June 5, 2013

Finest Hour 143, Summer 2009

Page 37

Winston Churchill’s Constitutionalism: A Critique of Socialism in America

By Justin D. Lyons

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Justin Lyons is Associate Professor of History and Political Science and Adjunct Fellow in the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University, and a valued part of Churchill Centre educational activities. This is an excerpt from his article first posted by the Heritage Foundation (http://xrl.us/bev4gv) which is now found also on Finest Hour Online (http://xrl.us/beuiy6).


While Churchill’s heroism in World War II was the high point of his career, he was Prime Minister twice, held every major Cabinet post except the Foreign Ministry, and was prominent for over sixty years. This extensive political experience produced in him a deep and often underappreciated reflection on political matters.

Churchill’s wartime leadership was not unreasoned or incoherent—and would have been unsuccessful if it were. It depended, he stressed, upon consistent, coherent thought:

Those possessed of a definite body of doctrine and of deeply rooted convictions will be in a much better position to deal with the shifts and surprises of daily affairs than those who take short views, indulging their natural impulses as they are evoked by what they read from day to day.1

Churchill’s convictions flowed from the Anglo–American constitutionalism of which he was so proud and devoted an heir. His attachment to the principles of political freedom guided his decisions and was the heart of his profound ability to inspire, but it was not merely instinctive or inherited. Rather, it was the product of reason and experience.

Churchill reflected broadly and deeply on both the domestic and international issues of his day. Indeed, it is indicative of his comprehensive understanding that he never lost sight of the connections between those spheres. In the Twenties and Thirties in particular, he surveyed with unease the collectivist trends already sapping the internal strength of his own country and threatening to create instability abroad. He opposed such programs, whether originating on the Left or on the Right of the British political spectrum, as destructive of freedom. It is well worth the effort to examine his thoughts on these matters, both for his diagnosis of political ills and for his prescriptions for political health.

Because scholars have paid so much attention to the working relationship between Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in matters of foreign policy, we tend to assume that they were entirely agreed on domestic policy. But by viewing Churchill’s thoughts on America as shown through the great issue of the day—the New Deal—we see that Churchill was an opponent of FDR’s centralized administrative philosophy of government and that his opposition was grounded in a recurrence to our founding principles.

A Unity of Spirit

At a time when America was undergoing significant political change following the Great Depression and New Deal, Churchill had much to say about political change in the United States. While the governing forms of the United States and Britain differed, Churchill saw the governing principles as built upon identical principles of freedom. Speaking to a joint session of Congress as the United States entered World War II in December 1941, he noted that both Congress and Parliament were animated by essentially the same principles, and strove for the same ends:

Therefore I have been in full harmony all my life with the tides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlantic against privilege and monopoly, and I have steered confidently towards the Gettysburg ideal of “government of the people by the people for the people.” In my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters.2

Despite certain “historical incidents,” the War of Independence primary among them, Churchill viewed the American Declaration of Independence from Britain as in perfect harmony with British political principles.3 Indeed, he argued that the Declaration belonged not to America alone but to all of the children of the English common law: “The Declaration is not only an American document. It follows on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title deed on which the liberties of the Englishspeaking peoples are founded.”4

In the war years to come, Churchill never tired of stressing the harmonious political and legal doctrines of the two nations and the common traditions and goals of the two peoples.5 He continued to do so even after the war. Speaking to the American Bar Association in 1957, for example, Churchill maintained that, though their laws were somewhat different in form, they were united in principle:

In the main, Law and Equity stand in the forefront of the moral forces which our two countries have in common. …National governments may indeed obtain sweeping emergency powers for the sake of protecting the community in times of war or other perils. These will temporarily curtail or suspend the freedom of ordinary men and women, but special powers must be granted by the elected representatives of those same people by Congress or by Parliament, as the case may be.

They do not belong to the State or Government as a right. Their exercise needs vigilant scrutiny, and their grant may be swiftly withdrawn. This terrible twentieth century has exposed both our communities to grim experiences, and both have emerged restored and guarded. They have come back to us safe and sure. I speak, of course, as a layman on legal topics, but I believe that our differences are more apparent than real, and are the result of geographical and other physical conditions rather than any true division of principle.6

Churchill was not engaging in sentimental reflection when he gave such speeches. The unity of principle he pointed to was, and always had been in his view, the basis for unity of action.

