Preface

Winston Churchill constructed an American network and deployed it in Britain’s for his own interests. This book tells how he did it.

Winston Churchill built an American network for two reasons. First, he believed close and ongoing relations with America would be in Britain’s national interest, in both the short and the long terms. He would spend decades promoting Anglo-American ties.

His second reason was personal. He lived in constant need of money, and planned speaking tours to America to earn lecture fees and sell his books, many of which were published and reviewed in the United States.

Building a network to accomplish both of these objectives took time and effort over half a century. He succeeded in both goals.

To describe how the network was constructed, I tapped into a rich and relatively underutilized source of information. Churchill toured America several times in pursuit of his twin goals, and those visits attracted wide attention in the press. With some difficulty, I obtained hundreds of press reports by national and local American newspapers of Churchill’s lectures and his sightseeing tours of cities in which he spoke. These visits were reported not only by journalists in those cities, but also by reporters sent from distant cities to cover his lectures—such was the breadth of American interest in his visits and talks. He was prepared to speak on a wide variety of topics such as Prohibition and issues of interest to both countries such as naval parity, the economic crises, and the dangers of Communism—promising the audiences a wide-ranging talk and his availability for a post-lecture discussion.

These hundreds of rarely consulted press reports—from a wide variety of media and from many different cities—tell an interesting story. They give us a view of how Churchill interacted with Americans, how local functionaries entertained him and—when they accompanied him on his tours—his wife and his daughter, Diana. They provide a who’s who of the local elites that entertained Churchill either out of kindness or of a desire to see their names listed in their local newspapers alongside that of their famous visitor. They tell us how a no-longer-young Churchill, not in the best of physical condition after being run down by a New York automobile, managed to maintain a schedule that would have felled less resilient, younger, and healthier men.

These news stories describe not only what he said but also how he organized his travel accommodation, sometimes with the help of wealthy recruits to his network who provided private railcars, sometimes with only the ever-dutiful Scotland Yard detective Walter Thompson to help. Local police protection and motorcycle escorts eased his travels, as did trains that delayed their departure to accommodate his usual lateness.

Reporters enlivened their coverage with tales of Churchill’s reactions to audiences that often included hostile German Americans, ethnic Irish Americans, and Dutch Americans. Most were placated by an unruffled Churchill and his well-placed comments that often included praise for the Boer enemy—a hallmark of Churchill’s enduring magnanimity. There were some radical Indian groups who were beyond merely hostile. They threatened to kill this defender of the Empire, providing reporters with news of police protection, the weapons carried by Churchill and Thompson (with the covert acceptance of the local police in each city), and an armored car for transport to the Chicago train station.

Reporters also gleefully recounted his humorous quips, either in the speeches or in answers to questions from the audience and the press. All of this would often provide reporters with a prestige-enhancing page-one or feature story.

These newspaper reports reveal the varying ways his biography was presented to Americans, in effect, how this famous lecturer was billed. They also reveal his unguarded backstage comments to hosts and men waiting to introduce him and describe his appearance and his dress, his impatience with accommodations that were not always “the best,” and the side trips he insisted on to pursue his lifelong interest in the American Civil War and the American West.

The search through these reports was not easy. Some newspapers maintain reasonably accessible archives; others made research more difficult. At times, reporters for both local and national papers covered Churchill’s visits and filed reports that differed as to details. At other times reference to Churchill’s letters to his mother and other correspondents was needed to fill in some gaps.

For reasons I discuss in the book, he did not find time to return to America after his first lecture tour until 1929, joined by his son, brother, and nephew. Churchill dubbed this foursome the Troupe. This was meant to be a leisurely visit at a time when he had no ministerial responsibilities at home. He crisscrossed the country to study its natural beauty, make and lose a fortune, and, as an added feature, meet its elites. He quickly returned to the lecture circuit in 1931–1932 to learn the perils of crossing the street in New York traffic on a misty night and relate to audiences his views on the problems afflicting the world in general and America in particular.

