The Churchills returned to the Waldorf on January 25, 1932, with Winston, although not fully recovered, eager to resume the tour that had been interrupted by his collision with an automobile. He was, of course, eager to fulfill his obligations to the tour managers. Even more important was the mounting pressure on him to raise cash.
There were to be no pauses to nibble the grass, no private railcars to ease the burden of a frenetic pace. This was a dash by a gambler, bothered by creditors, eager to restore some semblance of order to his financial condition.
Diverted by short-term pressures to raise cash, Churchill postponed work on his Marlborough although he had already been paid for what would eventually be a masterpiece. Speculating in a stock market beset by the Great Depression, he would put any winnings back on the table, despite the advice of Baruch and others, refuse to hedge his bets, and add speculation in currencies to his speculation in shares. As his leading biographer puts it, “…he was no more successful on the Stock Exchange than on the tables at Monte Carlo and Biarritz.”1
As he set off on his tour, Churchill did receive two important bits of good news: a note from his doctor who had been in charge of his post-accident hospital care. And wide reports from the press with good wishes for his speedy recovery. Dr. Otto Pickhardt2 ensured himself of Churchill’s lifelong affection when he wrote a letter certifying that “…the post-accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at meal times… the minimum requirement would be 250 cubic centimeters.”3
Given Prohibition, this certification was essential to ease the recuperation. And the instructions written across the top left of the note read KEEP ON HAND, possibly in Churchill’s handwriting. Detective Thompson supplemented the prescribed medicinal supplies by using a contact number provided by a bootlegger in Nassau. Although Amazon.com and its competitors had not yet been conceived, Thompson was able to obtain delivery of “Very excellent whiskies… and uncut [liquors]… in less than ten minutes” from the time he placed his order.4
At some point, Churchill must have discussed the cities where he planned to speak. In addition to providing his patient with an essential medication, Dr. Pickhardt provided him with a list of doctors and addresses in those twenty-five cities, should any relapse or complication beset Churchill while on his speaking tour.5 This list included several doctors on the West Coast in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, originally scheduled on the tour but canceled after the accident.6 Dr. Pickhardt persuaded the organizers to acquiesce in the cancellation by meeting with them and warning of the “possibility of [WSC’s] breakdown in midst of western trip.” They had little choice but to agree to the cancellations.7
By way of reciprocation, Churchill, in Hartford, Connecticut, on January 31 to deliver a lecture, met with Dr. Pickhardt’s eldest son, who had come to hear the famous patient, and reported to the boy’s father that “he [the son] introduced me to his Head Master and a good many of his school friends. I think they liked the lecture and enjoyed themselves.”8
And in May 1932, Churchill agreed to allow Dr. Pickhardt and Lenox Hill Hospital to use his name and his “very well-written account of your unfortunate accident and your kind reference to our hospital” as a fundraising appeal to “five thousand Park Avenue residents.”9 Dr. Pickhardt and his grateful patient would stay in touch at least through 1934.
The second bit of good news was that the newspapers in the cities that remained on Churchill’s tour schedule were running stories announcing the new lecture dates. That they believed their readers were interested to know when Churchill would appear was testament to his fame in cities around the country. More important to historians, these newspapers carried reports, at times quite detailed, of just what Churchill was saying about many of the policy issues that were roiling both his country and America. These reports provide perhaps the only record we have of the many speeches and comments by Churchill at press conferences before and after the lectures.