“What Good’s a Constitution?”

In The Age of Roosevelt, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. quotes Churchill’s 1936 article “What Good’s a Constitution?,”7 introducing the former Prime Minister as “an eminent English observer.” But Schlesinger gives a false impression of his message, quoting only the last few paragraphs, suggesting that Churchill fully supported Roosevelt’s views of the Constitution and the need to overcome the Supreme Court’s opposition to New Deal policies: “This is an age in which the citizen requires more, and not less, legal protection in the exercise of his rights and liberties.”

The reader quite naturally takes away the impression that Churchill, like FDR, believes the conditions of modern industrial society—especially the concentration of economic power in large corporations—require a much greater degree of governmental intervention and control to secure the liberties of the common man.

But this is not Churchill’s meaning. Reading the entire article, it is clear that he means quite the opposite—that liberty is best protected by the established boundaries of the constitutional order. “The rigidity of the Constitution of the United States is the shield of the common man,” writes Churchill. Here, too, Schlesinger misleads the reader by rendering it as follows: “The Constitution, he said, was ‘the shield of the common man.’”8

The surreptitious substitution of “was” for “is” serves the New Deal understanding that the Constitution is no longer an adequate framework for meeting the challenges of American life and economic crisis. Churchill’s article is in fact much less favorable to the New Deal understanding than Schlesinger admits.

Churchill begins his discussion of constitutionalism by suggesting that a person must first consider “the fundamental issue….Does he value the State above the citizen, or the citizen above the State? Does a government exist for the individual, or do individuals exist for the government?” The world is divided on this question, Churchill writes, but Russia, Germany, and Italy have definitely chosen “to subordinate the citizen or subject to the life of the State.” All three have adopted, in peacetime, a level of subordination of the individual proper only to a time of war, and seek to direct their national life permanently on that basis.

What these three nations have in common, Churchill notes, is the doctrine of socialism, which argues that economic crises are “only another form of war,” which justifies governmental controls. But Churchill rejects the comparison of economic war: “One of the greatest reasons for avoiding war is that it is destructive to liberty. But we must not be led into adopting for ourselves the evils of war in time of peace upon any pretext whatever.”

Churchill was to combat this tendency personally during the 1945 British election. The government had assumed many extra controls during the war. Churchill warned that if the Labour or Socialist party won, government’s grip on the individual citizen, far from being loosened, would grow ever tighter:

…even today they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus-boss.9

Of course, this economic-crisis-as-war language was frequently employed by the New Dealers, including Franklin Roosevelt himself.10

Socialism, Churchill noted, grafts itself onto nationalism and the features of nations it infects. Weimar Germany was destroyed and Hitler propelled to power through patriotism, tradition, and pride, combined with discontent over inequalities of wealth. Russian Communism was buttressed by national sentiment and imperialist aspirations. The next country Churchill mentions, in a shift that must be shocking, is the United States, which he says has experienced developments similar to those inspired by socialism in the dictatorships:

In the United States, also, economic crisis has led to an extension of the activities of the executive and to the pillorying, by irresponsible agitators, of certain groups and sections of the population as enemies of the rest. There have been efforts to exalt the power of the central government and to limit the rights of individuals.

The combinations at work in the United States, however, are different. Passions and economic jealousies have been unleashed—not with imperial ambition or twisted racism, but with a sense of public duty and the desire for national prosperity. But the result, Churchill warns, can be just as dangerous: “It is when passions and cupidities are thus unleashed and, at the same time, the sense of public duty rides high in the hearts of all men and women of good will that the handcuffs can be slipped upon the citizens and they can be brought into entire subjugation to the executive government.”

After describing trends in Germany, Russia, Italy, and U.S., Churchill takes “the opposite view.” He had always rejected any policy or propaganda that would use crisis to extend the power of the state as subverting individual liberty and perverting the purpose of government:

I hold that governments are meant to be, and must remain, the servants of the citizens; that states and federations only come into existence and can only be justified by preserving the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the homes and families of individuals. The right and power rest in the individual. He gives of his right and power to the State, expecting and requiring thereby in return to receive certain advantages and guarantees.