Young Churchill had attracted press attention in America in 1895 because his American mother, Jennie Jerome, later Lady Churchill, was herself the subject of considerable interest to the press and American readers. Beautiful, talented, the editor of a successful literary magazine, and always in the latest and finest the fashion world had to offer, she provided the material on which gossip columns thrived. Later, Churchill would be of interest in his own right because of the popularity of his first two books: The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899), both reviewed in America. His capture and escape from a South African prison were the subject of his next books, published in 1900. Churchill hoped that attendance at these lecture tours, and the fees they generated, would be increased by his growing reputation and the generally favorable reviews of his books. Which they did, resulting in wide press coverage during his subsequent visits to America.

That coverage also burnished his reputation at home as more than just another Member of Parliament: favorable press coverage in America was widely reported in the British press, and an ability to “conquer” America was much admired and valued in Britain. He was also getting to know American reporters who would someday be important intermediaries between himself and the American public.

Churchill was the network’s nerve center, a tireless advocate for policies which—not always but more often than not—he believed, correctly, to be in the interests of the nation he loved. The power of the network stemmed from the fact that it had hubs in key industries and institutions such as finance, entertainment, and media, and in political structures, including both Congress and the American presidency. These groups included the powerful political, financial, and social elites within whose circles Churchill moved so comfortably.

Many of those who were to become part of Churchill’s American network first met him when they needed favors that were in his gift. The steel magnate Charles M. Schwab sought defense contracts from the British minister of munitions, a post Churchill held from 1917 to 1919. The American chairman of the War Industries Board, the financier Bernard Baruch, relied on Churchill to allocate scarce materials fairly among the allies in the First World War. Averell Harriman sought out Churchill as chancellor of the exchequer (from 1924 to 1929), in search of information useful for his decisions concerning foreign investments in the Soviet Union.

These men and others trekked to Britain as early as the days of the First World War to seek those favors, consulting in London with fellow Americans who were in Britain, either for business or pleasure. Churchill, with characteristic prescience, was careful to stay in touch with those Americans who sought him out, as well as those working in Britain. He created useful contacts, in some cases forming deep and enduring friendships, both in the United States and in Britain.

This network of friendship and mutual interests overlapped, with each contributing something different and crucial to the advancement of Churchill’s twin goals of the defense of his nation’s interests and his personal and financial advancement. The men and women within these hubs will find their way across these pages.

Churchill used his network in Britain’s interests, most notably when President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to overcome anti-British and isolationist pressures rallying against intervention in the battle between Nazi Germany and Great Britain. There is no claim here that Churchill single-handedly enabled President Roosevelt to come to the aid of Britain. This book’s claim is more measured. Churchill’s lectures, articles, private meetings, and dinners, and the contacts he cultivated while in America, were a helpful offset to the noninterventionist, isolationist, even pro-German background of public opinion created by leading publishers such as William Randolph Hearst, politicians such as Senator Burton K. Wheeler, and “America Firsters” such as the influential aviator Charles Lindbergh and the American ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy.

Members of Churchill’s American network reinforced the favorable view of Britain already held by what are today called “influencers,” and enlisted others in support of his view that the Anglo-American alliance, the unity of the “English-Speaking Peoples,” as he put it, was key to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world, and therefore very much in America’s self-interest.

In researching any aspect of Churchill’s long and varied life, a historian inevitably encounters characters, interesting in their own right because of their achievements, eccentricity, effect on events or on Churchill’s life. Rather than interrupt the narrative, a series of inserts contain brief introductions to the powerful men and women who were important to Churchill’s American nexus: Bernard Baruch in finance and politics; Robert R. McCormick, Henry Luce, and William Randolph Hearst Jr. in media, with Hearst’s wife and mistress also fixtures in entertainment; Dorothy Thompson and Virginia Cowles in journalism; Schwab in steel; Averell Harriman in just about everything; and on the periphery, but nevertheless significant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Charlie Chaplin.