There was also a bit of temporary good news for Diana Churchill. A vice president of Paramount Pictures had seen Diana’s photograph in newspaper accounts and wrote to her mother at the Waldorf-Astoria. He “believe[d] that a charm of appearance which can survive newspaper photography might make an excellent film possibility… if an interview could be arranged.”10 In mid-February, they asked for further photographs and some personal data. At the beginning of March the Daily Express, Beaverbrook’s newspaper, ran the headline MR. CHURCHILL’S DAUGHTER A FILM STAR?11 Apparently, both her mother and father had agreed to a screen test but a movie executive “reports impossible to judge from test… personally make test in our London studio.”12
Alas, for Diana “the result was disappointing.”13 Perhaps she could relive some of her lost dreams in her sister Sarah’s film career years later. Diana, his daughter who had accompanied her parents both to New York and to Nassau, would continue with him for the remainder of his speaking tour. She was there to treat the sore throat he was to develop in Toledo.14
Some six weeks after his accident, Churchill’s first reappearance on the lecture circuit was on January 28, 1932, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a venerable and still-functioning theater built in 1908. Under the headline WINSTON CHURCHILL AT LAST, the Brooklyn Daily Times reported that the sponsors had proudly announced that Churchill “will make his first American appearance here in Brooklyn… as one of the chief attractions of this winter season.”
Further confusing the spelling of the driver’s name, the Brooklyn Daily Times reported that Churchill specifically sent the driver tickets to attend,15 one of the 2,000 people who were expected. And Churchill is reported to have brought with him the “battered wooden box which has served him since he has been a platform speaker… Measuring three by four feet, scarred by years of lecture duty, and devoid of its last vestige of varnish, the box is greatly treasured by him.”16 This writer could not determine whether this report is the product of an imaginative reporter’s brain, or refers to “the speech box in which he stored notes for his famous speeches,” acquired by the Royal Oak Foundation for display at Chartwell.17
Two days later Churchill headed for twenty-four cities during February and March 1932. Although most of the cities had particular events and variants on his basic lectures, most also had something in common, in addition to the reliance on less opulent means of transportation. One was that, unusually, Clemmie had accompanied him to New York and fortunately was with him when he was accidently hit by the car on Fifth Avenue. She also accompanied him to Nassau while he recuperated. And after returning to New York in late January, she was with him on several of the stops as he resumed his speaking tour. But she would sail back to Britain in mid-January, leaving him to continue on with Diana and the ever-loyal Thompson.
This set a precedent for later days when Churchill invited one of his other daughters to accompany him to important meetings. During the Second World War, Sarah accompanied him to the 1943 Teheran Conference, where, as Diana had done in Toledo, she nursed his sore throat. She was also at Yalta in 1945, where she served as his hostess when it was Churchill’s turn to preside over an elaborate dinner for Stalin and Roosevelt. Mary, the youngest, accompanied him to Potsdam following the Third Reich’s collapse in July 1945,18 a conference interrupted for him by the Conservative Party’s defeat in a general election after which he was replaced as prime minister by Labour’s Clement Attlee.
Another common feature was the presence of Detective Thompson, who had joined the Churchill party for reasons mentioned in the previous chapter. Thompson’s duty continued, as he had been alerted that there might be major security problems in Detroit, Toledo, and perhaps in other cities. “Secret service agents [were assigned] to protect the British statesman’s life which has been threatened repeatedly during his visit to the United States.”19 These agents would work alongside Thompson, who, you will recall, was well armed and had the assurance of the New York police that he should feel free to use his guns. Thompson reports that they received “seven hundred threatening letters. These we turned over to the police of whatever city we were in.”20
The main cause of the protests was Churchill’s position on independence for India. There were so many Indians living in the American Midwest as well as “Hindus from California”21 that the “undercover agents” were worried because the letters threatened that “Mr. Churchill will not be permitted to leave the United States alive. [Therefore]… the police will refuse admittance to the lecture hall to all East Indians, to assign a detail of plainclothes detectives to sit in the audience and to station guards at all entrances.”22
In Detroit, police assigned ten armed detectives to protect Churchill.23 As in other cities, these detectives were often supplemented by police motorcycle escorts with flashing lights, met Churchill’s train and accompanied him closely until his departure. And in Toledo, as in other cities, the authorities agreed to “comply with instructions [from the State Department] to refuse entrance to the auditorium to all East Indians.”24 In Pittsburgh, the press reported that Churchill was to be protected from “cranks,” perhaps making light of the very real problems.25
Another common feature at all the tour stops was Churchill’s practice of having the most available notables introduce him to lecture audiences. As his son, Randolph, noted in a description of his father’s plans for a lecture tour in America, “Soon after his return to England [from South Africa, after participating in the Boer War], Churchill had set about assiduously collecting eminent men to preside at his lectures in the various cities,”26 as noted earlier.
