August 15, 2013

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 34

In 1900 The Chicago Tribune began publishing “the highly colored dispatches of an upstart war correspondent anxious to parlay his South African heroics into a seat in Parliament.”¹ Fifteen years later the Tribune’s publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, after a friendly interview with Churchill, said he was “the most aggressive person I ever met.”²

Given McCormick’s well-known anti-British prejudice and isolationist bent, a surprisingly close relationship developed between the two magnificoes in the years leading up to World War II. A Tribune editor wrote, “Winston Churchill caused much gossip when he came to Chicago, because he was the guest of one of Chicago’s most anti-British pillars….the last person Chicagoans expected to be host. [Yet] the two men couldn’t have been a happier combination.”³

McCormick’s Anglophobia allegedly stemmed from personal effronteries he’d experienced as a schoolboy in England.⁴ Although he felt comfortable fox hunting and enjoying an English-like country house, he had no qualms about comparing the British Empire to the Third Reich, or saying that “Rhodes scholars were British spies planted in Uncle Sam’s bosom.”⁵

Such rants could not endear McCormick to Churchill, but WSC remained non-committal. Asked what he thought of McCormick’s view that “if the British behave they might be eligible to become one of the United States,” WSC quipped: “Great Britain and the United States one? Yes, I am all for that, and you mean me to run for president?”⁶

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On a personal level the Churchill-McCormick relationship blossomed, with reciprocal home visits and the exchange of presents, such as a portable desk for WSC and each volume of Marlborough as published for the Colonel. Volume I was wistfully inscribed, “Hope that the English-Speaking Peoples increasingly unite their history in common.” Writing his thanks, McCormick gushed, “I hear encomiums of you on all sides, not the least of them being that of my driver who remarked ‘There’s no baloney about him at all’….the McCormick dugout is always ready to welcome you.”⁷

McCormick’s Tribune seemed to express his favorable attitude during the 1932 visit. Cartoonist Carey Orr offered “The Contrast,” showing a determined Churchill with a bright candle entitled, “The Loyal Briton Abroad.”⁸ Below was a slouched American with muted candle, “The Apologetic American abroad.” Two days before, an editorial presaged the cartoon: “Mr. Churchill’s candor, a little brusque or impatient, and his readiness to charge any bastion of official authority have found [more] sympathy with us than at home. In short, we have rather taken to Mr. Churchill…We meet a forthright Briton, [a] seasoned statesman….what he says will profit us.” The editorial even accepted Churchill’s “fraternal relationship” concept, adding, “English speaking peoples must be founded…upon a self-respecting search by both peoples for policies profitable to both.”⁹

Things weren’t as smooth later on. The Tribune Press was to have been slated to publish Churchill’s Secret Session Speeches in 1946. But Churchill’s angry reaction to Tribune editorials condemning the “special relationship” squelched the deal, and WSC assigned the American edition to Simon & Schuster—his only book for that publisher.

The relationship of Churchill and McCormick was an exciting sidelight to WSC’s experiences in Chicago. A McCormick biography probably caught a key part of their mutual character is when it compared their passionate patriotism: “They shared…a belief in my country right or wrong—and differed only in the identity of the country.”¹⁰

Endnotes:

1. Richard Norton Smith, The Colonel, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997, 72.

2. Ibid., 160.

3. Fanny Butcher, Many Lives—One Love. New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 187-88.

4. Ibid.

5. Smith, The Colonel, op. cit., 160, 458.

6. Kay Halle, Winston Churchill on America and Britain. New York: Walker and Company, 1970, 33.

7. Colonel Robert R. McCormick Research Center of the First Division Museum at Cantigny, Wheaton, 111.

8. Chicago Tribune, 8 February 1932.

9. Chicago Tribune, 6 February 1932.

10. Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey, Poor Little Rich Boy. Carpentersville, 111.: Crossroads, 1985, 368.