“The Aryan stock is bound to triumph”

Sufferers from “Churchill Derangement Syndrome” hold “Aryan stock” high among Winston Churchill’s appalling utterances. The remark rose again in correspondence with a journalist. I dug out for him the background of that remark, but his report omitted it. Out of context the quote is misleading, so I guess that’s just as well. But rather than write off several hours’ research, the facts might here serve to advance reality.

Wales in its Welsh Wisdom is thinking of moving statues of Churchill, Nelson and Gandhi to a museum, the Daily Telegraph informs us. My correspondent wrote: “Churchill is again under fire, this time from the Welsh government. It cites his support for the British Empire and his supposed belief in the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race. The official Welsh government report examines what monuments and streets commemorate various figures. It throws in Gandhi for good measure.”

I wondered idly what Mohandas Gandhi, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, would say about all this? I think he would be amused, but then depressed, by the onward march of invincible ignorance. Gandhiji said some regrettable things about black Africans around 1906. Against that, the statue of this great man who led India’s quest for independence is to be proscribed in Wales? I should think the Welsh would approve of this champion of Home Rule. (And of Churchill, who campaigned for devolution before it became popular.)

“The Anglo-Saxon race”

Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project holds digital references to 80 million words of Churchill’s writings, speeches, letters, papers, plus biographies and memoirs about him. This resource reveals that he used the term “Anglo-Saxon race” exactly twice. The first referred to U.S. and British sailors, the second to US-UK Free Trade. You tell me whether either sounds racist:

The union of the Anglo-Saxon race is a great ideal, and if ever it is to be achieved it will be by increasing and not diminishing the friendly intercourse of trade between this country and the United States. Against such wanton folly as a tariff war with the United States, Free-traders appeal with confidence to Lancashire, and we hope that, as in years gone by, Lancashire will point the path of honour and wisdom to the people of the British islands. —Speech supporting Home Rule for Ireland, Public Hall, Cheetham Hill, Manchester, 16 June 1904, Complete Speeches I, 317

Churchill’s comment on Aryan stock occurred in an interview with Gustavus Ohlinger of Michigan University in January 1901. Ohlinger published part of that interview, entitled “Success in Journalism,” in the university’s journal The Islander. But much of the interview, including the Aryan remark, went unpublished. Decades later, Ohlinger published the full transcript.  (Michigan Quarterly Review, February 1966).

The context is significant. Ohlinger was born and grew up in China, where his parents were missionaries. Naturally, he and Churchill talked about the confrontation then going on between China and Russia. Ohlinger asked: what was his opinion? Churchill’s replied:

…we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them…as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph. Personally, I am not greatly concerned about Russian development in China.

Now, most today would object to “barbaric” as a description of China, or at least its people. One hundred twenty years ago, perhaps not. Churchill was however predicting the outcome of a Russia-China dispute. (Cynics will smirk over his idea “to take the Chinese in hand.” That’s still in vogue among certain politicians 120 years later.)

Who were the Aryans, anyway?

Taken out of context, “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph” certainly sounds racist today. In the original context, Churchill was talking about a rivalry between Chinese and Russians. Undoubtedly they are of two races, and Churchill thought the Chinese needed taking in hand. Did he mean absolute dominance of the white race? I think not. Nor do I think “Aryan” is quite the right term for Russians.

It took Adolf Hitler to give the word “Aryan” a bad name. It wasn’t aways thus. Defending Churchill from being called a “barbaric Monster” in a Canadian newspaper, Terry Reardon wrote:

The Toronto Star doesn’t inform us that Aryan horseman warriors from Central Asia migrated into the Indus Valley in the third millennium B.C. They were “as arrogant as they were tough,” wrote historian Arthur Herman. “Their very name, Arya, meant ‘master’ or ‘noble.’” They evolved into four classes, led by the Brahmins. Ironically, in view of the Star’s charges, “Aryan stock” is today the dominant demographic group in India.

The Hudson Institute  economist Irwin Stelzer penned an interesting article on trade: “Trump girds for War with EU.” I sent it around to colleagues, praising it for properly attributing an alleged Churchill quote:

No one doubts that Trump is gearing up to launch a tariff battle with the European Union. For one thing, he is set to sign a deal ending the trade battle with China, and would not be fighting a two-front war should he take on Europe which, he tweeted last week, “has taken advantage of the U.S. on trade for many years. It will soon stop”…. If the EU negotiators think they can use jaw jaw to prevent or delay war war (to borrow Harold Macmillan’s take-off on Churchill’s “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war”), they are misreading the President…. Trump demonstrates his ignorance of the economics of trade by focusing on bilateral trade deficits. But he demonstrates his New York street smarts by selecting opponents who are relatively weak, as China was when he launched a battle to end its predatory trade practices. Now it’s Europe’s turn.

