Baruch invited Churchill and Diana to spend the then-holiday, George Washington’s birthday (February 22 in 1932), at Hobcaw Barony, in South Carolina, which Baruch described as “a veritable Shangri-La.”1
Baruch was born in South Carolina and felt at home in Hobcaw, although in 1880, when he was eleven years old, his parents had moved the family to New York City. There his father developed a successful medical practice, and pioneered in the diagnosis and removal of perforating appendicitis among other ventures at improving public health. He led the way in establishing public baths for the poor.2
Churchill, briefly tempted to try to relax, was prepared to bring some painting gear “with the intention of making some sketches of the Carolina low country.”3 But he also was prepared to bring Phyllis Moir, his secretary. Baruch, although he had come to know Churchill well since they met while working on materials procurement during the First World War, nevertheless attempted to persuade him to have a complete vacation, without a secretary. A thought Churchill might never have entertained. Baruch believed that his own regimen of getting away from work “helped clear my mind and refresh me physically for any future action…. I preserved its [Hobcaw’s] isolation. Twice a day mail and telegrams were brought from Georgetown [South Carolina], and that was all the communication with the outside world I desired for myself or my guests.”4
Baruch should have known that Churchill would not agree. After four days of intermittent telephoning, Baruch conceded that Moir, Winston’s secretary, was to be included in the invitation.9 “Mr Churchill insisted that he wouldn’t know what to do without a secretary…. A secretary was as necessary to him as a fountain pen. (as a matter of fact, a secretary is the same thing to him as a fountain pen!)”10 After arrival, to Moir’s delight, she was invited on a horse-riding expedition organized by Baruch for Diana.
The terms of Churchill’s attendance settled, he and Diana, with Moir in tow with all the needed secretarial and office supplies, arrived by the only route available, train and then boat from Georgetown, South Carolina. En route to the plantation Winston did make one concession to his host’s view, “Saying that he came here merely to rest, he smilingly declined to be interviewed.”11
Presumably rested from his long weekend, Churchill launched the final lap of his tour, an eleven-city, seventeen-day jaunt. By now his speeches touched some or all of his major points: Prohibition is foolish, Communism is a “menace” to British and American interests, the economic disaster producing global suffering was due to French hoarding of gold, tariffs prevented Germany from earning the cash it needed to pay reparations, disarmament was a danger to the West, and, above all, the cooperation of the English-speaking peoples was essential to maintaining peace and restoring prosperity.
At each stop Churchill ensured that he would be greeted by the city’s A-list: governors, mayors, leading businessmen, socialites and, of course the press. One interesting feature of this trip was the increasing attention paid to Diana, “his beautiful and attractive young daughter,”12 “a small young woman with deep blue eyes and golden hair… clear youthful features.”13
At one stop in Indianapolis, Lady [sic] Diana was honored with a tea sponsored by the Indiana Council of International Relations14 and attended by 200 invited guests, entertained by the Indianapolis Junior League, and she “…danced so late on Saturday night” that the Churchills delayed their departure.15 Cincinnati’s ebullient press pulled out all the stops as it praised Cincinnati16 as “One of Few American Cities to Hear This Versatile Leader,” and described Diana as “the only post-debutante of England’s nobility to be welcomed in Cincinnati in many years.”17
On the practical side, it announced that Churchill had limited the price of some seats “in order that he may have the pleasure of facing as sympathetic and interested a group of Cincinnati’s intelligentsia as possible.”18 It is possible that facing the prospect of filling the Taft Theatre auditorium, a 2,744-seat venue, about the size of Baltimore’s Lyric, Churchill decided that price-cut seats might avoid the empty galleries that he found so upsetting. Still, as a general rule, he could count on audiences of more than 1,000. In Cincinnati, Moir describes the Taft Hotel’s Presidential Suite as “thoughtfully filled with huge baskets of flowers,” and when the manager showed “all the modern innovations,” she recalled that “When in America he [Churchill] was constantly carried away by schoolboy enthusiasms for all the modern American improvements that contributed to comfortable living.” Churchill, “happy as a small child in toy shop, commen[ted] enthusiastically on the… furnishing and lighting fixtures” and was “quite carried away by the effect of the colored fixtures” in the master bathroom.”19 There was no limit to his curiosity and attention to even the smallest details, he had the eye of a painter.
