By the time Churchill returned to New York on February 7, 1932, he had delivered major lectures, met privately with smaller groups for informal question-and-answer sessions, dodged death threats while working on a major biography, and attended to a hyperactive share portfolio. Also the ongoing management of Chartwell, including receiving news that his sow had won the championship at the Edenbridge Fat Stock Show.1 There was also the complicating factor of managing all the mail and telegrams to and from London, phone calls received and responded to, and arrangements with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. And letters to and from recently met Americans with whom he wanted to stay in touch. In addition, he insisted that copies of all of his correspondence while in the U.S. were filed and then forwarded back to London for the archives.2
Most people, having experienced such an intellectually and physically active whirlwind while not fully recovered from a major accident, would have used a stay in New York City, from which the journey had begun, to catch their breath. Churchill, however, was not then, and never did become, like most people. When he arrived in New York from Chicago, Winston had four things we know to have been on his agenda, and likely several more that have not been recorded. Top of the list was a talk to the Economic Club of New York.3 Then, although the phrase is less applicable in a concrete city of almost seven million people, a day to “nibble some grass”—see the sights, such as the Empire State Building—and get a renewed sense of this world-famous metropolis. He had last visited the city in October 1929, just as share prices collapsed and the Great Depression began. Third on the evening of that city tour, another lecture, this at Carnegie Hall. Finally, throughout the visit, touching base with many members of the network he had spent years constructing.
The Economic Club of New York talk, on February 8, would provide perhaps the most economically sophisticated audience Churchill would face on the entire tour. To this day it accepts as members only top-level professionals in leadership positions, and attempts to restrict speaking invitations to people its elite members want to meet and hear. Seated on the dais for his lecture were many of the members of his newly constructed network. Some he had met in London during the First World War, others when Baruch had arranged meetings during his previous tour of America, still others on this tour before it was derailed by his accident. In addition to Baruch, the most notable among the notables included John W. Davis, John D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab, Otto Kahn, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Parker Gilbert,4 and David Sarnoff. Churchill would keep in touch with those he met during this New York visit, and with other new and prospective links in his network when he completed his Marlborough the following year and arranged to send copies to his new friends.
Careful preparation has always been a Churchill practice. That was made more crucial to the success of this particular lecture by his decision to concentrate on the causes of the increasingly severe Great Depression that had descended on the world. He would devote less time to his standard theme, the need for unity between Britain and America, or, as he often put it, the English-speaking peoples.
It was only a week since his lecture in St. Louis, but a week in which he had become more aware of the depths of America’s and the world’s economic problem. He was also aware that to explain his position to the elite 1,500 members in the audience, he would have to extend his lecture from the usual one hour to one hour and a half.5 He undoubtedly felt that would not do violence to the lesson learned at Harrow in 1900: do not overstay an audience’s welcome.
The economic problems required more than the usual deep research. So Churchill called on a variety of advisers for advice and analysis to help him understand the causes of the problem. He deluged Brendan Bracken with questions6 and wired Sir Henry Strakosch, an economist, banker, and highly regarded expert on international monetary matters, for “your views on latest developments money situation.”7 Sir Henry responded with a crystal-clear, eight-page discourse that ended by modestly asking forgiveness for “this incoherent jumble of thoughts.”8
Churchill based his talking notes on a long formal paper,9 to which he applied his unique skill at translating such material into understandable and vivid prose. Also, he fussed: there is a handwritten draft with notes, that were translated into a typewritten version, in this case many closely typewritten pages, followed by a careful edit, with handwritten changes inserted and some parts of the original version crossed out. He used his “vigilant pencil”10 on these drafts.
He dismissed those who argued the Depression was due to overproduction with two sardonic sentences: “We are in want because we have become too clever in making all the things we want. So much wheat has been grown that many people are nearly starving.”
It would not have been a speech by Winston Churchill if he did not conclude with an appeal for the unity of the English-speaking peoples, and an optimistic assessment of the world’s prospects: “My confidence in the British Empire is only equaled by my confidence in the United States. All the world looks to the English-Speaking Peoples [sic] for example, guidance, valued leadership. They must not look in vain. Let us be unconquerable. Remember, ‘The Earth is a generous mother.’ ” This last phrase Churchill added by hand on the speech format, remembering a phrase he had first heard from Bourke Cockran.11 He would repeat that phrase in December 1941 in his first speech to the U.S. Congress and again in March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri.