It’s not too often that Churchill is so carefully referenced. Dr. Stelzer also highlighted my book of quotations, Churchill by Himself, as his recommended reading in that column. So I sent his column to colleagues, saying, “It sweetens his kind gesture by the fact that I agree with him.”

Challenge and riposte

This cost a remonstrance over my Churchillian credentials. A friend wrote:

Tariffs are a tax on domestic consumers, not foreign exporters. It’s crony capitalism for those domestic industries being “protected.” Churchill’s early mentor, Bourke Cockran, understood that; so did his protégé. So sad that someone otherwise so knowledgeable about WSC as you still doesn’t get it! Perhaps a re-read of For Free Trade might help you regain our hero’s wisdom? “Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time.” I saw that in a movie somewhere. [He refers to Young Winston.]

Uh-oh. My day in the barrel? But “never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense”:

Churchill wrote For Free Trade…

As Conservatives we are convinced that an effective measure of protection for British industry and British agriculture must hold a leading place in any scheme of national self-regeneration.… Only by walking in company together can the races and states of the British Empire preserve their glory and their livelihood.

On to the End

Irwin Stelzer comments

In asking permission to quote him, I showed Dr. Stelzer my words above and asked what he thought. He replied:

You’ve got it right. After all, Trump did not initiate trade wars; they were in place for years. It’s just that America was a non-combatant victim, eschewing Adam Smith’s advice.* If Trump is telling the truth—that his tariffs are a means of getting those in violation of world trading rules to the table so that trade will end up freer and fairer—they are unobjectionable. His insistence that other countries are paying the tariffs is either stupidity or a lie. I prefer to believe it is the latter.

There is an additional problem you might consider. Free traders concentrate on efficiency and maximizing growth. They ignore the distributional consequences: there are winners and losers. The little old lady sewing sneakers in a southern factory is the loser—collateral damage. The American consumer is the winner, at least until forced to pay taxes to support the losers. Since the average unskilled worker subject to competition from cheap labor is probably poorer than the average consumer, free trade involves an income transfer from poorer to richer. Tariffs are a crude way of preventing that regressive transfer. Better to allow it to occur and spend tax money retraining and/or supporting the innocent losers.

*Adam Smith’s advice

…It may sometimes be a matter of deliberation how far it is proper to continue the free importation of certain foreign goods … when some foreign nation restrains  by high duties or prohibitions the importation of some of our manufactures into their country. Revenge in this case naturally dictates retaliation … when there is a probability that they will procure the repeal of the high duties or prohibitions complained of. —The Wealth of Nations IV, ii.

A: Very. The late Curt Zoller was the first to write in depth about Bourke Cockran. This man played a vital but little understood role in forming young Churchill’s political philosophy. In 1895, Zoller wrote, when young Churchill traveled to New York on his way to Cuba,

…he was greeted by William Bourke Cockran, a New York lawyer, U.S. congressman, friend of his mother’s and of his American relatives. Winston’s Aunt Clara was married to Moreton Frewen. (The peripatetic “Mortal Ruin” would later badly edit Churchill’s first book, Story of the Malakand Field Force.) For many years Frewen had been a friend of Cockran, who would grow to become one of Winston Churchill’s lifelong inspirations.

Churchill later wrote of “the strong impression which this remarkable man made upon my untutored mind. I have never seen his like, or in some respects his equal. With his enormous head, gleaming eyes, flexible countenance, he looked uncommonly like a portrait of Charles James Fox. It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations but his conversations, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard.”

Cockran’s Influence

The New York congressman, therefore, was crucially important. Churchill based much of his domestic political philosophy, particularly his lifelong belief in Free Trade, on Cockran’s thinking. Thanks to Churchill’s his capacious memory, he was still quoting Cockran’s famous line, “the earth is a generous mother,” forty years later. In the 1950s, Churchill told Adlai Stevenson, Democrat nominee for President  in 1952 and 1956, that his model was a Democrat congressman. Stevenson had to be reminded of who Cockran was.

 

In 2007 Curt Zoller teamed with Michael McMenamin to write Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and his American Mentor. This excellent book is well worth a read, thorough and accurate. 

We can never know for certain how a person would have developed if one or another aspect of his life had been different. But what is clear with regard to Churchill—as his letters at the time and his writings in later years attest—is that a life which before 1895 seemed destined to yield a narrow range of skimpy achievements became from 1895 onwards a life of glorious epitomes and stunning vindications.

Credit Bourke Cockran, New York’s overflowing hospitality, the railroad journey to Tampa and back, or the rampant vitality of a nation outgrowing itself day by day. Credit whatever you will, but do not doubt that Winston’s exposure to his mother’s homeland struck a spark in his spirit. And it was this spark that illuminated the long and arduous road that would take him through triumphs and tragedies to his rendezvous with greatness.