*****

Cita Stelzer. Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship. New York: Pegasus Books, 2024. 236 pages, $29.95, Amazon $26, Kindle $19.99.

Cita Stelzer…

…offers a lively and readable account of Winston Churchill’s hold on important Americans—and theirs on him. Her book nicely complements Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and America (2005). Add Brad Tolppanen’s Churchill in North America 1929 (2014), and you have an excellent triptych on the Anglo-American Special Relationship.

Gilbert’s book was chronological and complete; Tolpannen concentrated on a single year. Stelzer splits the difference. She begins with Churchill’s first U.S. visit in 1895 and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War. Churchill’s long skein of American contacts served him well, and she could easily write a sequel covering the war years and beyond.

Nearly two-thirds of Churchill’s American Network is devoted to his nationwide tours of 1929 and 1931. Churchill’s American Network shows how WSC honed his U.S. contacts, begun in the First World War, that proved so indispensable in the Second.

Early on

On his first U.S. lecture tour in 1900-01, Stelzer observes, young Winston was viewed with some diffidence. Americans tended to sympathize with the Boers, Britain’s enemy in South Africa. Churchill disarmed them by paying tribute to Boer valor—and, in places like Boston, that of his Irish compatriots. Stelzer quotes Manfred Weidhorn on how Churchill, like U.S. Grant, successfully relied on “personal observation” in his war reporting (71).

As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, Churchill met steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, whose Bethlehem Steel was supplying guns to the Allies and “c.k.d.” (crated knocked down) submarines to the Royal Navy. Thus, the First Lord became aware of the “awesome productive capacity” of American industry. They remained close, and Schwab would supply the “Churchill Troupe’s” private railcar for their North American tour in 1929.

Return to “dry” America

By the late Twenties, Churchill’s chief American contact was Bernard Baruch, like Schwab another Great War acquaintance. Stelzer is our guide as the towering financier eases into the heart of the story, 1929-32. From Baruch, WSC learns “the relationship of finance and government and how private sector determined deployment of the nation’s resources” (119).

Two years later, back now for a lecture tour, Churchill assured audiences that “America is not going to crash.” But he couldn’t get over Prohibition, and denounced it in Collier’s. Cita Stelzer ferrets out a poignant quote from that article about the evils of excessive government regulation. Prohibition then, the dominant Administrative State now—Churchill’s view is still worth our attention:

[It is] the most amazing exhibition alike of the arrogance and of the impotence of a majority that the history of representative institutions can show. The extreme self-assertion which leads an individual to impose his likes and dislikes upon others…on a gigantic scale a spectacle at once comic and pathetic…. No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism (81).

Forging “special relationships”

If Churchill coined the term “Special Relationship” for Anglo-American association, he derived it from the contacts he himself forged. Yet not even he, Stelzer observes, “realized how important” the people he met would become.

There were, for example, future War Secretary Henry Stimson, Ambassador to Britain Andrew Mellon, and Navy Secretary Charles Francis Adams III (110).  There were certain key publishers, who didn’t always agree with him, but liked him. From William Randolph Hearst he learned “the variety and popularity of U.S. magazines accessing public opinion” (101).

Another vital publisher was Chicago’s Robert McCormick, who agreed with him even less than Hearst, but liked him equally. When the war began, Anglophobe Senator Tom Connolly questioned whether Churchill would keep his promise never to surrender the Royal Navy. McCormick told him: “Senator, I have known Winston Churchill for twenty-five years. A more thoroughly honorable man never lived. He would not have made that promise if he had not intended to keep it” (204).

American grandees were impressed by Churchill’s collegial attitude toward political opposites like McCormick. After his triumphant address to Congress following Pearl Harbor, he warmly shook hands with Democrat isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Later Churchill said, “I liked him. He is a fighting man…. I respect and admire fighting men even if they are against me” (209).

“Volume diplomacy”

To nurture his U.S. contacts Churchill employed a kind of “volume diplomacy.” He inscribed and sent successive volumes of his life of Marlborough to America’s haute noblesse. Baruch, Schwab, McCormick Hearst, Senator Joe Robinson, and B&O Railroad head Daniel Willard all received copies. Another recipient was insurance tycoon Donald McLennan, who in 1942 extended war damage insurance to endangered companies other insurers wouldn’t touch.

