In late September 1929, the Troupe began its move from California toward the East Coast, traveling by car to Yosemite National Park1—today some six hours by car, then rather longer. The Van Antwerps, who had suggested and arranged the visit to Yosemite, acted as their guides and, reports a local newspaper, provided a picnic lunch.2 Another newspaper report quotes Mr. Van Antwerp: “All [the Troupe] carried cameras and photographed everything, right and left. They were particularly interested in the wild animal life in the park.”3
No surprise, given Winston’s virtually insatiable desire for information about all forms of animal life,4 and perhaps, a desire to make up for having missed the sight of the seals on his journey down the West Coast. But he did stop at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, which he had always wanted to see, buying several different picture postcards which he addressed to Clemmie, Sarah, and Diana, but for some reason did not mail.5 Perhaps they were meant to be part of his photographic memories, today stored in the Archives at Churchill College, Cambridge.
At a nearby regular train stop, near the Grand Canyon, they were taken aboard the Loretto,6 Schwab’s private railway car. The Loretto was then attached to the regular train, the Navajo, that ran between San Francisco and Chicago. In an article for the August 5, 1933, issue of Collier’s titled “Land of Corn and Lobsters,” Churchill recalls what might have become a tragic incident as he boarded Schwab’s private car: “On one occasion only was there cause for alarm: an unnamed friend of mine… sent as a parting gift a good-sized suitcase unlabeled, which at the last minute was thrust unostentatiously into my compartment. Unluckily something seemed to have gone wrong with its contents, and a very curious trickle had left its trail all along the station platform… fortunately, on examination, the damage was found to be confined to only one of the articles which this mysterious, anonymous package contained.”7
The train and its private car would take them in considerable comfort to a planned stopover in Chicago. This combination, a private car suitably well stocked and insulated from the effects of Prohibition, about which Churchill has written so acidly for the Daily Telegraph, appears to have been up to the standard to which he had effortlessly become accustomed since arriving in America. Schwab’s car was “an elaborate affair containing bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, drawing rooms and an open observation platform. It was hitched to the end of the train and shunted off when necessary so that we could visit famous spots such as the Grand Canyon.”8
When the Troupe arrived in Chicago on October 2, it was met at the station by Bernard Baruch, who escorted them to the Drake Hotel, where they would be his guests. Churchill found an opportunity the following day to write to some of his literary agents in New York, telling them he was on the way and suggesting they collect some fees due him.9 He also telegraphed Percy Rockefeller: “I wonder if you would care to let my brother and me stay with you in New York, from the twenty-fifth to the thirtieth, when I sail. Pray do not hesitate to say if this is not quite convenient.”10 It proved to be convenient, although a last-minute change in plans meant Churchill would later have to cancel his request.
Randolph noted in his diary that Chicago was “reputed to be the most cosmopolitan in the world. Its population of three million includes more Poles than there are in Warsaw, more Jews than there are in Jerusalem, and it is also the third largest German city [in the world].”11
The 1930 Census, taken in the year following Churchill’s visit, and a few years before his next, revealed that those of German ancestry were the largest group in Chicago.12 Which might explain why the city which was receiving a delegation from Great Britain on the same day received another, led by the mayor of Berlin and his four assistants, the latter arriving as the guests of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry.13
In addition to Baruch, the Troupe’s hosts in Chicago were Donald McLennan, cofounder of the global insurance broker that during the Second World War would agree with FDR to place war-risk insurance that other brokers deemed unprofitable,14 and Charles Piez,15 who had served with Charles Schwab on the United States Shipping Board during the First World War, both men known to Churchill. McLennan would later advise Churchill on some of his investments during the early stages of the Great Depression.16
The Troupe visited the stockyards with Philip Danforth Armour III, the meat-packing industrialist. Whether Armour had ever read Churchill’s favorable review of the socialist Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, an exposé of abuses in America’s meat-packing industry, we do not know.17 Churchill also saw a prizefight. Both the fight and the meat-packing visit undoubtedly left unpleasant memories. Visits to a steel mill and a power plant followed the next day, more suitable to his intellectual curiosity.
On his final day in Chicago, October 4, he spoke briefly at a luncheon sponsored by the Chicago Association of Commerce at the Chicago Club, giving the sponsor the distinction of sponsoring events for representatives of two nations that had been and would again be on the opposing sides in a world conflict.