The next day, all three Churchills accepted an invitation from former New York State Democratic governor Al Smith to visit the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, its very top. The building had been completed a year earlier and was the tallest building in the world. A popular former governor, a famous foreign visitor, and a new landmark combined to attract several news photographers. Churchill commented: “…I have never been so high up before…,”12 perhaps recalling his visits to less tall buildings in San Francisco. The day being too foggy for a view of the Statue of Liberty, Churchill quipped, “The Statue of Liberty does seem to be in a bit of a fog,”13 which, in more serious terms, was how he described U.S. monetary policy when he had addressed the New York Economic Club.
So great was the interest in the Churchills, Governor Smith, and the Empire State Building itself that a newsreel theatre showed a film of the visit.14 The governor then took the Churchills to lunch, where they were joined by John Jacob Raskob,15 at one point the financial head of both DuPont and General Motors, and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Raskob used the proceeds of the sale of his GM stock to finance construction of the Empire State Building. We do not know whether he became one of the many recipients of a Churchill book.
Although, alas, we have no record of the day’s chatter or of the group’s table talk at the luncheon, it would be surprising if Churchill did not receive a good deal of information on the state of the Democratic Party and the nation’s economy from a man who had been governor of the nation’s largest state by far, and who had recently toured a good part of the country after being selected by his party to oppose Herbert Hoover in 1928.16 Smith had been defeated by Hoover because the nation attributed its booming economy to the Republican Party, and because the nation would not be ready to have a Catholic president until 1960, when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon.17
Churchill had always stayed up-to-date with American politics, and several of his newfound friends were involved in presidential or political campaigns, among them three key contacts. Baruch backed Al Smith and tried to persuade McAdoo to do the same; McAdoo declined because Smith would not abandon his opposition to Prohibition. Churchill would have to walk carefully to keep all onside, among other things not engaging McAdoo on the question of Prohibition especially as the McAdoos had so generously turned over their Santa Barbara house to the Troupe for their relaxation.
We do know that fifteen years later, Churchill would record a talk in London for broadcast at the annual Al Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a white-tie affair hosted by the archbishop of New York to raise money for Catholic charities. He said he had met Smith many times “and enjoyed long talks with him on men and things,”18 which almost certainly included talks during the day of the Empire State Building visit. As Churchill had demonstrated while fishing in California, when he used the occasion of a chance meeting with a curator to obtain access to important archives, he never failed to convert chance encounters into productive opportunities.
But lest a day off that included touring with a governor and presidential candidate, lunch with an important financier, and confronting the press be wasted, Churchill had one more item on his agenda—a lecture at Carnegie Hall, in which he repeated the themes of his lecture to the New York Economic Club.25 A Daily Telegraph reporter who represented that paper in New York for twenty-six years attended the talk and wrote to Churchill, “In all my experience I have never seen Carnegie Hall so crowded, or an audience more thrilled. Congratulations.”
Churchill scribbled instructions for his secretary on the note: “Thank and keep,” another piece for the Archives.26 Among the audience at Carnegie Hall were Baruch, John D. Rockefeller,27 Schwab, and Henry Morgenthau Jr.
Then it was on to Rochester,28 where his overnight train was met by a delegation from the Junior Workers Association (perhaps later part of the national Junior League Association), the organization sponsoring his talk that evening on “The World Economic Crisis,” and assorted notables. The illustrious speaker was whisked to his suite at the Sagamore, at one time billed as “The Finest Residential Hotel in the World.”29 Several dinner parties were arranged by leading hostesses in advance of the talk.30 Such pre- and post-lecture dinner parties were a common feature in many cities in which he spoke.