On Churchill’s gift list was Democrat powerhouse and former presidential candidate William McAdoo. In 1929, Baruch had told McAdoo of WSC’s forthcoming visit. McAdoo wrote Churchill: “[G]ive me…some indication of what you would like to do while here….Do you care for any form of public entertainment?” WSC replied, “Do not desire public entertainment but hope to dine with you privately” (62).

Marlborough also went to banker William Henry Crocker, whose Burlingame, California mansion included “a splendid swimming pool.” Crocker had introduced Churchill to several West Coast titans (83). Among these were Cal Tech President and physicist Robert A. Millikan, USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid, and actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  All of them, Stelzer writes, would later support American entry into the Second World War (100). A dose of Winston Churchill hadn’t hurt.

A positive vice

To the consistent horror of his wife, Churchill was an incessant (mostly losing) gambler—casinos and the stock market. His habit, Cita Stelzer writes, “did nothing to improve his reputation among the straitlaced…including Schwab’s associate, “the puritanical Andrew Carnegie” (57). She quotes financial historian David Lough: “I have never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale during my career of advising people about their finances” (125).

But Stelzer sees a saving grace, in that WSC’s addiction was a net gain for him and his readers. “It forced him to rely on his pen, producing forty-three book-length works in seventy-two volumes” Actually it was fifty-one books in eighty volumes—but as Stelzer writes, this was “a gift to the world.” (126)

To that she adds some 400 periodical articles between the World Wars, a dramatic output. Indeed Churchill never stopped writing—and earning. Confined to a New York hospital after being knocked down and nearly killed by a car in 1932, he dictated the story of his accident at a dollar a word.

At the same time, the author continues, he was “in treaty” for twelve Collier’s articles and six for The Strand. Meanwhile, he was telegraphing publisher George Harrap that he had “no serious work between me and [Marlborough] at the present time.” (138)

With Americans, Churchill seemed more cautious about risk-taking. He met Averell Harriman between casino visits in 1927, warning him against investing in Soviet manganese mines. Later he claimed he had saved Harriman millions. Whether Harriman took his advice is unclear, Stelzer writes, but here was another link to “his American chain of relationships that would stand him in good stead for decades” (64). In an adjacent sidebar—one of many on people and events—the author details Harriman’s wartime diplomacy with Churchill and Stalin.

Churchill on Americans

On his very first visit to the U.S., Churchill had written his mother: “What an extraordinary people the Americans are! Their hospitality is a revelation to me and they make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I have never before experienced.” To his brother he simply remarked: “This is a very great country, my dear Jack.”

Cita Stelzer shows that he never found reason to alter that impression. Thirty-five years later he wrote of “gusts of friendliness…expansive gestures…hospitality and every form of kindness… [Americans] are less indurated by disappointment; they have more hopes and more illusions.” This, he observed, meshed well with British “traditional reserve and frigidity….chary of allowing the feeling of friendliness to take root quickly…. It is in the combination of these complementary virtues and resources that the brightest promise of the future dwells” (119).

Again Manfred Weidhorn, “a keen student of Churchill’s attitudes toward America,” is quoted: The United States in Churchill’s view was “a great experiment, a trail blazer, in so many ways the leading nation of the world and the carrier of the hopes of mankind” (193).

Americans on Churchill

A few minor errors of fact do not detract from a good read, full of insight tempered by honesty. For instance, Cita Stelzer doesn’t hide Churchill’s willingness to take advantage of good-natured American hospitality, sometimes with unabashed pushiness. In 1929 she has him writing Hearst to find out whether banker William Crocker or aircraft and oil baron George Armsby “would like to take care of me in San Francisco” (76).

Yet she notes that Churchill’s outgoing character, his fraternal love of his mother’s land, soon disabused his hosts of base impressions. The Anglophile journalist Frederick Wile was not the first American to go out on a limb (albeit with a nickname WSC detested): “Dynamic, brilliant, resourceful and lion-hearted, ‘Winnie’s’ path, his admirers are persuaded, one day will lead him to the premiership” (110).

It would—but not quite in the way Wile expected.

In 1941, a few months after the whole world had seen what his indomitable character had made him, even Americans who had been dismissive were giving Churchill another look. That was when one of his U.S. acquaintances, Henry Luce, named him Time’s “Man of the Year.”