Another feature of this final lap in the 1931–1932 tour was Churchill’s emphasis on acquainting young people with his views. On the day following his lecture in Atlanta,22 where he again referred to the “red [occasionally crimson] tide of kinship,” a phrase he acquired on an earlier tour, he visited Georgia Tech and spoke to the ROTC class.23 In Indianapolis efforts were made to attract “college students and college organizations having international relations as part of their courses.”24
Most of the time, Churchill would make himself available to the media, although in Chattanooga,25 Tennessee, unusual for him, he ordered that he not be disturbed. He also refused interviews and meetings with local notables during this stay. He must have been exhausted. One enterprising reporter reasoned that Churchill must be housed in the Read House Hotel’s best suite and followed him there, but to no avail. Extra security was provided by the hotel so that Churchill would not be disturbed. Perhaps not being as tired as he thought, or overwhelmingly curious about the site of a Civil War battle for the control of Chattanooga,26 he went directly from his hotel to the site, Chickamauga.27 That battle, wrote Churchill years later, “was fought with desperate valor on both sides…. The casualties in this battle were frightful. Sixteen thousand Federals and over twenty thousand Confederates were killed.”28
Like his recent biographer, Andrew Roberts, Churchill insisted on walking the actual battlefields about which he would be writing.29 In his public talk in Chattanooga, he again listed the evils of Prohibition, and the dangers of a Russian-centered worldwide Communism, two of his major speech topics. His language varied and his sentence structures were altered but his major points remained the same.
After several other stops, Churchill arrived in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, he felt it necessary to turn down an invitation from Howard Heinz, a son of the founder of the famous condiment producer. Heinz invited the Churchills to stay with him while in Pittsburgh and “to see some of the industrial establishments, including our own….” He reminded Churchill that they had met when they both spoke at “the Wembley Exposition” in London in 1924 and that his son, Jack, “had crossed on the steamer with you in December” when the Churchills arrived in New York.30
Churchill initially declined: “I fear, however, that I am the veriest bird of passage that I arrive from Toronto at 7:45 A.M.… and must leave toward mid-night… it will not be possible for me… to see the great industries for which Pittsburgh is famous and which would have interested me very much…. I should like to… lunch and dine quite quietly with you and your family.”31
A change of schedule did allow Churchill to accept the offer of a much-needed day’s rest at the Heinz family home, adding another person to the ever-growing list of important contacts. Churchill must have regretted his inability to see “the great industries” of Pittsburgh, especially the giant steel mills (since replaced by “knowledge industries”). But another opportunity presented itself when he was passing through Detroit, where he toured Ford’s truly gigantic River Rouge plant, the heart of its auto production operation. Like Pittsburgh’s steel plants, River Rouge was to become a key component of America’s “great arsenal of democracy,”32 as FDR would describe it in a radio broadcast on December 29, 1940.
Other stops included Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor in Michigan and a brief speech in Toronto. Lectures in New Orleans and Minneapolis were canceled, perhaps because they added many miles to his trip and he felt he needed a rest. By March 8 he was again based in New York City, with short trips to speak in White Plains, a suburb, and Philadelphia. He maintained his pattern of arranging to be introduced by famous local celebrities, those he might add to his American network. In Philadelphia, that honor fell to a former American ambassador to Japan, Roland Morris.
Then it was back to New York City for a lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria with his cousin William Travers Jerome, a former New York City district attorney. When in New York, Churchill was made an honorary member of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. In his speech of acceptance, he reminded the members of his mother’s New York City birth.33 A few days earlier, the New York Times had favorably cited Churchill’s introduction to Richard A. Bermann’s recently published book about the Mahdi, against whose armies Churchill had ridden in the last great cavalry charge in 1898.
Then a night train to Boston, leaving Diana in New York to prepare for sailing home, “This political darling of the English conservatives”34 arrived at 8:30 A.M. and went directly to the Copley Plaza Hotel, with a police motorcycle escort. He had a late breakfast and found time for a chat with some reporters. He then met with visitors, including Admiral William S. Sims (USN-retired), who had met Jennie and her son in London. Then Churchill invited Thomas Nelson Perkins35 to lunch as they had known each other when Perkins was working in London on an economic mission. Declining to comment further when asked about Prohibition, he “turned a good-humored eye upon some bottles of a popular brand of soda water which stood on a [nearby] table.36 He met as he always did with local political leaders, including the governor of Massachusetts and the mayor of Boston. That night he spoke to 3,000 people in Symphony Hall.
The press described him as “blond, ruddy… stout… [he] developed his serious subject with a light touch which frequently drew rounds of laughter….”
