June 10, 2013

FINEST HOUR 134, SPRING 2007

CHURCHILL ON THE CHICAGO SCANDALS

ABSTRACT
WHY IN 1906 WOULD AN ENGLISHMAN be interested in a muckraking book on the abuses in the United States’ meatpacking industry? Winning student essayists from Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities review Churchill’s short-term goals and long-term convictions.

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I. Intellectual Honesty and Moral Righteousness

BY JAMES KIRCHIK, YALE UNIVERSITY

Mr. Kirchick’s essay won first prize in the Sir Martin Gilbert Student Essay Competition, held in conjunction with the Chicago Churchill Conference. Mr. Kirchick’s professor is Theodore Bromund.

“The Chicago Scandals,” Winston Churchill’s essay on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, offers a nuanced perspective that distinguishes between Sinclair’s political message and the journalistic account the book offers about the Chicago meatpacking industry. In addition to the well-deserved criticism that Churchill provides regarding Sinclair’s punishing literary style, he praises the author for spearheading the uniquely American movement of “muckraking” journalism and its unapologetic mission to trumpet the truth while brushing aside institutional cowardice and cant. Churchill would later demonstrate these very same qualities as the Cassandra of the British House of Commons in the years of Nazi ascension.

Churchill’s appreciation for Sinclair’s moral conscience and prescience is immediately striking. Churchill does not write as a disinterested observer from overseas offering haughty takes on the state of American literature. He does not conflate Sinclair’s regrettable socialist realism with the entire American canon. Rather, Churchill writes with a keen appreciation for the American experiment and as one who understood that not just Britain’s fate but that of the world rested on the success of the United States as a liberal, democratic power. “It may be that in the next few years we shall be furnished with Transatlantic answers to many of the outstanding questions of economics and sociology upon whose verge British political parties stand in perplexity and hesitation,” he wrote, recognizing a bond of unity that would prove crucial three decades later.

It is for this reason that Churchill declares so early in the essay that, in reference to the sordid state of the Chicago meatpacking industry, “people have no right to hold their noses and shut their eyes.” A good case can be made for this statement being enshrined as Churchill’s literary epitaph, so pithily does it encompass the man’s worldview. The allusion obviously refers to the culinary aspect of The Jungle, imploring readers not to erase the sights and smells of the Chicago abattoirs from their memories. Yet the acts of holding one’s nose and shutting one’s eyes could be applied to anyone who chooses to ignore evil. The troubles that Sinclair documented in the United States were grave enough to threaten the future health of that nation, and thus, in Churchill’s eyes, the world.

The statement also indicates Churchill’s belief in the importance of engaged and active citizenship. Apathy may be the easiest response to the worlds various injustices but individuals, he insists, “have no right” to ignore the grave problems confronting their society. In describing the horrors at Chicago, Sinclair has placed his readers, in “a kind of horror-struck docility.” So grave is the problem of unsanitary meat production and so dominant are the great powers that stand behind its continuation that in the face of this scandal one is weakened to the point of inaction.

In the 1930s, Churchill faced a far greater hurdle. Even though the ethno-nationalism and territorial expansionist policies of Hitler were apparent for the world to see, national leaders denied that there was any problem at all. After The Jungle was published, however, the debate concerned strategies to solve a problem rather than whether one even existed.

The threat that Nazi fascism posed to the world inflicted the same sort of “docility” upon national leaders; yet this docility was more dangerous than that created by the meatpackers, because the European appeasers were hardly “horror-struck” over the Nazis. On the contrary, politicians and newspaper editors were so wedded to the policies of appeasement, their collective heads buried so deep in the sand, that they failed to recognize the existential threat moving swiftly towards them.

