Text of my Zoom address to the Chartwell Society of Portland, Oregon on 10 May 2021, 81st anniversary of Churchill taking office as Prime Minister. “In Defense of Liberty” is part of as an iTunes audio file. For a copy, please email rlangworth@hillsdale.edu.
A Life Devoted to Constitutional Liberty (continued from Part 2)
Churchill was far more than the hero of 1940. His thinking on concepts like liberty, representative government and the rule of law are as important today as ever. Holding the Anglo-American relationship central, he had a vast appreciation for and understanding of the British and American constitutions, and the pros and cons of each.…
“Why are you buying expensive pills over the counter?” asked Dr. John Mather. We were in an elevator during a 2001 Churchill Conference. “Don’t you have an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard?” He was then a Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service and Assistant Inspector General at the Veteran’s Administration. I’d never thought my four years with the USCG worthy of anything special, but I did have my DD-214. Mather said I was entitled: “We issue cheap pills.”
In the lift with us was Luce Churchill, married to Sir Winston’s grandson.…
This history of the Official Biography was first published in Finest Hour 190, Fourth Quarter 2020
“We go back a long way,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn recently reminded me. “I knew Dal Newfield.” He realized that would invoke a fond memory. A few still remember the man responsible for where some of us are today.
Dalton Newfield was a Sacramento army veteran who had admired Winston Churchill since he saw him live during World War II. In 1970, I shrank away from Finest Hour after the first eleven issues. I was clearing the decks for an automotive writing career in New York City.…
Crater eruptions: “Isn’t it enough to have this parent volcano continually erupting in our midst? And now we are to have these subsidiary craters spouting forth the same unhealthy fumes!” —Churchill’s reply to the son of a harsh critic, freshly elected to Parliament, who immediately began attacking him.
From one crater to anotherNo sooner does the campaign for Churchill’s memory quell emissions from one crater than another one erupts. The campaign to delegitimize Churchill as Hero continues, but the main volcanos have already erupted. Now we have the odd subsidiary crater spouting the same old stuff.…
Case for the defense: “If we allow our monuments and statues and place-names to be torn down because of our present-day views, and claims of people being offended by our built environment that has been around for decades and sometimes centuries, it speaks to a pathetic lack of confidence in ourselves as a nation. We are on the way to a society of competing victimhoods, atomized and balkanized into smaller and smaller communities, which ironically enough is something racists want too.” —Andrew Roberts
Defense of the goodThe Hillsdale College Churchill Project has joined many other groups and individuals in defense of the good.…
Hillsdale College has announced acquisition of an important part of the Ronald Cohen collection of the writings of Sir Winston Churchill. It numbers almost 2000 individual items. They comprise six categories: forewords, prefaces, and introductions by Churchill; periodical articles; works and periodicals containing Churchill speeches; letters, memoranda, statements and letters to the editor. Some 15% of these writings have not seen print since their original, limited editions, and therefore comprise a “submerged canon,” because they open a fresh field of Churchill scholarship.
Hillsdale College also has a temporary, exclusive purchase option for the balance of the collection, books written by Winston Churchill.…
Hillsdale College has acquired the world’s most comprehensive collection of Churchill recordings. Many are very rare because they reach back over a century.
The collection was generously donated by collector and bibliographer Ronald I. Cohen of Ottawa, Ontario. Among the 300 recordings are 100 speeches and 24 readings from Churchill’s war memoirs.
Hillsdale College has a long-standing commitment to leadership studies through The Churchill Project. We encourage scholarship in, and completion of, the remaining volumes of The Churchill Documents, a series in Churchill’s official biography. The final volume 23 arrives in 2019, and so completes a 31-volume epic Randolph Churchill began in 1962.…
…is the only Churchill quotations book with each entry referenced with a date and source. There’s even an appendix on incorrect quotations (called “Red Herrings”), stating why they are not Churchill’s. By Himself is also the only Churchill quote book that has undergone repeated reviews to produce a text as close to Churchill’s original words as possible. Fortunately, it’s been continuously in print for over ten years, making constant revision possible.
Just before the first publication in 2008, we found that a transcriber had made many errors in copying out quotations.…