At this lecture, Churchill was introduced by Colonel Oscar N. Solbert34 to the social and intellectual elite that crowded the Eastman Theater.35 Colonel Solbert recalled meeting Churchill in London when the colonel was the military attaché at the American embassy after the First World War. Now in Rochester in 1932, Solbert offered Churchill a tour of the Eastman Kodak plant and a private dinner. He had also tracked down an eighty-nine-year-old Rochester resident who had been a “playmate” of one of the Jeromes, and offered Churchill an introduction.36 Churchill’s written answer declined both the introduction and the tour of the plant as “the state of my health and the number of my lectures do not permit me to make additional outside engagements….” but he did invite Colonel Solbert to visit him the hotel.37
Churchill’s talk, followed by a reception in his honor, hewed to the lines so carefully laid out in New York. However, in his freewheeling interview with reporters the following morning, he commented on issues not as fully covered in his lectures. The reporters, gathered in his suite at the Sagamore “described a gentleman with the accent of a cultured Briton; a pinkish gentleman, full faced, with blonde hair, and the chubbily thick build of a man who has had roast beef and solid brown ale [Pol Roger might have been closer to the mark]; a gentleman in Bond Street clothes, and slippers, fancifully fashioned of strips of alligator hide, [who] lay back in a deep chair….”
Chuckling now and then, Churchill dismissed the war in Manchuria between Japan and China as one between two Asiatic countries “and they couldn’t expect other nations to help one side or the other.” He thought it was “natural and entirely understandable” for Japan to occupy Manchuria. Relighting “his black and very large cigar,” Churchill pointed out that Russia despises everything America and Britain represent, that disarmament conferences “have little use,” and that “with Gandhi in jail… order was being restored in India.”38
Churchill did accomplish more than the applause of his audience. A decade later, in June 1941, before Pearl Harbor, when Churchill was desperate for American intervention, the University of Rochester awarded him an honorary degree, the first of several honorary American degrees he would accept. Alan Valentine, president of the university, proclaimed, “Mine-laden seas cannot divide us… our common cause is freedom…. When Marlborough goes off to war, no one knows when he will come back, but we know he will not give up…. To England go our scientists and our weapons to help your democracy and ours…. May peace with freedom be your crowning work.”39 In a long and moving response, broadcast from Downing Street by NBC and the BBC, Churchill concluded, “Divided, the Dark Ages return. United, we can save and guide the world.”40
Then by train to Washington, arriving late on February 11 and proceeding to the British embassy, where he, along with Diana, Clemmie, and Phyllis Moir, the British secretary who was traveling with him, were to be the guests of the ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay.41 As was often the case, tracking the path of Churchill on this tour is not easy. In this case that is made more difficult by the fact that he chose to make the embassy a sort of hub, from which he could be driven by car to the neighboring Maryland cities of Baltimore and the state capital, Annapolis, to deliver lectures. We do know that he delivered a major lecture at Washington’s Constitution Hall, visited with politicians from congressmen to the president, and delivered a talk to the large contingent of reporters, both American and foreign, who inhabit Washington and for whom he was a source of news.
For Winston Churchill, Washington was where the power was located to bring about his sought-after unity of the English-speaking peoples. He knew that. If ever there were a time and place to deploy his wit and charm in the interests of his policies, February 1932 was that time and Washington was that place. He knew that reporters from all over America and many from other countries worked the Washington “beat,” providing a megaphone for his speeches. He knew the views of media barons William Randolph Hearst and Robert R. McCormick, and the pressure these men, although personally friendly to Churchill, could put on politicians to adopt policies hostile to British interests. He knew that signed copies of Marlborough could not by themselves swing them to his side. His carefully cultivated network and those inclined to agree with his world view would have to be effective enough to offset the pressures on them.
It is reasonable to assume that, with his sources of information that would prove so valuable during his Wilderness Years, he knew, too, that Hitler’s Brownshirts were roaming the streets of Germany, and guessed the new year would mark “the beginning of the Nazi seizure of power…”42 In a little more than a month the Nazis would become the largest party in the Reichstag elections.
More immediately, in only eight months Democrat Franklin Roosevelt would face off against incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover, with FDR likely to be moving into the White House the following March.43 Churchill’s network reached deep into the Democratic Party, and this might be his last chance to meet with many of the network links—Averell Harriman, Baruch, McAdoo, Davis—who would matter in a new administration as it was being formed.