He was proud of his American ancestors who had fought with Washington, and although he did not agree with their stand during the Revolution, that could be relegated to history. “Perhaps, [concluded Churchill] on the whole, it was better that we should have fallen out about the tea, than that we had waited 150 years to fall out about liquor.”37
That afternoon he had agreed, unusually, to make a public radio broadcast from a Boston CBS station. He would be extending his reach to still more Americans—at least those who had not heard him speak in person or read about him in the newspapers.45 He was interviewed by Edwin C. Hill, a nationally known New York Sun newspaper reporter, nicknamed the “Man in the Front Row.” Hill submitted proposed questions that seem bizarre in light of what we know of Churchill’s insistence on substantive speeches, although at times leavened by humor. Examples of the many proposed queries: “What is your pet superstition… Who is the most beautiful woman… Who is the most attractive woman you have ever known…?”46
Wisely declining to answer the proposed questions, Churchill suggested, “I do not think the plan… is satisfactory…. There are far too many questions to be treated properly… and many of the questions are foolish…. I have some experience in broadcasting… I had contemplated composing a short and carefully studied talk on the present situation, both personal and general, grave and gay—a message to the United States from one now leaving their shores.”47
Hill’s introduction was better than some of the rejected questions: “Only a little while ago he [Churchill] came perilously near to being translated from this sinful world to the company of the better-known British angels…. [But] he himself is constructed upon one of the most solid English models extant….”
The topics Churchill agreed to address included the economic crisis and the destinies of the English-speaking world, allowing him to repeat for the wider audience many of the themes of his now about-to-conclude lecture tour. Unfortunately, Churchill also decided to share with his CBS radio audience a forecast that might have been one of the worst of his career. He said:
I do not believe that we shall see another great war in our time…. I’ll tell you why. War, today, is bare—bare of profit and stripped of all glamour. The old pomp and circumstance are gone. War is nothing but toil, blood, death, squalor, and lying propaganda. Besides, as long as the French keep a strong army, and Great Britain and the United States have good navies, no great war is likely to occur.48
That was on March 9, 1932. Four days later, on March 13, 1932, while Churchill was still aboard the Majestic en route back to Britain, Adolf Hitler won eleven million votes, against Paul von Hindenburg’s eighteen million. In only another month, on April 13, Churchill learned of Hitler’s assault on the Jews, and began warning that “As Germany acquires full military equality with her neighbors… so surely should we see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of a general European war.”49
This successful broadcast in America gave Churchill a basis, upon returning to Britain in March 1932, to offer Sir John Reith, head of the BBC and not his biggest admirer, “an address on the general American and British situation… and would give it without charge…. I may mention that I made a successful broadcast before leaving New York lasting only twelve minutes, for which I received a high fee, and it is possible that I may make other broadcasts to America in the future.”50
A late train back to New York from Boston, a lunch the next day with one of his lawyers, Louis Levy,51 and a hurried dash to the West Side docks to board the RMS Majestic, with Diana and Inspector Thompson. Moir stayed behind. Once aboard, Churchill began a series of working appointments with other passengers eager to meet with him, as he had done on the SS Europa en route to New York in December 1931. Eleven years later, he arrived in Boston as prime minister to give an important speech at Harvard University.
It is a testimonial to Churchill’s resilience that at age fifty-seven, after a major injury, he could complete his grueling lecture tour, delivering tightly reasoned lectures aimed at the thousands of Americans he wished to persuade of the importance of Anglo-American unity. He also was able to earn fees for those lectures and for the articles he miraculously produced while touring as he had secretaries available to him when and where he needed them. He was always in contact with Chartwell and with events in London. This lecture tour earned him profits of $23,000 with $9,000 to come from Collier’s.52 Also, during 1931, Churchill would write monthly articles for Hearst’s newspaper, March of Events, only stopping in November when he sailed to America.53
It is this resilience that stood him in such good stead in the early days of Britain’s involvement in the eventual war, when defeat after defeat was the news from the several fronts and it enabled him to persuade America that he and Britain would stay the course and make good use of the aid that he was requesting. He left America for Britain satisfied that he had done all he possibly could to make certain that America was tied to Britain by the “crimson thread of friendship.” That would matter. Equally important, he continued to add to the network he had spent decades constructing in order to do exactly what he had done on the tour: influence American opinion in Britain’s favor, and earn much-needed money. He had reconnected with many of the key people in his American network and made new contacts that would remember his words when deluged later with isolationist literature and speeches. He was leaving in place an American network with significant access to the incoming Roosevelt administration, and one that would, eventually, assist that President to overcome isolationist resistance to aid for Britain while American remained apart. The unity he sought would only arrive after the shock of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
The tour completed, with the favorable reviews tucked in his luggage,54 the applause ringing in his ears, and the successes outweighing the losses, Churchill headed home to one of the most difficult periods of his career, a stint as a prophet without honor in his own land. Churchill arrived in London to be greeted by a gift from a group of American and British friends celebrating his recovery from his accident55—a new £2,000 Daimler.56
The group of friends was sensitive to his often-straitened circumstances: “There was some controversy as to whether you would prefer a Rolls-Royce, a Daimler, or a Bentley,” the group’s organizer, Brendan Bracken, explained. “The controversy was solved by fixing on the car which is least expensive to maintain.”57
There’s nothing like a touch of frugality in hard times.