That evening Churchill gave a major dinner speech at the Commercial Club, a venerable institution at which most American presidents have spoken, essentially a presidential podium.18 With some 300 in the audience, his topic was the negotiations to amend the naval agreement concluded in Washington in 1922 by the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—the First World War allies—to limit construction of battleships, battlecruisers, and aircraft carriers—especially by Japan, which nevertheless emerged from the conference as a major naval power in the Pacific. The treaty, however, did not limit the number of cruisers, an issue that was not resolved until the London Naval Treaty of 1930, which put America in parity with Britain for those vessels. It was those negotiations Churchill was attempting to influence when he declared: “There was a very deep desire in Great Britain for such a naval agreement with the United States as shall put the whole question of naval strength outside the regions of controversy and leave it in the background altogether for many years, and, if possible, for many generations to come… The agreement must be based upon the willing agreement of both countries.”19
He also repeated the theme he had developed earlier during his tour, and would repeat virtually until his dying day, that close cooperation of the English-speaking peoples was essential to the maintenance of world peace.
The Chicago visit successfully concluded, Churchill and his companions joined Baruch in the financier’s private railway car. Schwab’s private railcar had taken the Troupe across Canada, the western United States, and as far as Chicago, and later would resume its service when the Troupe reached New York City. While in Chicago Churchill, learning that Baruch had arranged for him to stay at the luxurious Savoy-Plaza hotel—now the Plaza Hotel—on New York’s Fifth Avenue, notified Percy Rockefeller that he would not be staying with him.
In addition to his own private railway car for the trip to New York, Baruch provided Winston and his brother with office space and secretarial support in his offices in the Equitable Building in the Wall Street area.20
Churchill’s old friend Lord Birkenhead, F. E. Smith, had resigned from the Cabinet and was in New York at the same time as Churchill but for two different reasons. One was to study “American methods of public utility financing and management”21 in a series of meetings with representatives of the U.S. electric utility industry.22
The second reason was to give a luncheon talk sponsored by the Bond Club but held at the Bankers Club. At a suggestion from Baruch, Winston was invited to attend and to join the notables at the head table. He accepted the opportunity to see his old friend and to maintain and deepen his friendships among the American financial wizards in New York. The date was October 8, 1929, only weeks before these wizards were to lose their reputations as seers. Two old friends from England, meeting in New York at a luncheon at the Bankers Club along with an Indian prince. As one report put it, notables included “the Maharajah Jagatjit and a distinguished list of American industrial leaders and bankers.”25
Just the right audience for a joint appeal by Churchill and Birkenhead for Anglo-American cooperation, and a warning from Birkenhead that “the United States… can never be bound within the straight waistcoat of world seclusion…”26
In the years immediately following that warning, isolationist publishers such as Hearst and Robert McCormick, perhaps the dominant publishers in Chicago and its surrounding area,27 were able to play on Americans’ war-weariness to bind America in just such a “straight waistcoat.” Churchill used the occasion of Birkenhead’s speech to add a few remarks of his own, as the press reported: “Mr. Churchill remarked that no task in the world today is too great for the combined efforts of the English-speaking races.”28
He also repeated a remark made by Andrew Chaffey during Churchill’s West Coast tour: “Nothing will give us the strength and encouragement to go on with our task so much as the sense that those… tied to us by the crimson thread of friendship on the other side of the ocean… will… in their own time give us the moral assistance of their good-will and approval.”29 This crimson thread is “precious,” he said, using one of his favored adjectives.30
Churchill was to refer to the phrase “crimson thread of friendship” more than once in the future, as events proved it an apt and memorable description of the emerging relationship between his country and America. That colorful reference notwithstanding, this was a rare instance in which he was outshone. One news account remarked that “Lord Birkenhead is, of course, the more remarkable of the two.”31
That night Churchill was guest of honor at a private dinner given under the auspices of Sir Harry McGowan,32 a British industrialist and later chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, knighted in 1918, and a member of London’s The Other Club, to which dinner invitations could only be issued jointly by Churchill and Lord Birkenhead.
