Q: What was it?

The Atlantic Charter was issued by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in August 1941. “We had the idea,” Churchill later told Parliament, “to give all peoples, and especially the oppressed and conquered peoples, a simple, rough and ready wartime statement of the goal towards which the British Commonwealth and the United States mean to make their way, and thus make a way for others to march with them….”

A reader asks if the Charter had a second iteration:

In your review of Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network, you link Martin Gilbert’s 2005 lecture on Churchill and America. In it, Sir Martin said: “One of the documents which I’ve never seen reproduced…was the Declaration of Principles which Churchill and Eisenhower signed in the White House.” Was this, as he hinted, a second Atlantic Charter?

A: “Perhaps—perhaps not”

Sir Martin was quoting, actually paraphrasing, Churchill’s description of the charter he signed with Eisenhower in 1954. He correctly said it was never published. Finding it proved a challenge.

Sir Martin’s book Churchill and America references the Eisenhower Papers at Johns Hopkins University. The university library could not find it. They referred me to the Eisenhower Library, which did not reply. (Some libraries seem to have difficulties even answering queries about materials in their care.)

Repeated online searches eventually produced the text. Back in 2005, Sir Martin wished that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair publish the “Second Charter” as a gesture of solidarity during the Iraq war.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project met Sir Martin’s wish that the “charter” be published, albeit on its seventieth anniversary. The wording certainly bears the imprint of Sir Winston.

Washington, 29 June 1954

As we terminate our conversations on subjects of mutual and world interest, we again declare that: 

(1) In intimate comradeship, we will continue our united efforts to secure world peace based upon the principles of the Atlantic Charter, which we reaffirm. 

(2) We, together and individually, continue to hold out the hand of friendship to any and all nations, which by solemn pledge and confirming deeds show themselves desirous of participating in a just and fair peace.

(3) We uphold the principle of self-government and will earnestly strive by every peaceful means to secure the independence of all countries whose peoples desire and are capable of sustaining an independent existence. We welcome the processes of development, where still needed, that lead toward that goal. As regards formerly sovereign states now in bondage, we will not be a party to any arrangement or treaty which would confirm or prolong their unwilling subordination. In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure they are conducted fairly.

*

(4) We believe that the cause of world peace would be advanced by general and drastic reduction under effective safeguards of world armaments of all classes and kinds. It will be our persevering resolve to promote conditions in which the prodigious nuclear forces now in human hands can be used to enrich and not to destroy mankind. 

(5) We will continue our support of the United Nations and of existing international organizations that have been established in the spirit of the Charter for common protection and security. We urge the establishment and maintenance of such associations of appropriate nations as will best, in their respective regions, preserve the peace and the independence of the peoples living there. When desired by the peoples of the affected countries, we are ready to render appropriate and feasible assistance to such associations.           

(6) We shall, with our friends, develop and maintain the spiritual, economic and military strength necessary to pursue these purposes effectively. In pursuit of this purpose we will seek every means of promoting the fuller and freer interchange among us of goods and services which will benefit all participants.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston S. Churchill 

Self-government, self-determination

In the original Atlantic Charter, Churchill had been careful to distinguish self-government from self-determination. Britain and the U.S. agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”

Churchill’s hand was again evident in the 1954 declaration, with its closely similar wording: “We uphold the principle of self-government…the independence of all countries whose peoples desire and are capable of sustaining an independent existence.” They welcomed “the processes of development, where still needed, that lead toward that goal.” (Italics mine.)

The British Empire was much diminished by 1954. But this wording preserved a certain flexibility for Britain over the colonies that remained. In the years which followed, under Churchill’s successors, colony after British colony became independent. Most evolved peaceably, and with far less strife than colonies of other empires. Today many are members of the useful, if sadly underutilized, Commonwealth of Nations.

“Rough-and-ready”

Churchill glossed over minor semantics in his report to Parliament. The statement, he said, was only “a declaration of our basic unity.” Angl0-American unity, he continued, was “the strongest hope that all mankind may survive in freedom and justice.

This was virtually the same meaning Churchill had attached to the 1941 Atlantic Charter: “A simple, rough-and-ready” statement by which Britain and America “mean to make their way.”