Governors would surely qualify as notables. In 1929, C. C. Young, the governor of California, had qualified for the distinction of introducing Churchill at the MGM luncheon during Churchill’s visit to Hearst’s San Simeon. Hence, now when Churchill lectured in Hartford, Connecticut, on a Sunday afternoon under the auspices of the Mark Twain Memorial Fund, he was introduced by Governor Wilbur Cross. Whether Twain, the great American author, anti-imperialist, and one of Churchill’s favorite debate opponents, would have approved (he died in 1910) we cannot know. We do know that by way of thanks Churchill sent Francis P. Webb, of the Twain Trust, a copy of his A Roving Commission, signed and dated January 1932, a first edition of the American title of My Early Life for the lucky recipient.27 This book was published almost simultaneously in the United States and Great Britain in October 1930.
Some thirty years earlier, Churchill had lectured in Hartford on the Boer War and earned a mere £10, the least earned from any lecture on that multicity tour.28 Although most newspaper coverage during the first lecture tour was favorable, the Hartford Courant was not kind to Churchill then. It reported that Churchill had employed slides to supplement his lecture, “A number of pictures were shown. None of them very good.”29
This time would be different, although one correspondent, the drama editor of the same newspaper, Walter Brown, could not resist recalling that in 1900 “a tall and slender Young Englishman” was introduced by “the short and grizzled veteran of another war,” and then delivered his tale of the Boer War “in rather a detached way….”30
In the three decades since his first visit to Hartford, Winston had become a well-known and much-admired visitor from Britain. From “a slim” and “detached” young Englishman he was elevated by the press to “The British Statesman and Author”… keen to return to the city he visited so long ago. He “is bronzed and appears to be in excellent physical condition.”31
The public interest already displayed in the approaching lecture prompted Mrs. Lyman B. Swormstedt, secretary of the [Community] Institute, “to place the tickets on sale this week at several bureaus and at the American Automobile Association.”32 Even the somewhat critical drama editor added to the air of an impending major event by stating, “I hope and expect to be one of a large number of people who will enjoy hearing that lecture.”33
A devoted Churchill fan added to the pre-lecture buildup. In a letter to the Hartford Courant, Mr. Frank W. Williams, an ex–Royal Marine, who had served on British ships during the First World War, urged his fellow citizens to attend Churchill’s lecture: “…I can assure you that be he stoker, seaman, or marine there is not a man Jack fore and aft in the British Navy who would not give a long and strong pull for Winston Churchill.”34
A crowd of 2,000 filled Bushnell Memorial Hall (now the Bushnell Performing Arts Center) for Churchill’s talk. The Hall had been decorated with a large Union Jack provided by a group from the Edith Cavell Command, British War Veterans, invited by Winston to attend as guests of honor.35
The lecture in Hartford deserves special attention, for two reasons. First it was the first stop, other than Brooklyn, which did not involve long-distance travel, on the tour. More important, perhaps because the lecture was delivered in the afternoon, rather than in the evening as was the case in most other cities, reporters had ample time to develop copy and still meet their deadlines. As a result, we have a rather good record of many of the themes he would develop in the other cities on his schedule. Some of those themes will come as no surprise to readers familiar with positions taken by Churchill thus far in his career. The overriding theme, to which many of the others were related, was the need for unity between the U.K. and the U.S., a unity made durable by a common language “which alone defies the ravages of time.”36 And then Churchill told his audience: “The pyramids may molder, and the canals silt up… the bridges rust—and the railroads pass their dividends—but the words of our common language will remain in living force and a tie between our nations.”37 As was to become his practice, he drove the message home with a light touch. Because “we understand each other only too well,” we might quarrel, in which case we “must do it as nicely as possible.”
