Churchill

In his first decade in politics, Churchill was the sponsor or champion of a series of social reform measures, including the minimum wage, disability insurance, and maximum-hour laws. Later, as president of the Board of Trade, he expanded his agenda to include unemployment insurance and labor exchanges, which he thought would enhance the dynamism of labor markets and reduce unemployment. Churchill sympathized with the early-twentieth-century Progressive movement in the United States, which advocated similar measures and anticipated some features of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Churchill admired both Roosevelt and the New Deal, and while Churchill has often been praised—or criticized—for being one of the early architects of the British welfare state, he also foresaw many of the serious defects of the welfare state with which we are so familiar and about which we are acutely concerned today. A close look at Churchill’s careful views on social and economic questions shows both his prophetic foresight and his moderation—qualities that would be useful today as industrialized nations confront the crisis of an overextended welfare state.

Churchill regarded the material advances of late-nineteenth-century industrialization as a great blessing, but he did not avert his gaze from the tradeoffs involved, such as the poor housing and working conditions of the rising working class. As a child of the upper class, Churchill had little firsthand experience observing poverty in Britain. He had grown up in another world—a world of stately country homes and fashionable townhouses, where the art of conversation and the manners of society were exquisitely practiced by gracious families, unburdened by the drudgery and chores of household care. These were people who had the time to read, talk, and discuss current affairs and fashion. As Churchill once said, “It was the world of the few and they were the very few.”

The first time Churchill ever saw the face of poverty was at the time of his campaign for the parliamentary seat in Manchester. Strolling out from his hotel headquarters one evening with his administrative secretary, Edward Marsh, he wandered among the grimy tenements of the slums. “Fancy,” remarked Churchill to Marsh, “living in one of those streets—never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savory, never saying anything clever.” An entirely new world, which he knew before only from reports and statistics, revealed its ugly face.

In his first year in the House of Commons, Churchill acquainted himself with some of the leading studies of urban poverty of his time, especially Seebohm Rowntree’s recent book, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901), which contained a graphic account of the life of the poor in the city of York. In an early speech, Churchill said that Rowntree’s book “has fairly made my hair stand on end.” In a letter to a friend, Churchill expanded on the effect Rowntree’s book had on him: “For my own part, I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves but is unable to flush its sewers.... What is wanted is a well-balanced policy midway between the Hotel Cecil and Exeter Hall, something that will coordinate development and expansion with the progress of social comfort and health.” He went on to warn that “extremists on both sides” would make a moderate policy difficult to achieve. In other words, Churchill rejected both the socialists who prescribed redistribution or revolution, and the pure laissez-faire school that disdained any government measures to ameliorate poverty or the insecurity of the working classes. Churchill understood that the failure to ameliorate the worst conditions of poverty and the laboring classes would make socialist revolution more likely and that moderate social welfare measures would strengthen a market economy. As the historian Kenneth Morgan puts it, Churchill stood for “free enterprise with a human face.”

Churchill’s moderate approach emphasized not social revolution, but social insurance; not nationalization of industry, but regulation of industry. In 1906, this grandson of a duke explained how his agenda of unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and the eight-hour day should be understood: “I do not want to see impaired the vigour of competition, but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure. We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour, yet above which they can compete with all the strength of their manhood.” Speaking about eight-hour-workday laws, Churchill said:

The general march of industry is not towards inadequate hours of work, but towards sufficient hours of leisure. People are not content that their lives should remain alternations between bed and factory; they demand time to look about them, time to see their houses by daylight, to see their children. Time to think and read and cultivate their gardens; time, in short, to live.

Churchill’s understanding of a runaway welfare state’s defects is clear in his reaction to a famous American book of the time, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Churchill found The Jungle, like Rowntree’s book, a “really excellent and valuable piece of work” that “pierces the thickest skull and the most leathery heart. It forces people who never think about the foundations of society to pause and wonder.” But in his rejection of Sinclair’s remedy, socialist revolution, Churchill explained that socialism could never replace the most important ingredient of social welfare—human virtue:

I must frankly say that if the conditions of society in Chicago are such as Mr. Upton Sinclair depicts, no mere economic revolution would in itself suffice to purify and ennoble. A National or Municipal Beef Trust, with the United States Treasury at its back, might indeed give more regular employment at higher wages to its servants, and might sell cleaner food to its customers—at a price. But if evil systems corrupt good men, it is no less true that base men will dishonor any system, and while no bond of duty more exacting than that of material recompense regulates the relations of man and man, while no notion more lofty than self-interest animates the exertions of every class, and no hope beyond the limits of this fleeting world lights the struggles of humanity, the most admirable systems will merely succeed in transferring, under different forms and pretexts, the burden of toil, misery, and injustice from one set of human shoulders to another.

Even before they became partners in prosecuting World War II, Churchill admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In a famous essay about Roosevelt published in 1937, Churchill observed that “the courage, the power and the scale of his effort must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age.” He added that “in truth Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”

One of Roosevelt’s closest political advisers, Thomas (“the Cork”) Corcoran, told Churchill that Churchill’s early workmen’s compensation, unemployment compensation, and pension programs “were the models of those of us who drafted those Depression bills.” But like his evaluation of Upton Sinclair’s socialist prescriptions in The Jungle, Churchill’s essay about Roosevelt sounded valuable cautions about the limits and defects of the New Deal—warnings that have been borne out by subsequent historical scholarship. The economic emergency of the Great Depression had created the conditions of a virtual dictatorship by FDR, and “[a]lthough the Dictatorship is veiled by constitutional forms, it is nonetheless effective.” While “the Roosevelt adventure claims sympathy and admiration from all of those in England,” Churchill worried that “very considerable misgivings must necessarily arise when a campaign to attack the monetary problem becomes intermingled with, and hampered by, the elaborate processes of social reform and the struggles of class warfare.” Specifically, Churchill feared that Roosevelt’s pro-union policies would drive labor unions to the Left. In Britain, he noted, extreme and intransigent trade unionism “has introduced a narrowing element into our public life. It has been a keenly-felt impediment to our productive and competitive power.”

Related to this was Churchill’s criticism of Roosevelt’s “disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts.” In language that could be applied to President Barack Obama’s so-called “Buffett Rule,” Churchill wrote, “The question arises whether the general well-being of the masses of the community will be advanced by an excessive indulgence in this amusement.... To hunt wealth is not to capture commonwealth.”

In the run-up to his second premiership after World War II, Churchill warned against the endless expansion of the welfare state that had become the credo of the Labour Party. In 1949, while still in opposition, he sounded the cry for fiscal restraint: “We are not going to try to get into office by offering bribes and promises of immediate material benefit to our people.... It would be far better for us to lose the election than to win it on false pretense.” It is unfortunate that modern politicians do not follow this prophetic example of Churchill’s as well.