Some even saw in Hitler a model leader. After signing the Munich Pact, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced from the steps of Ten Downing Street that “peace in our time” had been achieved, and instructed members of the press to stop asking questions and “Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

For all his literary and political faults, Sinclair, like Churchill, was a canary in the coalmine. Churchill readily acknowledges Sinclair’s socialism, yet separates the political message of the novel from its journalistic qualities. Ridiculing Sinclair’s protagonist’s political awakening after encountering Chicago’s corrupt machine, Churchill writes, “There is one man more in Chicago who may be trusted to vote straight for the Socialist ticket. Hurrah!”

Upton Sinclair’s stated mission was to marshal public opinion in favor of massive electoral change (he ran in California for Congress in 1920, Senator in 1923 and Governor in 1926, all on the Socialist ticket). But the primary effect of The Jungle—thankfully, from Churchill’s view—was not to turn the country towards socialism but to compel the adoption of practical food safety laws. Churchill warns naive readers that “no mere economic revolution” can change the behavior of the detestable men who run the Chicago political machine. “Base men will dishonor any system,” whether that system be totalitarian or democratic. In a warning that predates the Russian Revolution, Churchill writes that human nature is inherently imperfect, no matter what are the grand designs of central planners.

Churchill’s concern for intellectual honesty and moral righteousness in a free society answers the question, “Why in 1906 would an Englishman be interested in a muckraking book on the abuses in a foreign country’s meatpacking industry?” Here, he exhibits an appreciation for the ingenuity and effort of the American people, an attitude that later influenced his policy as wartime leader when his prime concern was achieving American involvement in World War II. In this review-essay, Churchill demonstrates his virtues as a man of action, just as he would during what his biographers have referred to as “The Wilderness Years,” when the soon-to-be prime minister spoke out on the Nazi threat, as a lonely backbencher in a feckless parliament.

Perhaps the greatest praise that Churchill offers Sinclair is the encomium that The Jungle “enables those who sometimes think to understand.” That commendation is no less true of the man who bestowed it.

II. The Aristocratic Reserve: Churchill and the Muckrakers

BY SASHA G. ROUSSEAU JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Mr. Rousseau’s essay won second prize in the Essay Competition. His adviser at Johns Hopkins is Stephen Dixon.

An ill-fed, ill-shod, permanent underclass cannot form the basis of an empire. Winston Churchill was a traditional patriot in the Kipling mold who, in pursuit of a stronger nation, and a parliamentary seat, attempted to mediate the perpetual battle between the haves and the have-nots.

In 1904, Winston Churchill crossed the floor of the House of Commons to join the Liberal Party in its advocacy of free trade.1 By joining the opposition, Churchill expanded upon the nascent liberalism of his father’s “Tory Democracy” ideals and his own Tory Radical reputation.2 As opposed to the pro-tariff Conservatives, he argued that protective tariffs strained foreign relations and threatened buyers of all goods with higher prices and uncertainty of supply. As an opposition Member of Parliament, he campaigned to win a seat from working class Oldham in the 1906 election,3 entirely upon the platform of free trade.4

Churchill believed that under free trade goods are cheaper, so people buy more of them. The market is thus strengthened, and everyone has greater accessibility to goods.5 He had crossed the floor to sit in the opposition seat once occupied by his father, and he built upon that statement by speaking only of the issue that had publicly severed him from his former party. By homing in on Free Trade, Churchill defined himself for his constituency as well as his new allies in government. Yet he was still very much tied to the status quo.

Churchill was a traditionalist. Despite his years as a war correspondent, the criticism of military infrastructure inherent in his novel,6 and his experience as a POW, he had a picturesque view of war before the Great War shattered his illusions. He was a nationalist who believed in the gallantry of man. Though he supported the English cause in the Boer War, he did not dehumanize the Boers.7 Maintaining a hierarchy was one thing: cruelty and oppression another.

The same might be said for Churchill’s views on economics. Not a believer in squeezing the rich or subsidizing the poor, he understood that a strong state must be based on a strong economy.8 He supported competition spurred commercial development,9 which would raise the material standards of living for everyone without altering the class hierarchy itself: a prototypical version of “trickle-down economics.” Placed as he was near the top of the social pyramid, Churchill already had a great life. So he believed in the greatness of England.