Churchill also took the occasion to warn against the threat of Communism, “a force that is universal, tireless, novel, cruel, and inhuman” which was attacking all that the English-speaking people held dear. “It was the duty of the English-speaking countries, [he said] to stand together to protect Europe… from Communism.”38
Churchill never deviated from his insistence that world peace and progress depended on the unity of the English-speaking peoples. Almost twenty-five years later that deep-rooted belief would eventuate in his multivolume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. In the sometimes less serious tone in which Churchill presented serious ideas, he told his audience that cooperation should help both countries. Building on a theme he had earlier laid out in a magazine article that appeared in Britain’s Strand magazine and America’s Collier’s, Churchill noted that British subjects tended to seek their careers in politics, while American citizens sought their futures in profits, in industry. To the amusement of the audience, he suggested a “swap, with Americans entering British industry and Englishmen coming to America to enter ‘public life,’ ” what many years later would emerge as a variety of exchange programs. If Churchill were alive today, he undoubtedly would have noticed that things have changed. “…the rewards of a political career in the U.K. have dimmed… while opportunities in business… are bright… while booze-guzzling British politicians fight over scraps in the shadows of vanished greatness.”39
Churchill also used his lectures to chide Americans for the institution of Prohibition, which he had been attacking regularly on an earlier visit. He suggested that Americans had succeeded in enriching gangsters, while Britain, taxing alcoholic beverages, had enriched the Treasury. And to leave his audience some food for thought, he proposed a United States of Europe, no borders, no customs barriers, no separate currencies. “Whereas the unified Holy Roman Empire needed only 800,000 troops to guard its borders, a fractured Europe with 7,000 miles of barriers required 20 million soldiers to guard “the jig-saw boundaries of 26 jealous and distrustful states.”
Various versions of this observation were in the Hartford Courant February 1, 1932, the Chicago Tribune February 8, 1932, and other speeches. There’s more, but this summary demonstrates that a speech delivered by Churchill in 1932 contained ideas that he came to implemented decades later. He proposed a unity of the English-speaking peoples that now takes the form of joint intelligence exchanges between the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. He proposed what became an exchange program between American and British elites, politicians and students. He proposed a unified Europe, of which, “the British Empire will not be a member,” instead remaining part of the English-speaking world. He proposed an end to Prohibition, which only benefited the bootleggers. He warned that Communism was a dangerous enemy decades before an Iron Curtain descended on Europe.
Churchill proceeded by train to St. Louis, a city new to him, following a schedule that would have felled a younger man, certainly one not yet fully recovered from a serious automobile accident. He arrived in St. Louis on the Big Four Railroad at 5:30 P.M., to be met by a welcoming committee of thirty-five members of the British Officers’ List.
He was whisked to his hotel and then to the Women’s Club for his 8:30 lecture, where he was introduced by J. Lionberger Davis, president of the English-Speaking Union in St. Louis and a friend of Woodrow Wilson, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, and Felix Frankfurter among others. A useful new addition to the Churchill network. Then a buffet dinner and reception with a variety of officers of the Women’s Club, an advisory committee of seventy-five “prominent men” and a reception committee of twenty-five “prominent women.”46
Winston was already the beneficiary of considerable press coverage by papers all over America. His doings and tour were reported in newspapers in cities where he was not scheduled to speak. In addition to making himself available to the press in cities on his tour, he granted interviews to national correspondents who followed him to every town. The social events surrounding his lectures were grist for the mills of a competitive, hungry press. In St. Louis he had the added advantage of a favorably inclined, anticipatory press that assured packed houses for his lectures, and a “fashionable audience,”47 “an evening-dress gathering of more than 400 at the St. Louis Women’s Club.”48
An unsigned and slightly florid editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch urged its citizens to attend his talk, writing: “Don’t miss it…. A first class writing man, a first class fighting man, a vivid personality, now here, now there, and pictorially present wherever the mood and minute find him, welcome awaits when he comes this way again, ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow.’ ”49