In retrospect

Was the 1954 Washington declaration a second Atlantic Charter? Probably not, writes Roosevelt-Churchill scholar Warren Kimball: “I’m a bit dubious about ordaining that statement, since it apparently attracted little attention and had no effect on history.”

Indeed, Churchill’s bright hopes for a “new charter” were quickly dashed. The Prime Minister was at sea, returning to England. There he dashed off a telegram to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, suggesting a high-level meeting with the Russians—absent Eisenhower.

Churchill informed Eisenhower, furious that he had not been consulted. ‘‘You did not let any grass grow under your feet,” he fired back. Back in London, the Cabinet was “even more indignant.” The Prime Minister had not consulted them, either.

Though the President later insisted he was “not vexed,” he wanted no Soviet summit. Privately, later, Eisenhower voiced the concern that “Winston would give away the store.”

Churchill’s initiative came to nothing. “I cherish hopes not illusions,” he replied. “And after all I am ‘an expendable’ and very ready to be one in so great a cause.”

In April 1955, convinced at last that he could not foster “a meeting at the summit,” Churchill resigned.

Three months later his successor and Eisenhower met with the Russians in Geneva.

Related reading

“Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing, After All Other Possibilities are Exhausted,” 2021.

“Researching the Atlantic Charter Conference, Argentia, Newfoundland, August 1941,” 2019.

“Bull in a China Shop (Dulles): Not Churchill’s Line,” 2022.

“Churchillian Phrases: ‘Special Relationship’ and ‘Iron Curtain,’” 2019.

“Cita Stelzer on the Angl0-American Special Relationship,” 2024.

*****

Cita Stelzer. Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship. New York: Pegasus Books, 2024. 236 pages, $29.95, Amazon $26, Kindle $19.99.

Cita Stelzer…

…offers a lively and readable account of Winston Churchill’s hold on important Americans—and theirs on him. Her book nicely complements Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and America (2005). Add Brad Tolppanen’s Churchill in North America 1929 (2014), and you have an excellent triptych on the Anglo-American Special Relationship.

Gilbert’s book was chronological and complete; Tolpannen concentrated on a single year. Stelzer splits the difference. She begins with Churchill’s first U.S. visit in 1895 and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War. Churchill’s long skein of American contacts served him well, and she could easily write a sequel covering the war years and beyond.

Nearly two-thirds of Churchill’s American Network is devoted to his nationwide tours of 1929 and 1931. Churchill’s American Network shows how WSC honed his U.S. contacts, begun in the First World War, that proved so indispensable in the Second.

Early on

On his first U.S. lecture tour in 1900-01, Stelzer observes, young Winston was viewed with some diffidence. Americans tended to sympathize with the Boers, Britain’s enemy in South Africa. Churchill disarmed them by paying tribute to Boer valor—and, in places like Boston, that of his Irish compatriots. Stelzer quotes Manfred Weidhorn on how Churchill, like U.S. Grant, successfully relied on “personal observation” in his war reporting (71).

As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, Churchill met steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, whose Bethlehem Steel was supplying guns to the Allies and “c.k.d.” (crated knocked down) submarines to the Royal Navy. Thus, the First Lord became aware of the “awesome productive capacity” of American industry. They remained close, and Schwab would supply the “Churchill Troupe’s” private railcar for their North American tour in 1929.

Return to “dry” America

By the late Twenties, Churchill’s chief American contact was Bernard Baruch, like Schwab another Great War acquaintance. Stelzer is our guide as the towering financier eases into the heart of the story, 1929-32. From Baruch, WSC learns “the relationship of finance and government and how private sector determined deployment of the nation’s resources” (119).

Two years later, back now for a lecture tour, Churchill assured audiences that “America is not going to crash.” But he couldn’t get over Prohibition, and denounced it in Collier’s. Cita Stelzer ferrets out a poignant quote from that article about the evils of excessive government regulation. Prohibition then, the dominant Administrative State now—Churchill’s view is still worth our attention:

[It is] the most amazing exhibition alike of the arrogance and of the impotence of a majority that the history of representative institutions can show. The extreme self-assertion which leads an individual to impose his likes and dislikes upon others…on a gigantic scale a spectacle at once comic and pathetic…. No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism (81).