Churchill then gives the tests by which he judges the civilization of any community:

What is the degree of freedom possessed by the citizen or subject? Can he think, speak and act freely under well-established, well-known laws? Can he criticize the executive government? Can he sue the State if it has infringed his rights? Are there also great processes for changing the law to meet new conditions?

A vital support for freedom also lies in the independence of the courts, Churchill continues:

In both our countries the character of the judiciary is a vital factor in the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the individual citizen. Our judges extend impartially to all men protection, not only against wrongs committed by private persons, but also against the arbitrary acts of public authority. The independence of the courts is, to all of us, the guarantee of freedom and the equal rule of law.

In other words, the safeguard is to be found in a structural feature of American and British constitutional arrangements. These remarks hardly appear sympathetic to FDR’s frustration with the Supreme Court’s repeated striking down of New Deal programs as unconstitutional, and his search for ways to limit the powers of the Court.

Churchill did not hesitate to state his opinion on whether a fixed constitution is a “bulwark or a fetter.” He wrote: “I incline to the side of those who would regard it as a bulwark….” Yet it is very difficult, he writes, for those in England to comprehend the kind of governmental deadlock that has been reached in the United States.

That major bills affecting the whole life of the people could be passed by Parliament only to be struck down and nullified by a court of law would be beyond imagination. The unwritten British Constitution thus has great flexibility: “There is no limit to the powers of Crown and Parliament. Even the gravest changes in our Constitution can in theory be carried out by simple majority votes in both Houses and the consequential assent of the Crown.”

But limits on government and the separation of powers were central to America’s founding. The judiciary was to be independent, but whether the Supreme Court would have a veto over legislation passed by Congress was a matter of debate among the Framers. While the actual language of the Constitution gives no specific grant of such a power, the idea was advanced and became entrenched as an implied power very early.11

Churchill found the opportunity for a conflict between American branches of government remarkable: “…anyone may bring a test case challenging not merely the interpretation of a law, but the law itself, and if the Court decides for the appellant, be he only an owner of a few chickens,12 the whole action of the Legislature and the Executive becomes to that extent null and void.”

Churchill recognizes and understands the American hesitancy to approve such arrangements as the “British democracy expressing itself with plenary powers through a Government and a Parliament controlled only by the fluctuating currents of public opinion…Yet all classes and all parties have a deep, underlying conviction that these vast, flexible powers will not be abused,” citing British respect for law and constitutional usage, the stability of a permanent civil service, and the attachment of popular opinion to the unwritten constitution.

The Better System?

Lest readers assume that Churchill believes the British system superior, he notes that the U.S. situation is quite different: The size and complexity of the United States makes the flexible British arrangement impractical and unwise: “the participants of so vast a federation have the right to effectual guarantees upon the fundamental laws, and that these should not be easily changed to suit a particular emergency or fraction of the country.”

Thus Churchill concludes that the United States requires both federalism, in order to function properly, and the Supreme Court, to enforce the principle, especially in time of crisis.

Roosevelt, however, was impatient with those like Churchill, who opposed an evolving interpretation of the Constitution that would permit the federal government to take an increasingly active role in the life of the states. In 1937, for example, FDR called for an “enlightened view” of the Constitution: “Difficulties have grown out of its interpretation but rightly considered, it can be used as an instrument of progress, and not as a device for the prevention of action.”13

The language of constitutional flexibility was common New Deal parlance to which Churchill in his essay takes great exception: “‘Taking the rigidity out of the American Constitution’ means, and is intended to mean, new gigantic accessions of power to the dominating centre of government and giving it the means to make new fundamental laws enforceable upon all American citizens.”

Change, Freedom and Tyranny

Churchill’s 1937 article, “This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” is a meditation on political change, an essay of sweeping historical breadth, starting with the ancient European kings, who were granted powers sufficient to remedy the defects of an earlier, chaotic age and were elevated to an almost godlike status. While this was an improvement on anarchy, the accidents of individual birth and character were unstable foundations on which to risk the fortunes of nations: “At one period Pericles or Augustus, at another Draco or Caligula!”