That paper also added to the attraction of the event by calling Churchill “this solid-looking British Statesman”50 in a long piece including photos from A Roving Commission (the American title of My Early Life). Certainly Churchill would have been pleased at the opportunity for publicity—and sales—of his book in St. Louis and elsewhere across the U.S. As noted earlier in this chapter, A Roving Commission was published in the United States in October 1930 and reviewed extensively. On his fifty-sixth birthday in 1930, the New York Times Book Review said: “He is a born writer. His book, though written recently, long after his period of adventuring, nevertheless preserves the zest of youth…. [after quoting long passages] Pretty good adventure for a man destined eventually to the life of government offices and desks and dust! [sic]… the vigor of Mr. Churchill’s writing… is not alone vigorous. It is likewise vivid and modest, terse and lively, scintillating with wit and touched with genuine charm. And what fun he had! [sic]”51
Another reviewer called it “…Churchill’s best book,”52 and another, Bruce Catton, wrote, “This Englishman packed a good deal of excitement into his youth and he gets much of it into the book.”53
Churchill did find a bit of time to nibble a bit of grass he had missed on his last trip. He viewed the “Mississippi and its flanking railroad tracks”—he used no less a word than mighty in speaking… of the city’s commerce as he judged it from his brief view.54 As was often the case, Churchill made an accurate appraisal. The commerce of the city was indeed “mighty” in those days of the importance of water-borne commerce.
The need to thank and chat with the multiple committees and many members of the audience made it highly unlikely that he had a moment of rest before leaving on a midnight train for Chicago, where he was scheduled to lecture the following day.55 Then to Cleveland, where in addition to his usual lecture in the recently completed Cleveland Music Hall, a “beautiful building” according to one of the many who wrote to Churchill before his arrival,56 we have a memoir by Louis B. Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press. He reports on Churchill at a private meeting of the city’s (mostly rich) movers and shakers at the home of Samuel Horatio (“Sam”) Halle. Mr. Halle was cofounder of a high-end department store chain with outlets in New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana at the time of Churchill’s lecture, as well as in Cleveland, where his empire was anchored by a $5 million, six-story building in the center of the city.57 The editor records that Churchill, “one of the world’s great men,” mused that “We are not through with wars. We will have another one…. We must prepare.”58 He was sharing with this small gathering the views that propelled him into his Wilderness Years. It was part of his effort on the lecture tour to dissuade America from signing on to disarmament agreements that would leave it ill-prepared for the war he saw coming.
From Cleveland59 it was on to Toledo, where advance press coverage assured a turnout at the Civic Auditorium for “…one of our supreme orators… before he was twenty-six he had seen more fighting than the oldest general… best living writer of narrative prose… He can do anything from polo playing to brick laying,” enthused The Register.60 Thanks to Diana’s care and the resilience that had seen him through bouts of illness before and would again, he recovered sufficiently from the aforementioned sore throat to plunge on to Detroit before returning to Chicago on February 6, to deliver a lecture at Orchestra Hall. So numerous and credible had death threats become that he was escorted from Toledo to Detroit by “several detectives.”61 Clemmie was still with him on this stop. The Chicago lectures of February 2, 6, and 7 are best considered together, so that discussion must wait.
That threat seemed especially great when “Indian agents” began distributing anti-British and pro-Gandhi pamphlets in front of Orchestra Hall, where Churchill was to lecture. Churchill’s interview a few days earlier in Hartford, in which he said Gandhi was of no consequence, and that his importance had been inflated by the British government,62 undoubtedly fanned the anger of those favoring Indian independence. His protection squad, which of course included Detective Thompson, was expanded to a dozen detectives, half-a-dozen plainclothes men, and several uniformed patrolmen, “Apparently the incident caused him no worry although he made no objection to being guarded on the journey from Toledo and during his stay here [Detroit].”63 One reporter suggested that “Churchill, no doubt, relishes the situation—that is, the danger of it.”64 A not unreasonable assumption given Churchill’s taste for danger.
