Continued from Part 1…

Youthful discretions

Churchill was born into a world in which virtually all Britons, from the Sovereign to a Covent Garden grocer, believed in their moral superiority. They preached it to their children. All learned that the red portions of the map showed where Britannic civilization had tamed savagery and cured pandemics. Churchill’s assertions, especially as a young man, were often in line with this. And yet he consistently displayed this odd streak of magnanimity and libertarian impulse.

It was Churchill, the aristocratic Victorian, who argued that Dervish enemy in Sudan had a “claim beyond the grave…no less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.” In South Africa, he asserted that Boer racism was intolerable, that the Indian minority deserved the same rights as all British citizens. (This was something Gandhi never forgot, though Churchill did—which Gandhi praised years later, when they were opponents over the India Bill.)

Fair play and magnanimity

After the Great War ended, this same Churchill urged that shiploads of food be sent to a starving Germany as the wartime blockade ended. Other leaders preferred to “squeeze Germany till the pips squeaked.” They did, and the long-term results were not good.

The Jallianwala Bagh or Armritsar massacre of Indians in 1919 found Churchill in full cry against the perpetrators. It was Churchill who in 1920 secured India’s support in the future Hitler war, and assured independent India’s military legacy. Arthur Herman in Gandhi & Churchill writes:

For every disgruntled or discouraged subaltern who joined Japan’s puppet Indian National Army, a dozen KCIOs and VCOs served with distinction on every front in the British war effort…. And the minister of war who created the KCIOs in 1920 had been Winston Churchill…. Churchill never grasped the full magnitude of what he had done, but Gandhi nearly did. Many times over the years he had spoken of brave Indian soldiers who would defend their country and then return home to carry the future burden of freedom.

In the 1920s, it was Churchill who argued that the coal miners should be compensated after the 1926 General Strike. In the 1940s it was Churchill, not FDR, certainly not Stalin, who declared carpet bombing German cities morally reprehensible. Ten years later, he denied South Africa’s demand for Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland without the consent of their inhabitants.

A singular record

No statesmen of stature exhibited such magnanimity for so long: Not the leaders of the Tory or Labour parties; not the chieftains of wars. Many who heard Churchill’s proposals shook their heads. Some thought him a mental case, a traitor to his class, or a good man gone soft. “I have asserted many times and without being contradicted,” writes historian Larry Arnn, “that Winston Churchill never said or implied that the rights of any person were conditioned upon the color of his or her skin.”

There are countless examples of Churchill’s magnanimity bucking what Andrew Roberts called “The Respectable Tendency.”  He recognized and cited the rights of minorities and the oppressed long before the World Wars. He understood that the claim to liberty was not Britain’s alone, and that understanding welled up in his finest hour. Yet similar views had governed his political thought virtually from the start.

Verdict of historians

I often quote what William Manchester wrote. Churchill, he declared,

…always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. Given time, he could devise imaginative solutions.

Martin Gilbert wrote about the thousands of documents he examined in writing the Official Biography:

I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think: “How shocking, how appalling.”

Yet today some writers profess shock at Churchill’s stray, emotional, unworthy remark. Time and again, the full context of what he said produces an entirely opposite impression.

On the matter of Eugenics (Part 1), to equate Churchill’s record with “the extremities practiced to a tee by the Nazis is”—forgive me—pretty extreme.

“Master of invective”

“Low is the greatest of our modern cartoonists,” wrote Winston Churchill in his delightful essay “Cartoons and Cartoonists.” He praised “the vividness of his political conceptions,” declaring Low a singular talent: “He possesses what few cartoonists have—a grand technique of draughtsmanship. Low is a master of black and white. He is the Charlie Chaplin of caricature, and tragedy and comedy are the same to him.”

New Zealander David Low worked mostly for left-wing periodicals like the Star and the New Statesman. Such praise for someone who consistently poked fun at him is a fine example of Churchill’s collegiality. He was never a hater; he appreciated talent on all sides of politics. Of course, Churchill didn’t hesitate to say what he thought of Low’s political attitude:

Here was the British Empire emerging into conscious existence fanned by the quiet loyalty of hundreds of millions of faithful people under every sky and climate. To jeer at its fatted soul was the delight of the green-eyed young Antipodean radical.

A Low cartoon, Churchill went on, was a masterpiece of invective:

There is not a figure in it that is not instinct with maliciously-perceived truth…. . There he is, with his little tyke and his Joan Bull and her baby, deriding regularly everything that is of importance to our self-preservation.