Once society was set on a firm footing, Churchill explains, constitutions were invented to restrain the excesses of kings—particularly in England, which gave rise to the famous English Parliamentary system and constitutional monarchy….The English conception, wrought by the island nobility from Magna Carta to the age of Anne, spread over wide portions of the globe. The forms were often varied, but the idea was the same. Sometimes, as in the United States, through historical incidents, an elected functionary replaced the hereditary king, but the idea of the separation of powers between the executive, the assemblies and the courts of law widely spread throughout the world in what we must regard as the great days of the nineteenth century.14

But the point of this essay is to convey a modern warning. In the 20th century, he continues, just when the progressive faith was at its zenith—when the illusion of mastery over man’s fortunes had taken on its most vibrant hues—all those hopes failed: “Then came terrible wars shattering great empires, laying nations low, sweeping away old institutions and ideas with a scourge of molten steel.”

The world now learned (or re-learned) that political change does not necessarily follow consistent directions. 19th century thinkers had hoped for the spread of democratic institutions, but as Churchill points out, democratic regimes are as subject to degradation because they, like other regimes, carry their own dangers with them:

Democracy has been defined as “the association of us all in the leadership of the best.” In practice it does not always work this way. Vast masses of people were invested with the decisive right to vote, while at the same time they had very little leisure to study the questions upon which they must pronounce; and an enormous apparatus for feeding them with propaganda, catchwords and slogans came simultaneously into existence.

When responsibilities are shirked, Churchill continued, the control of the people will become an illusion and eventually vanish. Flatterers will sway the people. Demagogues will convince them to surrender their power for safety or comfort. Propagandists will play on their fears. Tyrants will be born:

Alike in fear of anarchy and in vague hopes of future comforts a very large proportion of Europe have yielded themselves to dictatorship. Nations [have] made haste to rally in the parades and processions of a set of violent, wrathful, resourceful, domineering figures cast up by the bloody surge of war and its cruel lacerating recoil. We have entered the age of the dictators.15

Thus, the early 20th century witnessed political regression. Nations were subject to lords many times more powerful than the ancient kings. The reader recognizes the spirit of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, but Churchill’s warning is for those who have not yet fallen under the yoke of such men—for those countries which imagine themselves immune from such a transformation, including the Western democracies. Whatever political victories may have been won, the danger of tyranny is never removed.

“Roosevelt from Afar”

The common political heritage of America and Britain was the basis for Churchill’s appeal for aid from the United States in the Second World War. His initial success had much to do with his personal relationship with Roosevelt, which has rightly received a vast scholarly attention. Their disagreements over war policy and the Soviets are well documented.

Almost completely ignored, by contrast, are Churchill’s comments on the political, economic, and social policies Roosevelt pursued—reflecting Churchill’s concern that even regimes built on the principles of freedom can become corrupted and lose their way.

Churchill believed that the United States was not immune to the political degradation then affecting much of the world. In a 1934 essay on the New Deal, first entitled “While the World Watches” and later changed to “Roosevelt from Afar,”16 he warned that a moment of social and economic crisis is also a moment of political danger.

Churchill admired Roosevelt’s desire to deliver his people from the problems of the Depression, but his essay had another purpose, as he wrote to the editor of Collier’s: to warn against the possible ill-effects of the New Deal: “I have tried to strike a note of warning while at the same time expressing my sincere sympathy with the great effort the President is making,”17

For a statesman to remark on the domestic policies and personalities of a friendly country without exciting resentment requires diplomatic skill, and Churchill was very careful. He went so far as to leave final judgment to his American editor: “…if there are any phrases which you think would cause offence…you are quite at liberty to soften or excise them without reference to me.”18 Yet despite his caution, “Roosevelt from Afar” conveys serious warnings about America’s Depression-era economic and social policies.

Churchill admits that the new President faced a stiff challenge: “Everybody had lost faith in everything.” Roosevelt chose to seize direction of the whole scene, and “[s]ince then there has been no lack of orders.” (Roosevelt issued an extraordinary number of executive orders—more than all of his successors through Bill Clinton combined.)

Using a word that must have shocked Roosevelt supporters, Churchill continued: “Although the Dictatorship is veiled by constitutional forms, it is none the less effective. Great things have been done, and greater attempted.”19 Churchill is careful to attribute possible excesses to mis-guided followers rather than to Roosevelt himself:

But the President has need to be on his guard. To a foreign eye it seems that forces are gathering under his shield which at a certain stage may thrust him into the back-ground and take the lead themselves. If that misfortune were to occur, we should see the not-unfamiliar spectacle of a leader running after his followers to pull them back.20

While Churchill describes these forces as dangers to Roosevelt’s “valiant and heroic experiments,” it is clear from the essay, as from New Deal history, that these are in fact dangers arising from those very experiments.

