people was created to ensure.

Lincoln spoke in solace for all who fought upon this field; and the years have laid their balm upon their wounds. Men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray are here together, a fragment spared by time. They come here by the memories of old divided loyalties, but they meet here in united loyalty to a united cause which the unfolding years have made it easier to see.

All of. them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now….

* * *

That is why Lincoln—commander of a people as well as of an army—asked that his battle end “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

To the hurt of those who came after him, Lincoln’s plea was long denied. A generation passed before the new unity became accepted fact.

In later years new needs arose. And with them new tasks, worldwide in their perplexities, their bitterness and their modes of strife. Here in our land we give thanks that, avoiding war, we seek our ends through the peaceful processes of popular government under the Constitution.

We are near to winning this battle. In its winning and through the years may we live by the wisdom and the humanity of the heart of Abraham Lincoln.

_________

See also “Lehrman on Churchill and Lincoln.”

Q: Another new movie, A United Kingdom,  saddles Churchill with racism. It’s the story of Seretse Khama of the Bechuanaland royal family and heir to the throne. After studying in England, he meets and marries a British woman, Ruth Williams. The South African government, which is adopting Apartheid, is troubled by the interracial marriage. It presses the Attlee government in Britain to exile Khama, which they do. Churchill is not a character in the film, but we are told that he supports Khama and will restore him if Churchill’s party wins the 1951 election. Churchill does win, but now we are told he has exiled Khama for life. The movie as usual compresses history and tells us at best a version of the truth. I am wondering if the Churchill part of the story is accurate. —P.L., Richmond, Va.

______

A: It is not. I heard about this and bounced it off others, because I am a bit busy fending off nonsense about Churchill in “Viceroy’s House,” “The Crown,” and other Drama that Goes Bump in the Night. A colleague replies: 

The Labour government exiled Khama in 1951, when he returned to England where he had been a Law student. In 1956 he was allowed to return as a private citizen before entering politics in 1961. As for the charge of racism, you can’t compare today with the 1950s. It was a different world.

Contrary to the film, Churchill did not promise to end Khama’s exile if elected, then withdraw it and exile him for life. Commonwealth Relations Minister Lord Ismay warned the incoming Churchill cabinet that his return would provoke South Africa’s racist government. They would resort to economic sanctions and demand annexation of Bechuanaland, kept out of their hands since the Union of South Africa in 1910. (The Churchill Documents, Vol. 23, 34.) Khama and Ruth returned home in 1956. In 1966 he was elected first president of independent Botswana. Under Khama (1966-80), Botswana developed one of the world’s fastest growing economies. It boasts a record of uninterrupted democracy. Their son Ian was Botswana’s fourth president, serving 2008-18.

Racism?

Another Churchill scholar, author of a recent book on Churchill’s thought, challenges even the “different world” excuse. by responding as follows. This is certainly something to think about. Anyone reading this may do so. Note particularly the bold face:

Of course, and you can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense, and also most of America’s founders (who abolished slavery in two-thirds of the Union during their lifetimes). The remarkable thing is not that any of them, or Churchill, had the standard view of questions like intermarriage. There was almost no experience with that and the prejudice against it was universal or nearly so.

The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights.

Therefore to say that Winston Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember was that Lincoln and Churchill were political men. Also they were democratic men. They needed, and thought it was right that they needed, the votes of a majority. If they lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course they would be careful how they offended those prejudices.

See also “Churchill as Racist: A Hard Sell”

Mr. Lehrman is author of Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point (2008) and Lincoln “by littles” (2013). Uniquely among the Lincoln scholars I’ve heard on Churchill, he has as fine a grasp of the English statesman as he does the American president. He tells me he regards each as the outstanding figure of his respective century. No argument there.

1. Lehrman on Preparation for Greatness

Excerpt: President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill found themselves challenged by wars of national survival. Even though their early lives appear to be different, there are similar aspects in their educational preparation.

“If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him,” declared Abraham Lincoln at Peoria on 16 October 1854. In this case, he implied that Senator Stephen Douglas, his political adversary, made irrational arguments on the subject of slavery.