Low – down payback

David Low gave as good as he got. “An upholder of Democracy,” he described Churchill—

…yes, when he was leading it. Impatient with it when he was not…. His definition of democracy, I felt, would be something like “government of the people, for the people, by benevolent and paternal ruling-class chaps like me…. I could never accept him as a democrat in the Lincolnian sense.

Modern critics still float that image of Churchill, however wide of the mark. In Labour Party circles, the myth long pervaded (and still does), that Churchill’s first reaction against striking Welsh miners in 1911 was to send troops against them. This potent theme returned in the 1926 General Strike.

War and Reversal

Thus it went until the Second World War. Then, in May 1940, Churchill plunged in as Prime Minister. Just as suddenly, Low’s cartoon critiques became rampant boosterism. Everything Low admired in Churchill came to the fore.

“Winston’s characteristics,” he wrote later, “were confidence in himself and love of his country. At the time of our first meeting I wrote, ‘Churchill is one of the few men I have met who … give me the impression of genius. Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is much overrated!”

“From his old castigator”

David Low’s greatest Churchill cartoon was created for the pictorial magazine Illustrated in 1954 to mark Sir Winston’s 80th Birthday. Low gathered all the “Winstons” of the great man’s life, toasting the old man. Here was the red-haired

Harrow schoolboy upstart. The subaltern in India. The First Lord of the Admiralty and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the painter, the siren-suited Prime Minister. Even the portraits—Marlborough and his Duchess—are raising a glass. (For a large format image click here.)

In this cartoon we sees all the mutual respect and affection of two skillful practitioners of the political arts. Entirely different métiers, of course—but there it is. More important, however, I think David Low was expressing what the nation knew as a certitude. Certainly the whole nation knew it in 1954—but perhaps some need reminding today.

_________

Learn …

Who was Winston Churchill? Why, half a century since his death, is he the most quoted historical figure? Scholars know the answers. Do you? Why does it matter?

It matters because Churchill continues to offer guidance and example today. His indomitable courage, his ability to communicate, his knowledge of history, his political precepts, are as valuable now as they were in his time.

Courage and resolution

Churchill himself said “nothing surpasses 1940.” We must look there for to learn of his greatest accomplishment. Without him the world today would be unrecognizable: dark, impoverished, tortured. Churchill didn’t win the Second World War. That took more than he alone could offer. His triumphant achievement was not losing it.

Churchill did that in two ways: pursuing the paramount goal to the exclusion of all others; and communicating that goal to a baffled and frightened world.

The great movements that underlie history are the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures, wrote Charles Krauthammer:

These are undeniably powerful, almost determinant.  Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different…. The originality of the 20th century surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror—a breathtaking catalog of political creativity. And the 20th is a single story because history saw fit to lodge the entire episode in a single century. Totalitarianism turned out to be a cul-de-sac. It came and went. It has a beginning and an end, 1917 and 1991, a run of seventy-five years neatly nestled into the last century. That is our story.

And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon? Yes, it was the ordinary man and woman, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. True, it was America and its allies. Indeed, it was the great leaders: Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

Learn more: Winston Churchill’s War Leadership, by Martin Gilbert; Churchill and War, by Geoffrey Best.

Right and freedom

Almost all his life, Churchill’s quarrel was with tyranny. But singularly among politicians of his time, he saw the future—and its implications for good or ill. Churchill predicted today’s age of instant communications. He foresaw the nuclear age, the mobile phone, social media, genetic engineering. He feared the challenge to free government through what he called “Mass Effects on Modern Life.” It is useful to learn how he expressed these warnings, which still apply.

As early as 1908, Churchill’s ideas, speeches and legislative accomplishments produced pioneering reforms in the social structure. His aim was to reform what was bad and to preserve what was good, without disrupting the enterprise that produces the wherewithal to make life worth living. That is still a worthy goal.

* * *

At the same time, Churchill foresaw the all-powerful administrative state. Many an advance in science, technology and communication, Churchill argued, “suppresses the individual achievement.” He deplored the rise of the collective at the expense of the individual: “Is not mankind already escaping from the control of individuals? Are not our affairs increasingly being settled by mass processes? Are not modern conditions—at any rate throughout the English-speaking communities—hostile to the development of outstanding personalities and to their influence upon events; and lastly if this be true, will it be for our greater good and glory?” Today such questions merit examination by thoughtful people.

The newspapers do a lot of thinking for us, Churchill wrote. Substitute “media” for “newspapers” and he could be speaking today. He particularly worried about the superficiality of media. True, it provides “a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial.” Such a process, taken to its ultimate ends, would produce “standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party.”