The investments McGowan had made for Churchill proved more profitable than Churchill had hoped. In a letter from Canada, Churchill informed Clemmie that he had made £2,000 from investments in Electric Bonds and Shares on the advice of Sir Harry33 and, in a later letter from Santa Barbara, he was happy to report that he has made a total of £5,000 with Sir Harry who has “profound mines of information about this vast American market.”34
One of the attendees at the dinner, Norman Toerge, an American financial adviser, sent Churchill a check for $12,500 on the instructions of McGowan. In a note accompanying those profits from the investments made for Churchill, Toerge wrote, “I feel confident that a talk such as yours and Lord Birkenhead’s to the business men of this country can only further a great relationship between your Country [sic] and ours.”35 He was preaching to the choir.
On money matters, Churchill wrote happily to Clemmie: “…there is money enough to make us comfortable & well-mounted in London this autumn, & you shd [sic] be able to do the nursery wing all right. Go on with your plans & have it all ready for us to settle when I get back.”36 Winston was not one to let money burn a hole in his pocket.
Churchill did find time to meet at City Hall with Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant mayor of New York who shared Winston’s views on Prohibition and winked at the illegal speakeasies that sprang up all over his city. Then it was off to a theatre party for the musical produced by Vincent Youmans, Great Day, and more important introductions. In addition to Mr. and Mrs. Baruch, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson (old friends of Baruch’s)37 attended. Gibson created the famous, idealized Gibson Girl and was a highly paid illustrator—$50,000 from Collier’s for a year of weekly double-page illustrations.38 That night, Randolph and Johnny “set off alone to inspect Harlem.”39
Churchill was not the only British politician visiting America in October of 1929. The new British prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, the first member of the Labour Party to hold that office, and the first in-office British prime minister to visit the United States, arrived in Washington on October 4 to discuss the joint naval treaty about which Churchill had spoken in Chicago. The Labour prime minister addressed members of both houses of Congress—he was also the first in-office British prime minister to do so.40 He also had an official visit with President Hoover, the first for a serving British prime minister. MacDonald’s visit overshadowed Churchill’s: an out-of-office former chancellor of the exchequer cannot compete for press attention with the current prime minister of Great Britain, especially one on an official visit to discuss policies of mutual interest with the president of the United States. The Boston Globe reported that “Winston Churchill and Lord Birkenhead, speaking at the same luncheon in New York City, were given a third of a column on an inside page of some New York papers and were not mentioned elsewhere… but columns of front-page stories in all the American newspapers have been printed about Ramsay MacDonald.”41
Since both Churchill and MacDonald were in New York, Winston paid a courtesy call on the prime minister on October 12, MacDonald’s sixty-third birthday. Churchill, reported the press, “called at 11 in the morning [at the prime minister’s hotel] to pay his respects… photographers were permitted to take pictures of Mr. MacDonald cutting the sixty-three-candle birthday cake…. Mr. Churchill and Mr. MacDonald… have clashed again and again, particularly on issues involving Mr. Churchill’s aggressive hostility toward Soviet Russia.”42
MacDonald may have had unpleasant memories of clashes with Churchill. Not one to harbor grudges, he telegraphed Clemmie, “Good talk MacDonald.”43 He might have been referring to the one-hour “full account” he reportedly received from MacDonald on the status of the naval negotiations.44
News reports are not very helpful in deciphering the body language of the two men. A Philadelphia paper says the political opponents shook hands across the birthday cake, and that a British observer joked, “If that picture is published in England, it will cost one of you an election.”45 But a British paper reported that when one of the photographers asked the two men to shake hands for a picture, “just as if you were congratulating him, Mr. Churchill,” they refused.46 The latter version probably made for a better story back home, where readers often find tales of political battles more interesting than those of reconciliation.
These were two men with very different ideas of how the world worked and how it should work, two men who traveled in quite different social circles. When Churchill had spare time he would seek refuge in some grand country house, which led him to the Connecticut home of a member of the Rockefeller family on his last weekend in New York.
MacDonald, although no stranger to the salons of the well-to-do, finding himself with a day off during his U.S. visit, sought the company of Lillian Wald, one of America’s best-known humanitarians, rights campaigners, and social workers.47 A staged, hands-across-the-birthday-cake shake between Churchill and MacDonald would not have bridged that social, political, and financial gap.