Although Churchill certainly repeated his call for the unity of the English-speaking peoples, he now turned his attention to the economic situation. Although earlier in his tour he had said that “It seemed to him that the depression could not be very severely felt here,”65 as always he seemed to have learned very quickly that he might be wrong. Perhaps he recalled his quiet chat with department store magnate Sam Halle on the condition of the economy. Or perhaps he had been told that the Michigan unemployment rate was 34 percent. For those or other reasons, he titled his talk in Detroit “Is the World Facing Disaster?”
Calling his lecture “One of the most auspicious events of the pre-Lenten season,” the Detroit Free Press listed the names of almost 100 of the attendees from “the smart set.” That coming disaster, Churchill told that audience, was due to an imbalance of the holding of gold reserves, with France and America holding the majority. In Cleveland, Churchill had suggested that both countries put the gold in circulation “instead of being kept sterile in vaults.”66
This was not Winston’s first tussle with the economic issues surrounding the gold standard, a problem future American presidents from FDR to Richard Nixon would confront. As chancellor of the exchequer he restored the Gold Standard at its prewar parity with consequences still being debated.
Churchill returned to Chicago four days after his first stopover, having visited Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit between stops in the Windy City. Winston had visited Chicago in 1901, on his first lecture tour of America, and again in 1929 when its population had doubled, from 1.7 million to 3.4 million, where it remained at the time of his third visit.67
The first lecture was delivered at the Union League Club to a dinner crowd of 1,200, joined by another 300 after the tables had been cleared away. An overflow crowd spilled across three floors of the club and listened to on loudspeakers. “The World Economic Crisis” dealt with the now-familiar theme of the need for unity between the British Empire and America. The second lecture was delivered at Orchestra Hall, covered much the same ground, and attracted “financial, social, and political leaders” of the city.68 He called for unity between America and Britain to combat “Communism and the disintegrating forces of a disunited Europe.”
Such unity was essential, he continued, “with the coming into being… of the force of international Communism…. May it, therefore, not be our time now to raise together, with our united hands, the standards of the home, of the family, of God?”69 Churchill was well aware that, although anti-interventionists shared his views on Communism, he was treading on dangerous ground, calling for Anglo-American unity in the hometown of Robert R. McCormick. “The Colonel,” as he was called, thanks to an appointment in the Illinois National Guard, owned the Chicago Tribune, with a Sunday circulation of over one million.70 It dominated the Midwestern market. One commentator labeled McCormick “the Doyen of Chicago.”71 Perhaps because he had been made to feel inferior while in school in England, he had a deep-seated personal loathing of the English aristocracy, which added to his desire to make certain that no American blood nor treasure was to be spent supporting the British Empire.
Churchill was on this tour partly to persuade Americans to do just that and, of course, he was a member of the British aristocracy that McCormick so despised. Yet, for some reason the men had grown friendly since the February day in 1915 when McCormick had called on Churchill at the Admiralty to congratulate him on having the British fleet ready for war.73 He praised the first lord of the Admiralty for holding “the great fleet mobilized, ready for the rupture [with Germany]. He even had the courage and patriotism to order without sanction of Parliament the supplies that would be necessary for the beginning of war.”74
Another of the Colonel’s biographers reports that he called Churchill’s move a “master stroke.”75 As was his practice, Churchill kept in touch with McCormick by sending him volumes of his The World Crisis. McCormick was “deeply appreciative,” said he would keep the book at his farm, and added in his thank-you note, referring to Churchill’s recent visit to Chicago, “I hear encomiums [sic] 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.’ ”76
Maintaining a pleasant contact with McCormick paid dividends years later. In 1941 before Pearl Harbor, McCormick was asked by Senator Tom Connally (Democrat, Texas) at a congressional hearing about the implications for America should Churchill break his word and surrender Britain’s fleet to Germany as part of a settlement. McCormick, by then a virulent noninterventionist, replied, “Senator, I have known Winston Churchill for twenty-five years. A more thoroughly honorable man never lived. He would not have made that promise if he had not intended to keep it.”77