These considerations alone, writes Larry Arnn,

offer ample practical reasons to know Churchill’s story; but there are other reasons beyond the manifestly practical. Justice and the duty to pursue it are central to true statesmanship. It is certainly worth our time to consider how Churchill, who held to that idea as strongly as any, understood his and his country’s purposes and navigated toward them.

Learn more: Churchill’s Political Philosophy, by Martin Gilbert; Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Challenge to Free Government, by Larry P. Arnn.

Magnanimity and generosity

Another quality worthy to learn was Churchill’s magnanimity. He was not a hater. “I have always urged fighting wars and other contentions with might and main till overwhelming victory,” he said, “and then offering the hand of friendship to the vanquished.” He proved this repeatedly.

As a young statesman Churchill fostered a generous peace with the Boers after their defeat in the Boer War. In 1918, he urged (vainly) that shiploads of food be sent to blockaded Germany. He fought the 1926 General Strike, then argued for redress of strikers’ grievances. His hate for the Germans in World War II “died with their surrender.”

* * *

He held the same attitude toward individuals—something we can only wish for among today’s politicians. Admiral Fisher nearly destroyed his career in 1915; a year later Churchill advocated Fisher’s return to the Admiralty. In 1945 the socialist Clement Attlee inflicted his greatest political defeat. Yet when confronted with jokes at Attlee’s expense, Churchill refused to be drawn into lampooning a man he described as a “gallant servant of his country.” In the 1930s he fought a bill granting India greater independence, and then urged the Indian leader Gandhi to “make the most of it,” and promised to see that India would get “much more.”

His eulogies to Neville Chamberlain and Lloyd George were masterful in their generosity, Andrew Roberts wrote: “He did not believe in vengeance against domestic political opponents, but rather in what he called, ‘A judicious and thrifty disposal of bile.’”

This was a rare quality, even then. It remains an example worth imitating. To those who had wronged him in the past Churchill would say, “time ends all things,” or “the past is dead.” In 1940, having finally risen to the pinnacle, he warned critics of his predecessors: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find that we have lost the future.”

Learn more: Churchill as Peacemaker, James W. Muller, ed.; Great Contemporaries: Churchill Reflects on FDR, Hitler, Kipling, Chaplin, Balfour, and Other Giants of His Age, by Winston S. Churchill.

“A man of quality”

We do tend to be discouraged about how things are going—although in our time, they haven’t gone all that badly. The fall of the Soviet Union, the prevalence of free market economics, were not things people would bet on forty years ago. Churchill saw them coming twenty years earlier than that. He was always the optimist. Humanity, he believed, was not going to destroy itself.

“In every sphere of human endeavour, Churchill foresaw the dangers and potential for evil,” wrote Martin Gilbert:

Many of those dangers are our dangers today. He also pointed the way forward to our solutions—for tomorrow. That is why it is useful to learn about his life. Some writers portray him as a figure of the past, an anachronism, a grotesque. In doing so, it is they who are the losers, for he was a man of quality: a good guide for our troubled decade and for the generations now reaching adulthood.

Mr. Daniel Knowles (“Time to scotch the myth of Winston Churchill’s infallibility,” (originally blogged on the Daily Telegraph but since pulled from all the websites where it appeared), wrote that the “national myth” of World War II and Churchill “is being used in an argument about the future of the House of Lords.”

Mr. Knowles quoted Liberal Party leader Nick Clegg, who cited Churchill’s 1910 hope that the Lords “would be fair to all parties.” Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames MP, replied that Churchill “dropped those views and had great reverence and respect for the institution of the House of Lords.” Soames concluded: “But it doesn’t matter. The basis of this argument is mythology, not history.”

Churchill’s view on the Lords was more nuanced than Clegg stated, and certainly did change after passage of the 1911 Parliament Act, which Churchill helped pass. It eliminated the Lords’ veto of money bills, restricted their delay of other bills to two years, and reduced the term of a Parliament to five years. You can look it up.

What to do about the House of Lords is a matter for the British people and their representatives. My task is merely to refute nonsense about Winston Churchill—which I will now respectfully proceed to do, quoting from Mr. Knowles’s treatise:

 • “We idolise Churchill because we don’t really know anything about him.”

Only sycophants idolize Churchill. But if they do, it’s not because they know nothing about him. He has the longest biography in the history of the planet. He has 15-million published words. There are a million documents in the Churchill Archives. One hundred million words were written about him. He gets 37 million Google hits. Don’t be silly.

 • “His finest hours aside, Winston Churchill was hardly a paragon of progressive thought.”