Trade Unionism

Churchill identifies two in particular: trade unionism and redistribution of wealth. While praising Roosevelt for his attempt to reduce unemployment by shortening working hours and thus to spread employment more evenly through the working class, he has “considerable mis-givings…when a campaign to attack the monetary problem becomes intermingled with, and hampered by, the elaborate processes of social reform and the struggles of class warfare.”21

Churchill, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer during the 1926 General Strike, knew whereof he wrote. Trade unionism, he wrote,

has introduced a narrowing element into our public life. It has been a keenly-felt impediment to our productive and competitive power. It has become the main foundation of the socialist party, which has ruled the State greatly to its disadvantage, and will assuredly do so again. It reached a climax in a general strike, which if it had been successful would have subverted the Parliamentary constitution of our island.22

Churchill accepted that British trade unions had become a stable force, and were, in any case, much better for society than “communist-agitated and totally unorganized labour discontent.”23 But British trade unionism had developed over fifty years, allowing time for economic adjustments and abatement of passions. “But when one sees an attempt made within the space of a few months to lift American trade unionism by great heaves and bounds to the position so slowly built up—and even then with much pain and loss—in Great Britain, we cannot help feeling grave doubts.”24 The conflicts involved in such a transformation, he warns, could “result in a general crippling of that enterprise and flexibility upon which not only the wealth, but the happiness of modern communities depend.”

Such sweeping decrees are exactly what characterized the Roosevelt Administration—as illustrated by the compulsory unionism of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935).

Redistribution of Wealth

The second great danger Churchill identifies in Roosevelt’s experiments is “the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts.” This may be “a very attractive sport,” but redistribution through penalties on the wealthy does not benefit a society in the long run— instead it drains the wellsprings of economic development:

The millionaire or multi-millionaire is a highly economic animal. He sucks up with sponge-like efficiency from all quarters. In this process, far from depriving ordinary people of their earnings, he launches enterprise and carries it through, raises values, and he expands that credit without which on a vast scale no fuller economic life can be opened to the millions. To hunt wealth is not to capture commonwealth….meanwhile great constructions have crumbled to the ground. Confidence is shaken and enterprise chilled, and the unemployed queue up at the soup-kitchens or march out to the public works with ever growing expense to the taxpayer and nothing more appetizing to take home to their families than the leg or the wing of what was once a millionaire….It is indispensable to the wealth of nations and to the wage and life standards of labour, that capital and credit should be honoured and cherished partners in the economic system.

Yes, Churchill admits, there is some justification for the anger of the American people against their leaders of finance. But “[t]he important question is whether American democracy can clear up scandals and punish improprieties without losing its head, and without injuring the vital impulses of economic enterprise and organization.”25

The U.S. is not the first country to deal with the question of whether “it is better to have equality at the price of poverty, or well-being at the price of inequality.” Churchill lamented the drift toward Socialism in Britain in the 1920s (and again in the 1940s), pointing out that these schemes produced little but economic disaster.26

Churchill strongly favored government action to ease the plight of the poor in modern industrial society; his whole career was marked by a concern for social justice, echoed in his cautious admiration of FDR. Ultimately, however, Churchill held that free markets should be allowed to operate without centralized, bureaucratic controls, which destroy the principle of competition that is the mainspring of economic health.27 The capitalist system can create concentrations of wealth, since free competition results in inequalities of property, but the removal of reward for investment and risk will stultify economic development and ultimately harm society as a whole.

Throughout his discussion of the economic choices America faces, Churchill refers to “the Russian alternative”—nationalization of production, distribution, credit, and exchange to cure the abuses and inequities of the capitalist system. One cannot take a middle ground between the two systems—yet Churchill believed that the American people would never willingly accept the “dull brutish servitude of Russia,” though he also believed that a nation can slide into doctrines it would not accept with open eyes. Churchill concluded:

There it seems to foreign observers, lies the big choice of the United States at the present time. If the capitalist system is to continue, with its rights of private property, with its pillars of rent, interest and profit, and the sanctity of contracts recognized and enforced by the State, then it must be given a fair chance.