Churchill allowed nothing to interfere with his ongoing work: the flood of correspondence, and political and personal business. That aspect of his stay at the British embassy is described by Phyllis Moir:
…the stream of visitors, the endless telephone calls to his publishers in New York, Randolph at Chartwell, his Parliamentary Secretary in London, the endless telegrams, all the cataclysmic disturbances…. A perpetual stream of servants with trays and newspapers, messenger boys with telegrams and secretaries with letters, dashed to and fro at his imperious command.44
This is not the overexcited recollection of a single overawed employee. Marian Holmes, one of Neville Chamberlain’s secretaries who stayed on with Churchill, described Number 10 when occupied by Chamberlain as “quiet.” Of Winston’s arrival at Downing Street, she said, “It was as if an electric current had gone through the place… suddenly it was all bustle and action this day… weekends vanished altogether.”45
One of Churchill’s top aides during both his stints as prime minister remembers, “Churchill arrived on the scene like a jet-propelled rocket.”46
On the evening of his arrival in Washington, the ambassador organized a dinner in his honor at the British embassy, providing Churchill an opportunity to meet several politicians, among them some of the Senate’s leading isolationists, and to get together once again with Baruch, who was of course one of the invitees.47 Churchill was not only a guest but in typical fashion became a major planner of this and related events, suggesting names for the guest list.48
On the following day Churchill had an unplanned opportunity to demonstrate his celebrity status among American politicians: a visit to observe American democracy in action as the congressional lawgivers debated a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill. Churchill’s arrival on the House floor (some reports say it was in the gallery) brought legislative business to a screeching halt. “Merely standing there caused that body [the House] to forget its business. First one representative, then another and another got up from his seat, edged toward the aisle, walked into the cloakroom to meet the visitors. Presently it was a general rush.”49 A rush that “continued until all the members present had met the distinguished guest.”50
Senator Joseph T. Robinson, who had given a luncheon for Churchill in October 1929, gave another luncheon at the Capitol for all three Churchills, also including Charles G. Dawes, Admiral Grayson, the inevitable Baruch, and assorted senators. Churchill had been briefed on Senator Robinson by Al Smith, and the senator had attended the embassy dinner the previous evening.
That night, introduced by Sir Roland, Churchill rose in Constitution Hall, a recently built venue, the largest such hall in Washington, with a seating capacity of 3,702. Churchill emphasized that he was speaking only as private citizen and not as a representative of the British government. He repeated his argument that “the world economic crisis” was due to the refusal of creditor nations to lower tariffs so that Germany could earn the money to pay the reparations levied on it at Versailles, and added a special attack on France for hoarding gold. “He was warmly received”51 by an audience that included the diplomatic corps, and the many other powerful people that are attracted to Washington’s corridors of power.
The following day, Churchill made a courtesy call on President Herbert Hoover, his second such meeting with the beleaguered president. The British ambassador introduced him. The meeting was scheduled to last five minutes, and it did, giving way to a similar meeting at which the German ambassador was to do the introductions of some German notable.55 Churchill’s next visit to an American president, this one taking place at the White House in December of 1941, lasted considerably longer; three weeks elapsed between his arrival and departure from the White House.
That night, February 13th,56 Daisy Harriman, Washington’s famed political hostess, captured the British statesman for one of her famous suppers. She was, Churchill said, “at the center of the political world.”57
And, a year later, Churchill would describe what seemed to him a very unusual after-dinner format. After dinner was over, the guests drew around Churchill in a circle and he spent two hours fielding questions on “debts, disarmament, naval parity, liquor legislation, the gold standard and the dole…. Nowhere else in the world, only between our two people could such a discussion have preceded.”