“Churchill cannot reasonably claim to have recruited Henry Luce to his network,” Stelzer writes. “But he can reasonably claim to have attracted Luce to his side…. Luce needed Churchill to make the case for intervention, Churchill needed Luce to make his arguments available to millions, Roosevelt needed both” (209). Mutual need featured hugely in the “Special Relationship.” It still should today.

On America and Americans 

From Sir Martin Gilbert’s remarks on Churchill and America, Chartwell Booksellers, New York, 11 October 2005.

In the beginning….

He came here first in 1895, and he was quite amazed by New York, which was the one city he visited—he was on his way to Cuba to watch the Spaniards grappling with the Cuban insurrectionists. He wrote to his young brother:

Picture to yourself the American people as a great lusty youth who treads on all your sensibilities, perpetrates every possible horror of ill manners, whom neither age not just tradition inspire with reverence, but who moves about his affairs with a good-hearted freshness which may well be the envy of older nations of the earth.

Toward the end….

One of the documents which I’ve never seen reproduced in any history book or collection of documents was the Declaration of Principles which Churchill and Eisenhower signed in the White House on 27 June 1954. He summarized it in a speech to Parliament:

Britain and the United States assert their sympathy for and loyalty to all those still in bondage, proclaim their desire to reduce armaments, and to turn nuclear power into peaceful channels, confirm their support of the United Nations, and all organizations designed to promote peace in the world; and proclaim their destination, to develop and maintain the spiritual, economic and military strength necessary to pursue their purposes effectively based on their mutual comradeship.

In 1955 he summoned his cabinet together for a final chat. And he said to them, “there are two things which matter. One is to remember that man is spirit. And the other thing is: Never be separated from the Americans.”

Related reading

“Origins of Churchill Phrases: ‘Special Relationship’ and ‘Iron Curtain,'” 2019.

“Churchill Quotations: The Best Telegram He Ever Sent,” 2023.

“Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing, After All Other Possibilities are Exhausted,” 2021

“Dewey, Hoover, Churchill, and Grand Strategy, 1950-53,” 2018.

“Churchill’s Ersatz Meeting with Lincoln’s Ghost,” 2018.

“‘Plumpy’ still loves Love Actually…”

Many American friends of Britain (and I trust vice-versa) think the “Special Relationship,” invented by Winston Churchill, tends nowadays to work in only one direction. Love Actually suggests this. Hugh Grant as Prime Minister delivers an unexpected message to a U.S. President.

Seriously stellar cast

Love Actually is a rom-com about ten different romances going on simultaneously in London at Christmas. The cast is remarkable: Colin Firth (“The King’s Speech”), Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, the mute comic), Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman (Sybil Trelawney and Severus Snape from Harry Potter). And Liam Neeson, who for once isn’t slaying the Ungodly but trying to be a good step-dad to his ten- year-old son. (The boy is in love with an American of the same age.)

Quite a cast—not the least Martin Freeman and Joanna Page, who meet as body doubles for movie sex scenes. John says (while naked and simulating sex): “it is nice to have someone I can just chat to.” They fall for each other and she takes him home and invites him in. He says, “Are you sure this is all right? I’ve never done this before.”

PM and President

In the midst of all this the Prime Minister receives a visit from the President of the United States (Billy Bob Thornton). The Prez is a really snarky piece of work. On the side, he tries to seduce Natalie (Martine), of Downing Street staff. During their plenary meeting, he tells Hugh he has an agenda he plans to follow, whatever Britain thinks. take it or leave it.

At the press conference the President mouths the usual platitudes about the Special Relationship and Hugh tells him off in public. Naturally, Churchill gets a mention. This is a terrific scene for those who think the “special relationship” tends sometimes to be a one-way street. You can watch it on YouTube.

Also, the PM gets the girl. When she sends him a Christmas card professing her love, he calls for his chauffeur and heads for her street in Wandsworth (“the dodgy end”). There he goes door to door asking if Natalie lives there. The reactions of the residents are priceless. A woman says, “Are you who I think you are?” Hugh replies: “Yes I am. Sorry for all the cock-ups, not my fault, my cabinets are absolute crap. We’ll try to do better next year.”