Given the regulatory activities of the National Recovery Administration, increases in taxes on successful businesses, frequent anti-trust lawsuits, and FDR’s antibusiness rhetoric, Churchill’s words can only be read as a rebuke to the New Deal approach to reining in “the vital impulses of economic enterprise and organization.”28

Conclusion

Churchill’s critique of the New Deal does not nullify his admiration for Roosevelt, especially as it developed into the “special relationship” in the Second World War and afterward. While they had their disagreements, Churchill’s gratitude to Roosevelt was immense. Speaking in the House of Commons a few days after Roosevelt’s death, he expressed that gratitude in some of his finest words: “For us, it remains only to say that in Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old.”29

Churchill’s critique does, however, have importance. Written in the context of worldwide economic upheaval, and collectivist trends destructive of freedom, it reveals his opposition to the philosophy of the New Deal as equally dangerous to political and economic liberty.

Churchill thought seriously, not only about the unity of spirit between Great Britain and the United States, but the ways in which both countries were subject to the dangers of abandoning the supports of law and liberty in times of crisis. The two countries were bound together in the defense of freedom; Churchill knew that freedom must be guarded internally as well as externally.


Endnotes

1. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 210.

2. “A Long and Hard War,” 26 December 1941, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963 (London: Chelsea House, 1974), III:6536. Cited hereafter as Complete Speeches.

3. “The Declaration was in the main a restatement of the principles which had animated the Whig struggle against the later Stuarts and the English Revolution of 1688, and it now became the symbol and rallying centre of the Patriot cause.” Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, vol. 3, The Age of Revolution (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 189.

4. “The Third Great Title-Deed of Anglo–American Liberties,” 4 July 1918, Complete Speeches, III:2614.

5. See for example “A New Magna Carta” (Lend-Lease), 12 March 1941, Complete Speeches, VI: 6360, and “The Task Ahead,” 27 June 1942, ibid., 6644: “The day will come when the British and American armies will march into countries, not as invaders, but as liberators, helping the people who have been held under the cruel barbarian yoke….Also, it will open the world to larger freedom and to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as the grand words of your Declaration of Independence put it.”

6. “Liberty and the Law,” 31 July 1957, Complete Speeches, VIII:8682–83.

7. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 3, The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 495, quoting from Winston S. Churchill, “What Good’s a Constitution?” Collier’s, 22 August 1936.

8. Ibid.

9 “Party Politics Again,” 4 June 1945, Complete Speeches, VII:7171–72.

10. To give one example: “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” Washington, 4 March 1933.

11. Marbury vs. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).

12. A reference to A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corporation vs. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), in which the National Industrial Recovery Act was overturned by the Supreme Court.

13. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to the Congress,” 6 January 1937.

14. Winston S. Churchill, “This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, vol. 4, Churchill at Large (London: Library of Imperial History, 1976), 394.

15. Ibid., 394–95.

16. Winston S. Churchill, “While the World Watches,” Collier’s, 29 December 1934. Republished in 1937 as “Roosevelt from Afar” in Great Contemporaries, deleted from 1940-45 editions. Cited hereafter as Great Contemporaries (University of Chicago Press, 1973).

17. WSC to William Chenery, editor, Collier’s, 13 September 1934 (Chartwell Papers 8/493) in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 2, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (London: Heinemann, 1981), 870.

18. Ibid.

19. Great Contemporaries, 373–74.

20. Great Contemporaries, 381.

21. Great Contemporaries, 374-75.

22. Great Contemporaries, 374-75.

23. Great Contemporaries, 375.

24. WSC would echo this concern in “Roosevelt and the Future of the New Deal,” The Daily Mail, 24 April 1935; Collected Essays II:372.

25. Great Contemporaries, 376–79.

26. “Socialism,” 12 February 1929, Complete Speeches, V:4551–52: “Show me the parts of the country which at the present time are in the deepest depression, show me the industries which are most laggard, and at the same time you will be showing me the parts where these withering doctrines have won their greatest measure of acceptance.”

27. See for example Liberalism and the Social Problem (New York: Haskell House, 1973; reprint of 1909 ed.), 82–83.

28. Great Contemporaries, 379–80.

29. 17 April 1945, Complete Speeches, VII:7141.

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