Nationalism throughout Europe was reaching dizzying heights, and war seemed a thrilling possibility. It was difficult to hold out against the patriotic fervor, even for those for whom the status quo did no favors. They, too, were claiming England’s traditions as their own. To gain their votes, Churchill had to bridge the gap between his own class and that of his constituency. He had to learn more about the circumstances of the working man.

Luckily, there was a glut of muckraking books chronicling the condition of the lower classes. To social critics, modern industry destroyed community: the social safety net.10 The political backlash against industry took the form of workers’ rights and anti-tariff rhetoric. Tempers flared over cheap Chinese labor shipped to become miners in the Transvaal.11 The rights of workers were still being disregarded in favor of commercial giants, but unions were forming and politicians, including Churchill, were starting to take note.

In response to the backlash, industry leaders such as George Cadbury and William Lever built new districts for their workers. They capitalized on the nationalistic trend by designing their buildings in a quaint English style. Lever bragged that his planned industrial community was “old England reborn.”12 The industrialists claimed that a new national myth, in which all the classes had a heroic part, had been formed by commercialization.

It was true that the poor were not being entirelyshut out of the industrialists’ prosperity. Fewer than ten percent of the working urban population lived in slums, and processed and imported food made staples cheaper and easier to obtain. Local bylaws governed what Parliament did not, and funded town sewers, municipally supplied water, and public bathhouses.13 But the muckrakers proved that more and more people were slipping through the cracks. There was a tug of war between social welfare and economic competition. Churchill focused on what the working classes could do for the empire, rather than what the empire could do for them.

Sharing the national glory meant sharing responsibility, most notably in national defense, and it was feared that stunted slum dwellers would make poor soldiers.14 Germany’s military might was growing, and so was knowledge of her more liberal welfare legislation.15 The U.S. was England’s ace in the hole, a country bound much more closely to England than to rest of Europe. Free Trade agreements kept America concerned for England’s economic welfare.16 Yet in observing Spanish-American War, Churchill had discovered the dangers of an army relying on modern industrial standards: only 379 American soldiers died of combat in that war, but almost 5,000 died of sickness, much of it brought on by the army’s spoiled supply of canned beef.17 Churchill feared that America was as vulnerable as England to the dangers of industrial efficiency run amok.

His political niche as an advocate of Free Trade, funneled through the interests of his working class constituency, led Churchill to delve into the writings of muckrakers like Upton Sinclair. The health of the workers, and the hygiene of their processed food, were of importance, because the poor would be given rights only if they took on responsibilities, especially national defense. America was a potentially strong ally in a European war, which loomed ever closer with the growing spirit of nationalism. But industrial scrimping can lead to a defense crisis, not to be overcome by the strong economy big business helps to create.

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WORKS CITED

Addison, Paul, Churchill on the Home Front. London: Pimlico, 1993.
Churchill, Randolph S., Winston S. Churchill, vol. II: Young Statesman, 1901-1914. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.
Gilbert, Martin, Churchill and America. New York: Free Press, 2005-
Keegan, John, Winston Churchill. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Murolo, Priscilla & Chitty, A.B., From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States. New York: New Press, 2001.
Schama, Simon, A History of Britain, vol. Ill: The Fate of Empire 1776-2000. New York: Hyperion, 2002.

ENDNOTES

1. Keegan, 63
2. Ibid., 59-61
3. Addison, 98
4. Churchill, 115
5. Addison, 98
6. Keegan, 45
7. Ibid., 51
8. Ibid., 59
9. Addison, 25
10. Schama, 413
11. Churchill, 116
12. Schama, 414
13. Ibid., 414-17
14. Ibid., 421
15. Ibid., 425
16. Gilbert, 46
17. Murolo/Chitty, 139 

 

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