Forging “special relationships”

If Churchill coined the term “Special Relationship” for Anglo-American association, he derived it from the contacts he himself forged. Yet not even he, Stelzer observes, “realized how important” the people he met would become.

There were, for example, future War Secretary Henry Stimson, Ambassador to Britain Andrew Mellon, and Navy Secretary Charles Francis Adams III (110).  There were certain key publishers, who didn’t always agree with him, but liked him. From William Randolph Hearst he learned “the variety and popularity of U.S. magazines accessing public opinion” (101).

Another vital publisher was Chicago’s Robert McCormick, who agreed with him even less than Hearst, but liked him equally. When the war began, Anglophobe Senator Tom Connolly questioned whether Churchill would keep his promise never to surrender the Royal Navy. McCormick told him: “Senator, I have known Winston Churchill for twenty-five years. A more thoroughly honorable man never lived. He would not have made that promise if he had not intended to keep it” (204).

American grandees were impressed by Churchill’s collegial attitude toward political opposites like McCormick. After his triumphant address to Congress following Pearl Harbor, he warmly shook hands with Democrat isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Later Churchill said, “I liked him. He is a fighting man…. I respect and admire fighting men even if they are against me” (209).

“Volume diplomacy”

To nurture his U.S. contacts Churchill employed a kind of “volume diplomacy.” He inscribed and sent successive volumes of his life of Marlborough to America’s haute noblesse. Baruch, Schwab, McCormick Hearst, Senator Joe Robinson, and B&O Railroad head Daniel Willard all received copies. Another recipient was insurance tycoon Donald McLennan, who in 1942 extended war damage insurance to endangered companies other insurers wouldn’t touch.

On Churchill’s gift list was Democrat powerhouse and former presidential candidate William McAdoo. In 1929, Baruch had told McAdoo of WSC’s forthcoming visit. McAdoo wrote Churchill: “[G]ive me…some indication of what you would like to do while here….Do you care for any form of public entertainment?” WSC replied, “Do not desire public entertainment but hope to dine with you privately” (62).

Marlborough also went to banker William Henry Crocker, whose Burlingame, California mansion included “a splendid swimming pool.” Crocker had introduced Churchill to several West Coast titans (83). Among these were Cal Tech President and physicist Robert A. Millikan, USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid, and actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  All of them, Stelzer writes, would later support American entry into the Second World War (100). A dose of Winston Churchill hadn’t hurt.

A positive vice

To the consistent horror of his wife, Churchill was an incessant (mostly losing) gambler—casinos and the stock market. His habit, Cita Stelzer writes, “did nothing to improve his reputation among the straitlaced…including Schwab’s associate, “the puritanical Andrew Carnegie” (57). She quotes financial historian David Lough: “I have never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale during my career of advising people about their finances” (125).

But Stelzer sees a saving grace, in that WSC’s addiction was a net gain for him and his readers. “It forced him to rely on his pen, producing forty-three book-length works in seventy-two volumes” Actually it was fifty-one books in eighty volumes—but as Stelzer writes, this was “a gift to the world.” (126)

To that she adds some 400 periodical articles between the World Wars, a dramatic output. Indeed Churchill never stopped writing—and earning. Confined to a New York hospital after being knocked down and nearly killed by a car in 1932, he dictated the story of his accident at a dollar a word.

At the same time, the author continues, he was “in treaty” for twelve Collier’s articles and six for The Strand. Meanwhile, he was telegraphing publisher George Harrap that he had “no serious work between me and [Marlborough] at the present time.” (138)

With Americans, Churchill seemed more cautious about risk-taking. He met Averell Harriman between casino visits in 1927, warning him against investing in Soviet manganese mines. Later he claimed he had saved Harriman millions. Whether Harriman took his advice is unclear, Stelzer writes, but here was another link to “his American chain of relationships that would stand him in good stead for decades” (64). In an adjacent sidebar—one of many on people and events—the author details Harriman’s wartime diplomacy with Churchill and Stalin.