Later that week in New York City, Churchill was the guest of honor at a dinner given by Mrs. (Millicent) William Randolph Hearst. The New York Times reports that the orchestras of Rudy Vallee and Emil Coleman played for dancing, after specially made newsreels showing some of the guests “at important events in the past.”48 Churchill asked if he could bring along Lord Feversham,49 who had attached himself to the Troupe somewhere during its California travels. Other guests at that dinner included Mrs. Cole Porter, and William Crocker, plus Astors, Vanderbilts,50 and Goulds. All would have been considered by Churchill valuable additions to his American network, with the possible exception of the Astors, home to the Cliveden Set, a group many of whom had unconcealed pro-German leanings during the run-up to Britain’s entry into the Second World War. In a letter to her husband, Millicent wrote that the dinner was “…very successful. You should have been here for it.”51
After midnight Churchill boarded Schwab’s private railway car, which had been attached to a train that would take him to Washington.52 Among other things, Churchill planned to meet with President Hoover on the 19th, followed by a luncheon given by Ronald Ian Campbell, chargé d’affaires in the ambassador’s absence.53 It is unlikely that even Winston, with his impressive foresight, realized how important many of the guests at the luncheon would prove to be to him and Britain in the future: secretary of state Henry L. Stimson,54 secretary of the treasury and future ambassador to the UK Andrew W. Mellon,55 and Charles Francis Adams III,56 the navy secretary.
A Washington journalist, Frederic William Wile, in a special column, wrote of Churchill: “Dynamic, brilliant, resourceful and lion-hearted, ‘Winnie’s’ path, his admirers are persuaded, one day will lead him to the premiership.”57
After his Washington visit, Churchill and his brother, Jack, traveled aboard Schwab’s private railway car to Richmond, Virginia, to visit the scenes of one of Churchill’s longtime interests, the American Civil War. They would tour the sites of the Seven Days Battles.58 Churchill and his brother—along with Lord Feversham—were officially the guests of Harry F. Byrd, governor of Virginia, exposing them to the famed “Southern Hospitality.”
On arrival in Richmond, the Englishmen were met by Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson,59 journalists, and several prominent local businessmen.60 Richmond’s Times-Dispatch reported that Admiral Grayson, formerly President Wilson’s personal doctor, whom Churchill met at Versailles in 1919, would be part of the tour group. Four years later, Churchill would invite Admiral Grayson to a dinner at Claridge’s in London to meet Bernard Baruch.61 Another example of Churchill’s ability to find ways of staying in touch with those he had met in the U.S. and with friends of those he had met.
An editorial writer for the Richmond News Leader, Douglas Southall Freeman, would be the tour guide, a chore he performed earlier when General Ferdinand Foch visited in 1921, and when former prime minister David Lloyd George visited Virginia in 1923, having been forced out as Britain’s prime minister the previous year.62 At the time, Freeman was working on the multivolume biography of Robert E. Lee that would win a Pulitzer Prize, as would Churchill’s later work, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which included a large section on the American Civil War. So it was a guide instructing a well-informed tourist, historian-to-historian with much to share. Freeman is reported to have been “impressed at how much Churchill knew.”63
An impression shared later in 1932 when Churchill visited Chattanooga and impressed the guides there with his detailed knowledge of those battle sites. In 1934, Churchill would write Freeman thanking him for a copy of his Lee biography, calling it “a work of absorbing interest upon a subject on which I already have some knowledge.”
Churchill, as he so often did, reciprocated, sending him “the second volume of Marlborough, whose true comradeship with Prince Eugene was a forerunner of the famous brotherhood in arms of Lee and Jackson.”64 Both historians shared an American publisher, Scribner’s, and Charles Scribner suggested that Churchill’s Marlborough volumes could be boxed and sold as a set—as they had been “very successful in doing this with Freeman’s R E LEE [sic].”65
Tired but exhilarated, Winston finally arrived at the governor’s mansion in Richmond, the oldest governor’s mansion in the United States still in use as a residence, in time for a formal dinner. As Governor Byrd was a “dry” and Prohibition was still in effect, the publisher of the Richmond News Leader who had foreseen the need and made quiet arrangements to get the “ ‘hooch’ to the mansion for the prominent guest’s consumption.”66 Fortunately, the publisher, John Stewart Bryan, “had the best cellar in Richmond.”67
Unlike Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress who had found Churchill “a very good guest,”68 Governor Byrd’s wife, nicknamed Sittie, found Churchill unbearable. His multiple offenses included imbibing in the home of a strict prohibitionist, wandering the mansion’s halls in his underwear, canceling a planned luncheon, and delaying a dinner so that a servant could be sent for the absent mustard for Winston’s ham. There was more to the charge sheet. Someone unfamiliar with Churchill’s assumption that his own rules followed him on his travels might well understand Sittie’s instructions to her husband, “Harry, don’t you ever invite that man back.”69
Churchill did not set foot in Richmond again until March 1946, three days after his famous Iron Curtain speech, when, accompanied by General Eisenhower, he addressed the General Assembly in Richmond and visited Colonial Williamsburg. It is not known whether Mrs. Harry Byrd was among the welcoming committee. There would be a final visit to Virginia, this time to Gettysburg with then-president Eisenhower in 1959.