For the Churchill researcher, all paths branch out from Sir Martin Gilbert’s gift to all future historians. Drawing on the massive collection housed in the Archives at Churchill College, Cambridge, Sir Martin wrote the final six of the eight-volume biography of Churchill, the first two authored by Winston’s son, Randolph Churchill, with Sir Martin’s assistance. Of equal importance are The Churchill Documents, a twenty-three-volume set of all the primary documents and personal papers on which Randolph Churchill and Sir Martin relied in preparing the biography. These cover the hyperactive Churchill from boyhood letters written beginning at age eight (from Blenheim Palace) to a transcript of Dwight Eisenhower’s moving January 30, 1965, BBC broadcast at the funeral of Ike’s great partner in defeating the Axis. These volumes of documents are not only an invaluable research tool but “can also be read in their own right…. They read as a radio play, where we get to hear history being lived and made in real time.”¹

I have cited the volumes of The Churchill Documents as DOCS, with the appropriate volume and page number.

As already noted, I have also relied heavily on a source not given the weight it deserves—press reports. Churchill visited America in the age of newspapers and magazines. For example, at around the time of Churchill’s last visit to Chicago, the Chicago Sunday Tribune had a circulation of over one million copies per day,² as did the Brooklyn Eagle. Time magazine estimated that William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers were read by 20 million of the 120 million men, women, and children in the United States.³

In June 1941 Luce’s Life magazine counted 3.2 million weekly readers and Time, which that year named Churchill its “Man of the Year” for 1940, more than one million. “By Time Inc’s estimates, more than 30 million people were reading or looking at one or more of Luce’s magazines…. The Luce press became an influential counter-medium in Chicago and Washington, where the Tribune and the Times-Herald supported anti-interventionist policies…. Newspaper reporters… often repeated Time’s version of recent events, and quotations from Life and Fortune editorials cropped up all the time in America’s newspapers.”⁴

Describing the construction of Churchill’s network in less than a mutivolume work demands some reluctant omissions, among them any significant discussion of the London branch of Churchill’s American network. That would require a separate volume. Besides, we already have three illuminating works available,⁵ in addition to multiple diaries kept by Americans who worked in London before and during both World Wars. I would include the particularly interesting journal kept by General Raymond E. Lee,⁶ and the detailed memoir from Cowles, who covered the Spanish Civil War, the fall of France, the blitz on London, and other war zones. Prime Minister Churchill described her 1941 book, Looking for Trouble, as “splendid.”⁷ And indeed it is.

Omitted, too, is an extended discussion of Churchill’s use of radio to shape public opinion. Such a discussion would also require considerable details on a subject already well covered by others, among them Asa Briggs,⁸ William L. Shirer,⁹ and, by the example he set, Edward R. Murrow. In the United States, radio, of course, was an important factor during the policy debates of the 1930s. Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic and anti-interventionist broadcasts reached tens of millions in the 1930s.¹⁰ Henry Luce’s “March of Time” attracted 8–9 million listeners by the middle of that decade. The popularity and effectiveness of Murrow’s “This is… London” broadcasts later “brought the war into the living rooms of America.”¹¹ Roosevelt also deployed that medium to great effect in his fireside chats. However, Churchill believed that in his case remote broadcasts from a radio studio were not the same thing as meeting Americans in major parts of the country, learning about them, and recruiting some to his network. Moreover, broadcasts had not yet become as certain a source of income as lecture tours.

Unlike many of his political peers, Churchill realized early on in his career that America was to become a great power, a nation that would have global interests that he would be wise to recognize and to try to align with Britain’s interests to the greatest extent possible. That would require a broadly favorable view of himself and his country among the American elite and electorate.¹² Fortunately for America, and, indeed, the world, Churchill succeeded in both.

A few notes for readers. Having written about the Churchill who used dinner parties for political purposes and the Churchill who showed much of his true self when working with his secretaries, I believe that a study of the scores of press reports of Churchill’s tours of America as he built his American network provides the reader with still another illuminating perspective of the man about whom so much has been written by so many able historians.

During my research for this third of my books on aspects of Winston Churchill’s life, I have found works that are carefully sourced to be a blessing. I have done my best to assist future scholars by indicating my sources.

Demonstrating how Winston Churchill’s pre-1940 visits to America built his network, rather than recite his trips as a mere travelogue, events are not always presented in their strict chronological order. The furious pace of activities by this early-day multitasker and tireless traveler occasionally made it impossible to construct an accurate timetable.

Finally, when sources are not wholly in agreement on minor details, I have selected the one that seems most plausible.