One of the opportunities for which any serious networker could only dream. It gave Churchill access to what he described as “the leading men of the Union, and the keen society of the political capital, with all its currents of organized, responsible opinion.”58
Included at the dinner, along with Mrs. Churchill, were General John (known as Black Jack) Pershing and Alice Roosevelt Longworth.59 It had been fifteen years since Churchill had first greeted the general on his arrival in London to command the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.60
Unfortunately, we have no record of the conversation between Churchill and his dinner partner, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. But the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who had little use for Churchill, was attending her first public affair since the death of her husband.61 She was a hellion when a child at the White House, a spectacular debutante who never failed to provide the Washington press corps with copy, and a tart-tongued gossip—as well as a talented stand-in for her father on diplomatic missions.62 Years later, when Mrs. Longworth was in London, Churchill asked his secretary to locate her, but she had already left for Paris.63
The following day, a Sunday, Churchill managed to attend a luncheon in Washington, travel the short distance to Annapolis for a dinner (some reports say it was only a tea) with the governor of Maryland, return to the embassy for an overnight stay, and then be driven the forty-odd miles to Baltimore to deliver a lecture.
The Washington luncheon, with Sir Ronald again the host, did not produce the usual notables the British guest of honor was eager to meet, since cabinet-level offices were still occupied by Hoover appointees. That probably reduced the pressure on him to linger before heading for Annapolis and a date with Albert Ritchie,64 the long-serving, four-term Maryland governor, still another Democratic politician Churchill was eager to get to know, not least because he was often mentioned as a possible candidate for president.65 He also queried the governor about the Civil War, asking why Maryland had not joined the Confederacy, a topic he would cover in his history of that conflict, published twenty-six years later. He asked his hosts to show him where “the historic gore flowed,”66 by which he meant the confrontation between pro-Confederate locals and Federal troops, which in his history he describes as “a bloody collision.”67
Then it was Baltimore. The city’s leading newspaper reminded readers that Churchill had visited thirty-one years ago while on the lecture tour recounting his experiences in the Boer War.68 Winston needed no reminding. Baltimore had proved to be the low point on his earlier tour. The tour organizer had hired him out for £40 to perform “at an evening party in a private house—like a conjuror,” and only a few hundred people had turned out to hear him in a hall he reckoned could have held 5,000.
On this later visit, he was met by the usual notables and conducted to the Lyric Theatre, where about 1,000 people heard his attack on the high tariffs and gold hoarding that were impeding the payment of war debts and causing the world economic crisis. Once again, he rather wished he had avoided Baltimore. The estimated 1,000 who turned out for his lecture barely filled half the seats in the 2,564-capacity Lyric. Backstage, in addition to attacking Prohibition and announcing that if he were an American he “wouldn’t vote for anybody unless he were a real wet.” Despite an audience generous with its applause,69 an annoyed Churchill told the reporters present he “would have given them a better speech if the galleries had been full.”70 He would not set foot again in Baltimore until June 1942, when passing through the city to board a flying boat back to London, seen off by a completely satisfactory audience of one, Roosevelt’s top aide, Harry Hopkins.71
After spending another night at the British embassy, Churchill attended a luncheon as guest of the Washington press corps. Fortunately, the Evening Star reported that “both women and writers will attend” Churchill’s luncheon talk. Among the 150 guests was the Washington correspondent for the [London] Times as well Miss Boyle, Bernard Baruch’s principal aide.72 Churchill was accompanied by Diana, but not by Clemmie, who might have left for New York in anticipation of her departure for England aboard the Cunard’s RMS Berengaria.73
The British ambassador had also arranged a side trip by car, with a lunch packed by the embassy staff, to the Gettysburg civil war battle sites. Hampered by the bad weather there, the War Department, which ran the National Military Park, at first could only show the two men a cyclorama of the battle sites but the expert guide was able to “answer unexpected questions many which were asked him, especially by Mr. Churchill.”74
Possibly because fog and rain let up a bit, the two men (and the attending staff) could tour a few of the sites, driving back to Washington that afternoon. The Gettysburg Times noted that the scar on his forehead from the auto accident was still visible.75 Churchill would return to Gettysburg with President Eisenhower in 1959.
During the entire speaking tour Churchill had often complained of fatigue as a residual consequence of his automobile accident, although his relentless schedule, along with his continued attention to personal investments, journalistic and household matters at home in Britain, would surely have produced exhaustion in a younger man who had not collided with a moving vehicle. He needed a weekend off and once again Baruch rode to his assistance.