The next morning, Churchill was driven some sixty miles to Fredericksburg, where sixty-seven years earlier the Confederacy won one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. In his column for the Daily Telegraph he described the site: “where the battlefields told their own story… [with] admirable descriptive iron plates… inscribed by deeply instructed hands, fix every historical point.”70
Churchill then returned to Washington for a luncheon at the Capitol given by Senator Joseph Robinson, a Democratic leader from Arkansas.71 Several senators, Vice President Charles Curtis, and all the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee attended. “Mr. Churchill spoke briefly but not politically,” so perhaps some were disappointed.72 Baruch, a major Democratic Party contributor, was there as he almost always was at Churchill events. A Republican senator, David Reed, of Pittsburgh, with a distinguished military career in the First World War, may have been at the meeting, as Churchill would send him a copy of Marlborough.
On October 23, 1929, Schwab’s private railway car whisked Churchill to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he stayed at the historic Hotel Bethlehem, built with Schwab’s money to replace the no-longer-safe Eagle Hotel that had been on the site.74 Churchill met with executives at Schwab’s Bethlehem Steel Company, and local and state politicians, and spent three hours touring the steel plant undoubtedly with the usual Churchillian enthusiasm, curiosity, and probing questions.
The steel industry had long sought Churchill as a guest to address the Iron and Steel Institute. As early as 1903, Andrew Carnegie had written to Churchill urging his attendance at their London meeting as the Institute was “inviting the prime Ministers [sic] and Leaders [sic] of the future.”75
And on August 12, 1929, Schwab wrote to Churchill inviting him to be the guest of honor at their annual meeting in New York on October 25, reminding Churchill that he (Schwab) was the president of the American section of the Institute. Schwab promised an audience of “the heads of practically the entire industry, about 2,000 people… [to] see and meet the important people connected with this great industry in America.”76
This sort of invitation Churchill, ever eager to learn about various industries and meet their leaders, could hardly resist. Responding from Canada two weeks later, Churchill agreed to attend with the “proviso” that he would not be available if the House of Commons were debating the evacuation of British troops from Cairo, which would require his attendance in London for that debate. In the event, he did attend the dinner at New York City’s Hotel Commodore. Schwab introduced Churchill, who reiterated his pleas for Anglo-American cooperation as the rest of the world “is dependent almost entirely in the immediate future on the cooperation and development of the English-speaking countries.” The New York Times page 3 headline for this story reads AMITY WITH BRITAIN URGED BY CHURCHILL.77
A decade after their initial meeting, former ambassador to Britain John W. Davis renewed Schwab’s earlier invitation for Churchill to address the leaders of the American steel industry. Churchill accepted the invitation. Davis also spoke, an unsurprising choice since the predecessor to the law firm of which Davis was a partner had represented J. P. Morgan when the financial titan created the United States Steel Corporation in 1901. Given Churchill’s practice of remaining in touch with important Americans, it is no surprise that he would have maintained contact with the man he had met earlier when Davis was Ambassador to Great Britain, a Wilson appointee.
As the date for his departure to Britain approached, Churchill worked furiously in the offices provided by Baruch to wind up business matters relating to his articles and other matters. But Churchill always had time for family and friends. In order to attend Christ Church (college), Oxford, Randolph had boarded RMS Berengaria, leaving his father in New York. Churchill telegraphed his son at sea asking, “How are you all getting on?” signed FATHER [sic].81 He then sent another telegram to his son’s ship, reporting “All well here,” signed FATHER [sic].82 And he had time to respond to a lunch invitation from Mrs. Millicent Hearst for October 31. His telegram said, “Alas, sail thirtieth. Will you give me tea Monday or Tuesday?”83
And to thank Mrs. Van Antwerp for the photographs she had sent, which were apparently some picture postcards that belonged to Randolph.84 The Troupe had taken many photos (and maybe even some films) and bought many, especially of the Grand Canyon.