Churchill on Americans

On his very first visit to the U.S., Churchill had written his mother: “What an extraordinary people the Americans are! Their hospitality is a revelation to me and they make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I have never before experienced.” To his brother he simply remarked: “This is a very great country, my dear Jack.”

Cita Stelzer shows that he never found reason to alter that impression. Thirty-five years later he wrote of “gusts of friendliness…expansive gestures…hospitality and every form of kindness… [Americans] are less indurated by disappointment; they have more hopes and more illusions.” This, he observed, meshed well with British “traditional reserve and frigidity….chary of allowing the feeling of friendliness to take root quickly…. It is in the combination of these complementary virtues and resources that the brightest promise of the future dwells” (119).

Again Manfred Weidhorn, “a keen student of Churchill’s attitudes toward America,” is quoted: The United States in Churchill’s view was “a great experiment, a trail blazer, in so many ways the leading nation of the world and the carrier of the hopes of mankind” (193).

Americans on Churchill

A few minor errors of fact do not detract from a good read, full of insight tempered by honesty. For instance, Cita Stelzer doesn’t hide Churchill’s willingness to take advantage of good-natured American hospitality, sometimes with unabashed pushiness. In 1929 she has him writing Hearst to find out whether banker William Crocker or aircraft and oil baron George Armsby “would like to take care of me in San Francisco” (76).

Yet she notes that Churchill’s outgoing character, his fraternal love of his mother’s land, soon disabused his hosts of base impressions. The Anglophile journalist Frederick Wile was not the first American to go out on a limb (albeit with a nickname WSC detested): “Dynamic, brilliant, resourceful and lion-hearted, ‘Winnie’s’ path, his admirers are persuaded, one day will lead him to the premiership” (110).

It would—but not quite in the way Wile expected.

In 1941, a few months after the whole world had seen what his indomitable character had made him, even Americans who had been dismissive were giving Churchill another look. That was when one of his U.S. acquaintances, Henry Luce, named him Time’s “Man of the Year.”

“Churchill cannot reasonably claim to have recruited Henry Luce to his network,” Stelzer writes. “But he can reasonably claim to have attracted Luce to his side…. Luce needed Churchill to make the case for intervention, Churchill needed Luce to make his arguments available to millions, Roosevelt needed both” (209). Mutual need featured hugely in the “Special Relationship.” It still should today.

On America and Americans 

From Sir Martin Gilbert’s remarks on Churchill and America, Chartwell Booksellers, New York, 11 October 2005.

In the beginning….

He came here first in 1895, and he was quite amazed by New York, which was the one city he visited—he was on his way to Cuba to watch the Spaniards grappling with the Cuban insurrectionists. He wrote to his young brother:

Picture to yourself the American people as a great lusty youth who treads on all your sensibilities, perpetrates every possible horror of ill manners, whom neither age not just tradition inspire with reverence, but who moves about his affairs with a good-hearted freshness which may well be the envy of older nations of the earth.

Toward the end….

One of the documents which I’ve never seen reproduced in any history book or collection of documents was the Declaration of Principles which Churchill and Eisenhower signed in the White House on 27 June 1954. He summarized it in a speech to Parliament:

Britain and the United States assert their sympathy for and loyalty to all those still in bondage, proclaim their desire to reduce armaments, and to turn nuclear power into peaceful channels, confirm their support of the United Nations, and all organizations designed to promote peace in the world; and proclaim their destination, to develop and maintain the spiritual, economic and military strength necessary to pursue their purposes effectively based on their mutual comradeship.

In 1955 he summoned his cabinet together for a final chat. And he said to them, “there are two things which matter. One is to remember that man is spirit. And the other thing is: Never be separated from the Americans.”

Related reading

“Origins of Churchill Phrases: ‘Special Relationship’ and ‘Iron Curtain,'” 2019.

“Churchill Quotations: The Best Telegram He Ever Sent,” 2023.

“Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing, After All Other Possibilities are Exhausted,” 2021

“Dewey, Hoover, Churchill, and Grand Strategy, 1950-53,” 2018.

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