Young Lincoln never had much of a chance to study mathematics. In June 1860, Lincoln wrote to a journalist that “when I came of age I did not know much….I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.”

Mr. Churchill would echo these biographical remarks of Mr. Lincoln in his speech at the Mid-Century Convocation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on 31 March 1949: “I frankly confess that I feel somewhat overawed in addressing this vast scientific and learned audience.…I have no technical and no university education, and have just had to pick up a few things as I went along.” Read more….

2. Lehrman on Statesmen of War

Excerpt: “We cannot escape history,” President Lincoln declared in his Second Annual Message to Congress in December 1862. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

Churchill, gifted historian that he was, learned lessons from the history he wrote. He certainly understood the importance of patience and hard work from writing his four-volume biography of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough. “The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaigns is because I was always on the spot—I saw everything, and did everything for myself,” the Duke had observed.

Lincoln’s memory was as good as Churchill’s, but Lincoln’s opportunity to study British history had been very limited. In February 1865, President Lincoln attended a peace conference in Hampton Roads, Virginia. After Lincoln set stiff Union conditions for any negotiations, one of the Confederate commissioners argued, as a precedent, that King Charles I had reached agreements with rebels during an English Civil War.

“I do not profess to be posted in history,” said Lincoln in concluding the discussion. “All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I is that he lost his head in the end.”

When it came to the future judgments of history, Winston Churchill had an advantage over Lincoln. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,” the British Prime Minister told World War II associates. Abraham Lincoln, however, had his own advantage. More even than Churchill, perhaps, Lincoln was attuned to the realities of the present and the promises of the future. In his 1862 Message to Congress, Lincoln revealed in a single line his ability to adapt to whatever came:

“As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” Read in full…

This quotation is now going around the web, broadly attrib­uted to Churchill. Is it accu­rate? “Social­ism is a phi­los­o­phy of fail­ure, the creed of igno­rance, and the gospel of envy, its inher­ent virtue is the equal shar­ing of misery.” —M.S. via email.

It is more or less correct, but it’s a truncated version of two separate comments, run together to make them more interesting (in the eye of the drafter).

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” —Perth, Scotland, 28 May 1948, in Churchill, Europe Unite: Speeches 1947 & 1948 (London: Cassell, 1950), 347.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” —House of Commons, 22 October 1945

A variation on the above is: “I do not at all wonder that British youth is in revolt against the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries, that what used to be called the ‘submerged tenth’ can only be rescued by bringing the other nine-tenths down to their level…” —House of Commons, 13 June 1948

Churchill’s legacy includes his philippics against socialism, said the late Dr. Harry Jaffa,

which are no less trenchant than those against fascism and Communism. Consider the following excerpts from a speech in the Commons in 1949: “I was brought up to believe that taxation is a bad thing, but the consuming power of the people a good thing. I was brought up to believe that trade should be regulated mainly by the laws of supply and demand and that, apart from basic necessaries in great emergencies, the price mechanism should adjust and correct undue spending at home….I was also taught that it was one of the first duties of Government to promote that confidence on which credit and thrift….can alone stand and grow. I was taught to believe that these processes, working freely within the limits of the well-known laws for correcting monopoly….would produce a lively and continuous improvement in prosperity. I still hold to those general principles.

“Socialists [on the other hand] regard taxation as good in itself and as tending to level our society….Everything possible is done discourage and stigmatize the inventor. The Chancellor [of the Exchequer] speaks in slighting terms of profit earners….What a lot of contempt he put into it—”profit earners.” There was an old Gladstonian expression: ‘Let the money fructify in the pockets of the people.’ That is regarded as a monstrous device of a decadent capitalist system.”

This moreover puts us in mind of that dictum concerning property asserted by the Father of the American Constitution, James Madison, when he said, in the Tenth Federalist, that “the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property [is] the first object of government.” One might add that according to Madison, the U.S. Constitution is intended to provide equal protection to unequal abilities. This is just as surely what Abraham Lincoln meant when in 1864 he wrote to the Workingmen’s Association of New York that “Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.” *

* Harry V. Jaffa, “Requiem for Socialism and the Iron Curtain,” Remarks on Churchill’s Birthday, 30 November 1990.