Churchill’s was at times so progressive that he was called a traitor to his class. His own Conservative Party never quite trusted him because they knew he continued to harbor principles of the Liberal Party he had been part of from 1904 to 1922. To cite examples would bore you. So let’s just say that he favored a National Health Service before the Labour Party did, and believed in a system of social security before the Labour Party existed.

 • “He believed that women shouldn’t vote – telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.’”

Churchill never said that in the Commons. It’s a private note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register in 1897, when he was 23. At that time the majority of British women themselves were opposed to having the vote. Churchill changed his view on women’s suffrage after observing the role women played in World War I—and when he realized, as his daughter said, “how many women would vote for him.”

 • “He was fiercely opposed to self-determination for the people of the Empire….”

Was the fierce independence Churchill admired in Canadians, Boers, Zulus, Australians, Sudanese, New Zealanders and Maoris a sham and a façade, then? Churchill did have a tic about the early Indian independence movement, with its Brahmin roots. Yet in 1935 he declared that Gandhi had “gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Churchill was proven right that a premature British exit from India would result in a Hindu-Muslim bloodbath—how many died is still unknown.

 • “….advocating the use of poisoned gas against ‘uncivilized tribes’ in Mesopotamia in 1919.”

That Golden Oldie has been refuted repeatedly for twenty years. The specific term he used was “lachrymatory gas” (tear gas). He was not referring to a killer gas like chlorine.

 • “Even his distrust of Hitler was probably motivated mostly by a hatred of Germans.”

Is this the same Churchill who urged that shiploads of food be sent to blockaded Germany after the 1918 armistice, incurring the wrath of his colleagues, who wished to “squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked”? Is this the man who wrote to his wife in 1945: “…my heart is saddened by the tales of masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in 40-mile long columns to the West before the advancing Armies”? Really, Mr. Knowles should be ashamed of himself.

 • “In 1927, he said that Mussolini’s fascism ‘had rendered service to the whole world,’ while Il Duce himself was a ‘Roman genius.’”

Lots of politicians said favorable things about Mussolini after he restored order to a reeling Italy in the 1920s. Churchill was among the first to realize and to say publicly what Mussolini really was. Churchill wasn’t always right the first time—but he was usually right in the long run.

 • “In 1915, he had to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disaster of Gallipoli.”

He had to resign because of the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli, which was someone else’s idea (and hadn’t yet become a disaster). Churchill initially was even doubtful about the plan to force the Dardanelles, but he defended it and was a handy scapegoat. He vowed never again to champion “a cardinal operation of war” without plenary authority; hence his assumption of the title “Minister of Defence” in World War II.

 • “His decision in 1925 to restore Britain to the Gold Standard caused a deep and unnecessary recession.”

There was already a recession. Churchill, Keynes and the Gold Standard comprise a far more complicated subject than Mr. Knowles represents. Among other things, the Gold Standard was insisted upon by the Bank of England. Churchill was certainly wrong to buy their arguments, and saw many of its effects coming; he was also incredibly unlucky in the way things transpired.

 • ”That led directly to the general strike in 1926, in which he was reported to have suggested using machine guns on the miners.”

Mr. Knowles confused his red herrings. It was the Welsh miners at Tonypandy in 1910 against whom Churchill is mythologically supposed to have sent troops—but top marks for the machine guns, a new twist on the old myth. (In fact, Churchill opposed the use of troops, in Tonypandy and in the General Strike.)

Mr. Knowles concluded:

Yes, he was, in the most part, a brilliant war leader. His role in the creation of the modern welfare state is also worth remembering. But his views on Lords reform are as irrelevant today as his views on India or female suffrage. This is a debate we should have based on principle, and on a practical evaluation of how well the House of Lords works. Citing dead men only muddies it.

Well, it is my instinctive feeling anyone who fails to do basic research can produce only what amounts to a national myth, divorced from reality.

Churchill was not always “a brilliant war leader.” He did help create what became the welfare state–and warned against its excesses. His views on Lords reform are not irrelevant, but they do require more study than we read in the Telegraph Blogpost. His views on India are still relevant to certain Indians who have written on the subject. (As one wrote, the Axis Powers had quite different ideas in mind for India than the old British Raj).

As for female suffrage, ask all the women who voted for him. Citing live Telegraph bloggers only muddies the waters.

Mr. Knowles has tweeted that “The whole point of the post was to take down Clegg. That piece is bizarre.” I certainly agree his piece is bizarre. But Mr. Clegg lasted until 2015.