The two men had much in common. Both were educated in England, both fought in World War I, both were athletes of sorts. McCormick excelled at cricket, Churchill at polo, which McCormick gave up after a rather serious injury when he was thrown from and pinioned under his horse.78 Both took an early interest in the development of aviation and both had a lifelong interest in the American Civil War. McCormick saw airplanes as a tool for his reporters to beat competitors to news stories.79 Churchill saw the airplane’s military potential,80 a prospect he had sketched in detail at the dinner arranged for him by Sam Halle in Cleveland. He had also believed them to be a “cheap, efficient, modern method of colonial control,” a point he thought not useful to make in front of an American audience.81
That friendship did not shield Churchill from the publisher’s polite but firm warning to his audiences not to buy what the “forthright Briton” was selling. This unsigned editorial, undoubtedly written by McCormick, appeared in the publisher’s paper four days after his first talk and the day before his final lecture. Our visitor, said the editorial, is “a very distinguished individual with an ingratiating eloquence…. What he has to say will profit us whether we are able to accept his conclusions or not.”82
The lectures to which McCormick urged audiences to listen with a skeptical ear were delivered with Churchill’s usual skill. He was, commented one reporter, “the most interesting man in England… at the top of his lecturing form. That is, judging from the supreme charm and brilliancy emanating from the stage of Orchestra Hall last Sunday afternoon.”83 While in Chicago Churchill stayed at McCormick’s elegant town house, to which he, Mrs. Churchill, and Diana had been invited.84 Churchill gladly accepted, but pointed out that Mrs. Churchill and Diana would be remaining in New York.85 McCormick proved a considerate host, suggesting that if Churchill were weary from his arrival and scheduled departure by overnight train, and an important speech, “you will want to take it easy today, perhaps not to leave the house.”
He suggested lunch at the Mid-Day Club “so that you can see how the businessmen of Chicago regale themselves, or we can stay quietly at home.”86 The luncheon guests included Donald McLennan, whom Churchill had met on his last trip and who would soon be called upon to insure ships carrying needed supplies to Britain. Mrs. McCormick arranged a small tea with a few guests she thought Churchill would find interesting, including Edith Rockefeller McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller.87 Churchill much enjoyed himself, writing to McCormick after leaving Chicago, “I think often about my pleasant stay with you in that long pilgrimage I made through the States. It was like putting into a safe harbor in the middle of a stormy voyage.”
McCormick, too, relished their time together. Not everyone, however, adjusted well to Churchill’s idiosyncratic attitude toward the clock. Mrs. McCormick told an interviewer that Churchill “drove McCormick crazy because he would want to stay up… until 4,”88 a practice that had not appealed to Sittie, the wife of Governor Harry Byrd, when Churchill was the Byrds’ guest a bit more than two years earlier. And would mightily offend Eleanor Roosevelt when Churchill, a guest at the White House after Pearl Harbor, kept her husband awake into the early hours of the morning. “Mother would just fume,” their son Elliott recorded.89 The servants, who were expected to be available whenever needed, also found it difficult to adjust. Churchill would return from his talks, climb the four flights of stairs to his rooms, and work on his Marlborough until three or four in the morning.90
Churchill’s retrospective memory of McCormick’s town house as “a safe harbor” might have been the result of an incident recorded by detective Thompson: Churchill’s interview a few days earlier in Hartford, in which he said Gandhi was of no consequence, and that his importance had been inflated by the British government.91 In Chicago, “A very correctly dressed” East Indian approached Churchill in the lobby of Orchestra Hall. Thompson, knowing that “His intention was to kill my man, and you could see it in his eye,” approached him with his gun drawn, but the assailant smashed his way through a glass door and escaped “into the arms of two plainclothes policemen”—what Churchill called “gun-men.”92 After which McCormick made available to his famous guest the armor-plated 1924 vintage Rolls-Royce he had built for himself after gangsters gunned down a Tribune reporter who had been digging into their business.93 Much appreciated in the city where “gangster law” ruled, said Thompson.94 It was in the safety of this vehicle that Churchill was driven to his overnight train trip to New York.