He finds Natalie going out to a kids’ Christmas play. He takes her whole family to it in his Jaguar with its police escort, then hides with Natalie backstage. Unfortunately the curtain pulls back at the end and they’re caught. “Too late, just smile and wave.”

By the way, a tip of the hat to former Prime Minister David Cameron, who said similar things, though not with Hugh Grant’s panache. (Some Britons who watch the film, perhaps not so jokingly, like to propose Grant for PM. His character displays none of the gratuitous pomposity and virtue signaling of the current crop of politicians. And not just the British ones.)

Around the same time, Congress was engaged in the perennial mock debate about raising the debt ceiling. (The ceiling was rather lower then. If my ceiling had been raised as often in the last ten years, I’d be faced with zoning violations.)

In the debt ceiling debate Senator Angus King (I.- Me.) deployed, for the 3,408th time, a dubious Churchill aphorism: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”

Did Churchill ever say anything like that? The answer is: unproven. It is in my quotations book, Churchill By Himself, page 124, Chapter 8 (America), under the heading, “Characteristics of Americans.” But I waffled in the accompanying note:

Circa 1944. Unattributed and included tentatively. Certainly he would never have said it publicly; he was much too careful about slips like that. It cannot be found in any memoirs of his colleagues. I have let it stand as a likely remark, for he certainly had those sentiments from time to time.

Lack of provenance

This is one of the few quotes in my book for which I could not find solid attribution. I was been told that it came from Sir John “Jock” Colville‘s memoirs, but I couldn’t find it there. Nor did Sir John mention it in our conversations. If proven apocryphal it will go to my appendix of inaccurate quotations,  entitled, “Red Herrings.” In the meantime, it sticks: former Congressman Paul Ryan used it awhile back (slightly inaccurately) in a speech at Claremont Institute.

It’s a great line—more appropriate right now than it was in 2011. Undoubtedly Churchill nursed those sentiments, though maybe not publicly. Here is another remark along those lines which we do know is genuine:

Their national psychology is such that the bigger the Idea the more wholeheartedly and obstinately do they throw themselves into making it a success. It is an admirable characteristic, providing the Idea is good. —The Second World War, vol. V, Closing the Ring (London: Cassell, 1952), 494.

Reader comments

The post above is reprised from its first publication ten years ago. At the time it drew these comments by readers:

Micah: “Quote Investigator offers what seems to be a pretty credible genealogy of this quote. They attribute it to Abba Eban (1915-2002), a longtime Israeli Foreign Minister.”

There’s no reason to doubt Q.I. Don’t you wish we could find the exact moment where some gag becomes Churchillian Drift? It is now broadly accepted that Nancy Astor told Churchill’s close friend F.E. Smith that if she were married to Smith, she’d put poison in his coffee. F.E.—a great wag, and faster off the cuff than Churchill—replied that if he were married to her, he’d drink it. Wouldn’t it be fun to know precisely when some villain drifted that crack from the forgotten F.E. Smith to the legendary Churchill?

Richard Munro: “I have often heard it quoted, even by reputable historians. You are right to be cautious. In any case it is not really very complimentary to Americans. I always thought it was unChurchill-like in its slight anti-Americanism. I think it will be found to belong to someone else ultimately.”

Many would not see this remark as anti-American, but as a plain expression by a friend—and after all, it has often been true. As has been said, “A friend is someone who knows all about you, but likes you.”

Recently a prominent historian said Churchill “could never quite make up his mind whether America was Britain’s friend or Britain’s enemy.” Are we sure about when exactly WSC had that trouble?

“Yes there were times, I think you knew….”

Churchill was appalled over Woodrow Wilson’s naiveté at Versailles. He railed over U.S. insistence that Britain repay every debt from the First World War, which had cost Britain the flower of a generation. He criticized the U.S. system of set four-year elections—many still do today. WSC chafed over America staying out of World War II until Japan forced her hand. He argued over when and where to invade Hitler’s Europe. FDR’s apparent “tilt” toward Stalin at Teheran depressed him. But from the time he set foot in America, Churchill never deviated from the belief in the centrality of Anglo-American fraternity. Never did he lose hope in “the Great Republic.”