During this final week in New York, Churchill had been unable to meet with Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York. Henry Morgenthau Jr., later FDR’s treasury secretary, who was to shock Churchill by proposing the deindustrialization of Germany after the Second World War, wrote to Churchill regretting that FDR would not be in New York on either October 28 or 29 to meet with him, but did suggest perhaps a visit to “some of the nightclubs and that no police protection was necessary for that.”85
And Morgenthau enclosed a copy of his most recent book. Churchill immediately telegraphed his reply “Let us discard night life.”86 He also had time to thank William G. McAdoo for copies of the two books he had sent, one on Brigham Young and the other on General Ulysses S. Grant.87 From his perch in Baruch’s office in the Equitable Building in the financial district, Churchill witnessed Black Thursday, October 24. At that point “all pretense of orderliness gave way to panic.”88 Churchill’s description of the chaos and sense of loss experienced by millions who had entrusted their savings to the lions of Wall Street included a report on a suicide he had witnessed from high above the financial district: “Under my very window a gentleman cast himself down fifteen stories and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade. Quite a number of persons seem to have overbalanced themselves by accident in the same sort of way.”89
Churchill, naturally, was concerned about his own financial condition. During his trip, his regular letters to Clemmie had advised her of their growing fortune, due in part to the financial connections he made during this trip. He was in fact riding a wave that had taken share prices, as measured by the Dow, from 63 in August 1921 to 381 in September 1929, a fivefold increase.90 Return to London was now imminent. On October 2491 Churchill arrived in New York, and that evening attended a farewell dinner in his honor at Baruch’s Fifth Avenue apartment. As always, Churchill did not hesitate to ask his host for a favor, although oddly rather than making the request directly to Baruch, Churchill telegraphed Schwab asking him to include among the invitees William Travers Jerome, a cousin of his mother’s, Jennie, and therefore his first cousin once removed. This might have been Winston’s way of reciprocating for the private dinner Jerome gave for him and his brother, Jack, at the Union League Club in New York. He also asked that invitations be sent to Ambassador Davis and Lord Feversham.92
By the time of the dinner, share prices had plunged from their September 3 peak by more than 21 percent. At that dinner, Churchill wrote to Clemmie, Baruch “had gathered around his table forty or more of the leading bankers and financiers of New York, and I remember that when one of them proposed my health he addressed the company as ‘Friends and former millionaires.’ ”93
There was more to come. October 29, the day before Churchill was to sail, “was the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market….”94 But not for Baruch, “who seemed none the worse for wear after the market broke,” with income close to $2 million and stock-trading profits of $615,786.31.95
When Churchill headed for London aboard the Cunard luxury liner, the RMS Berengaria, the next day, the collapse had cut 32 percent, or almost one-third from share prices. The carnage would continue, with the market plunging almost 90 percent. It would not recover to its 1929 peak for 25 years, until November 23, 1954.
Churchill did not escape unscathed, although Baruch attempted to ameliorate the impact on his friend. He covered $7,200 of Churchill’s losses on one trade from his own account, arranged for his friend to escape damage on trades done through Baruch’s brokers because he “felt partially responsible and could afford to be generous…”96
When he arrived in London, Churchill told Clemmie, who met him on the station platform, that they were not to be “comfortable & well mounted in London,” as he had written to her only some six weeks ago.97
The absence of an immediate financial payoff from his investments was mitigated by the fact that his grass nibbling turned out to have been more than that. He was soon to return to America for a lecture tour wiser in the ways and interests of his audiences, and therefore more likely to increase his ability to communicate with his audiences.
The most serious student of the Churchill finances notes the importance of the extensive leisurely tour to his future achievements, “Churchill’s abiding impression of America’s strength and vitality would help shape his wartime strategy a decade later, and would ultimately lead to a transformation in his finances.”98 He also achieved his goal of reaching a large and influential audience to which to present his views on the importance of an Anglo-American alliance, and adding that audience to his American network.
