June 27, 2011

COMMENT BY THE CHURCHILL CENTRE

This is a very good and accurate article about Churchill’s role as a creator of the welfare state, with an interesting point: that socialists resisted the “mixed economy” Churchill and Lloyd George favored, because they knew it would be the death of pure socialism. It’s a stretch to conclude that Churchill favored the kind of National Health Service Labour enacted, or to say the NHS fostered expanded private health care: it expanded because the NHS was rationed and inadequate.

To say Churchill’s books are “disappointing” and “needlessly extensive” is…disappointing. Leo Strauss called Marlborough “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding.” Nor are WSC’s biographies “devoid of any sense of personal weakness.” Books aside, this is a stimulating and thoughtful article about Churchill’s lifelong Liberalism; and in Martin Gilbert’s words “the modernity of his thought, the originality of his mind, the constructiveness of his proposals….” -Richard Lanworth, Editor Finest Hour

By George Watson

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 3 June 2011 – He stares defiantly at the camera, a bulldog surprised, and everyone knows what he has in mind. It is December 1941, just after Pearl Harbor, and Winston Churchill is defying Hitler. Seated in Ottawa in the paneled room of the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, he has just given one of the great speeches of history—the one about England’s neck being wrung like a chicken—”some chicken, some neck.” Canadian parliamentarians will roar back their sympathy and their support. Although only a few hours earlier Roosevelt’s doctor, full of doubts, had visited him in Washington at the White House, he looks fit. At the age of 67 he has given the performance of a lifetime.

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As his picture was being taken, though, he was not thinking about Hitler at all. Yousuf Karsh, the Canadian photographer of Armenian heritage who snapped him staring defiantly, has told the story. Churchill had been smoking a cigar in that paneled room, and the photographer, with the briefest of apologies, had just reached forward and snatched it from his lips. His speech is given, but he is wondering what has suddenly happened to his cigar.

The performance survives on film, and it is a masterpiece of theatrical timing, with a long dramatic pause between “some chicken” and “some neck” as the old stager slowly rotates his entire body nearly 180 degrees while a gentle chuckle swells into a roar, a roar into a cheer. That is the Churchill everyone knows—a consummate actor who could capture the mood of millions—and no one who saw it could ever forget it.

A lot about Churchill is forgotten, nonetheless, except by professional historians. He had been a politician for more than 40 years when he made that speech, and he had switched parties at least twice, sitting in the Commons after 1904 for 20 years as a Liberal before he consented to call himself (once again) a Conservative. The grandson of a duke, he was distrusted by his elders as a turncoat and not always acceptable as a dinner guest. First elected to Parliament in the fall of 1900, in the last weeks of Queen Victoria’s reign, he entered the cabinet at Liberal Prime Minister H. H. As­quith’s invitation in April 1908. In the same year, after being refused in marriage by Ethel Barrymore (among other ladies), he married Clementine Hozier. Then came two world wars that changed many lives, and especially his.

What is forgotten, above all, is his role as a social reformer and a founder of the British welfare state. In 1908, as president of the national Board of Trade, Churchill invited a young William Beveridge onto his team: Beveridge was a Scottish civil servant who would one day design the British National Health Service. Nowadays, however, those who gaze at the carved slab inside the door of Westminster Abbey that reads “Remember Winston Churchill” seldom remember that. Even in 1965, when the slab was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II, a few months after his death, all that people remembered was the war hero who defied Hitler, with or without a cigar.

Sitting in the smoking room of the Commons in his last years, after he had retired from the premiership, Churchill would call the Asquith government of 1908–16 “the best government I ever served in.” A belligerent, mischievous look would come into his face, and he would bark and repeat two words, “by far,” shouting in biting sarcasm to a group of Conservative members. For years, as they knew, he had led a party he despised. The Conservatives, under the dynamic influence of Joseph Chamberlain, Neville’s father, had turned protectionist early in the century; Churchill was a free trader to his dying day. In his 15 years as Tory party leader (1940–55) he had striven endlessly to bring Liberals back into Parliament. He had tried, in 1950–51, to persuade the Conservatives not to contest 50 parliamentary seats, and his party had rejected the idea. He had prevailed upon a Yorkshire constituency to give Asquith’s daughter, Violet Bonham Carter, a free run against Labour, but the votes were not there. By his second premiership (1951–55) he was a failing man, known to his impatient cabinet colleagues as the Old Boy and urged by doctors and a loving wife to give up and accept retirement. By then he was as famous as any man alive. The defeat of Hitler had ensured that. But he was subject to deep fears, black depressions, and a sense of having lived a life without a party and without a cause.

Read the entire article here at the American Scholar

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