A discerning observer, (later Sir) Gerald Campbell, consul-general in San Francisco, from 1922 to 1931,99 wrote to Churchill after the Troupe had left the West Coast, “…Your visit to San Simeon has produced wonderful and immediate results amongst those who, up to recent times, have been antagonistic toward us and our interests. It is a great thing to have a man like Hearst come out openly in a speech, as at Los Angeles, for cooperation, and the articles in the Hearst press, since his speech and yours were made, indicate that the various Hearst editors have been told to adopt a more friendly tone. That is bound to have an effect on the ‘masses,’ who after all form the bulk of the population… [A Hearst editor] who often revealed his dislike [of Britain]… On Saturday night at the Opera… made a beeline for me and (literally) embraced me in the foyer and then expressed enthusiasm over your visit to San Simeon and over the good that it has done and would do in the future.”100
Perhaps even more important, the understanding of American life that he obtained by doing more than merely nibbling at the grass as he traveled back and forth across America would provide an understanding of America and Americans that few foreign observers could match. The leaders of Germany and Japan would badly miscalculate American reactions to their policies, while Churchill understood how to persuade important Americans and their political leaders that Britain’s cause was their cause, even before Pearl Harbor. Unlike many foreign observers, he saw clearly the differences between the British and American people. He told of Americans:
“Gusts of friendliness… expansive gestures… hospitality and every form of kindness… [they] are less indurated by disappointment; they have more hopes and more illusions….” These are met by a British visitor with “traditional reserve and frigidity… chary of allowing the feeling of friendliness to take root quickly…. But it is in the combination across the Atlantic of these diversified minds, and in the union of these complementary virtues, and resources that the brightest promise of the future swells.”101
It is this understanding, honed on this cross-America trip, that allowed Churchill to become the glue that held the Second World War alliance together.
Churchill now also understood how America worked. From Baruch and his financial friends he saw the relation between that sector of the American government, how private-sector leaders determined the deployment of the nation’s resources. From Hearst he learned how the great variety and popularity of American magazines could make an integrated access to American public opinion possible. From Schwab he learned about the awesome productive capacity of American industry. From Crocker, who would later emerge as a member of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s pro-Lend-Lease lobbying group, and his other new contacts in San Francisco he learned where to find pro-British sentiment that could be marshaled to great effect when need be. “Though a decade passed before its formation was announced… several of its [CDAAA’s] key activists had met Churchill in Los Angeles or thereabouts.”102
Most notably, several, including Fairbanks Jr., had heard him speak at a luncheon at MGM studios on September 18, 1929, and argue that the “peace and safety of the world” depended on British-American unity, a theme he repeated at the California Club on September 23, phrased as a call for the unity of the English-speaking peoples, a theme that would dominate the lectures on his American tour a few years later.
Although Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the actor who was to become a war hero during the Second World War, did have a brief chat with Randolph at the gala luncheon at MGM, he and Winston did not meet, even though Winston had been a guest at the Beverly Hills home of Fairbanks Sr.
Churchill understood that these associations required continuous nourishment. He was careful to stay in touch with many of the people he had met, to include them in his burgeoning network. He always kept in mind how useful his mother’s network had been to her and to him early in his life and now, how useful his own network had been during his American visit, and how important it was to expand it.
He wrote to thank people with whom he had stayed or who had made arrangements for him, in some cases asking them to be in touch should they visit Britain, and entertained them when they arrived. In some cases he sent greetings to wives who had arranged dinners and other entertainments for him. And on his instructions, his staff retained all the visiting cards of those he met on this trip, including the manager of the Dictaphone Company in Los Angeles111 and, as mentioned earlier, winemaker Georges de Latour—with telephone number noted112 the cards bear check marks to indicate he had thanked them, or sent them books. Several clubs sent him passes so he could use their facilities while he was in New York, including, appropriately, the Newspaper Club,113 the Automobile Club, the Army and Navy Club, and the Advertising Club. All were thanked for their courtesies. He also kept a record of the telegrams he received with invitations from Californians and copies of his responses to them. He was preparing for when these people might someday, sometime, somehow help him to advance Britain’s interests, and his own.
An article he wrote for The Strand magazine in 1931, “The American Mind and Ours,” wisely and succinctly summarizes much of what he learned “nibbling the grass” and listening to Americans. He wrote, “Even if the first prizes of the future should fall to the United States, the Englishman will still remain a vast enduring force for virility, sanity, and goodwill.114
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy made Winston Churchill an honorary citizen of the United States, a rare honor. Just prior to this, some states had made him an honorary citizens of those states: West Virginia, Tennessee, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Texas, North Carolina, and Maryland.115