The “Special Relationship,” born in 1940, had been nurtured by his American mentor Bourke Cockran four decades earlier. To understand Churchill is to appreciate his belief in the primacy of U.S. friendship, which never wavered, however often he disagreed with U.S. policy. That was established on his first visit to America in 1895, when he wrote his brother: “This is a very great country, my dear Jack.”

Prominently quoted in this context is a remark Churchill made to de Gaulle—at least according to de Gaulle—in Unity, his 1942-44 war memoirs: “…each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea.”

Nothing to do with the EU

Warren Kimball’s Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (III, 169), nicely clears up this quotation. Churchill was referring to de Gaulle, not to anything resembling today’s EU. He wrote to Roosevelt on 7 June 1944: “I think it would be a great pity if you and he [de Gaulle] did not meet. I do not see why I have all the luck.” In his remark about the “open sea,” he was criticizing the intransigent attitude of de Gaulle’s Free French, and stating his intention to side with Roosevelt. Kimball writes:

In a letter…to General Marshall, [Eisenhower] commented that only two groups remained in France: “one is the Vichy gang, and the other [is] characterized by unreasoning admiration for de Gaulle.” In the original draft Eisenhower had put it even more strongly, asserting that the second group “seems almost idolatrous in its worship of de Gaulle” (Eisenhower Papers, III 1867-68).

Even de Gaulle recalled the phrases, though he surmised that Churchill’s passion was aimed primarily at the ears of his British associates: “Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.” (de Gaulle, Unity, 153).

More definitive…

Reader Kevin Ruane (@KevinRuane2) directed me to something Churchill said which would seem more to the point. In a memo to his cabinet on 29 November 1951, Churchill addressed the question of Britain  joining the Schuman Plan, a single authority to control the production of steel and coal in France and West Germany, open to other European countries to join:

Our attitude towards further economic developments on the Schuman lines resembles that which we adopt about the European Army. We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged with and do not forfeit our insular or commonwealth character. Our first object is the unity and consolidation of the British Commonwealth….Our second, “the fraternal association” of the English-speaking world; and third, United Europe, to which we are a separate closely- and specially-related ally and friend. (National Archives, CAB129/48C(51)32.)

“European pensioners”

In John Charmley’s Churchill’s Grand Alliance, the above is followed by a statement from Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: “It is only when plans for uniting Europe take a federal form that we ourselves cannot take part, because we cannot subordinate ourselves or the control of British policy to federal authorities” (Charmley, 250).

On 13 December 1951, Churchill agreed with Eden’s formulation. He wrote to Conservative delegation to the European Consultative Assembly. His note suggests that the Labour Party, then as now, was generally hostile to Britain within Europe. From The Churchill Documents, Vol. 31, 1951-1965, forthcoming from Hillsdale College Press, 2019…

We seem in fact to have succumbed to the Socialist Party hostility to United Europe. I take the full blame because I did not feel able either to go there myself or send a message. You know my views about the particular kind of European Army into which the French are trying to force us. We must consider very carefully together how to deal with the certainly unfavourable reaction in American opinion. They would like us to fall into the general line of European pensioners which we have no intention of doing.

Churchill’s 1951 statements clearly arrays him against Britain joining a “federal system.” But what kind of system? The concepts and forms of 1951 are not those of today.  It may tempting and even supporting to suggest this proves Churchill would be pro-Brexit. But it is not dispositive. Neither Europe nor the British Commonwealth are what they were then.

Again on 11 May 1953 Churchill told the House of Commons: “We are not members of the European Defence Community, nor do we intend to be merged in a federal European system. We feel we have a special relationship to both.”

Then is not now

Let’s also clear up the story bandied about by the other side of the EU debate, from Field Marshal Montgomery, who wrote that Churchill in 1962 was “protesting against Britain’s proposed entry into the Common Market” (then the EEC, predecessor to the EU). Montgomery’s statement not only took advantage of a private conversation with an old and ailing friend; it also misrepresented Churchill’s views. Sir Winston’s daughter Lady Soames wrote: “What I remember clearly is that not only my father, but all of us—particularly my mother—were outraged by Monty’s behaviour, and he was roundly rebuked.” (For more detail see Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair, Hillsdale College Press, 2013, 1337.)

* * *

In his memoir, Long Sunset, Sir Winston’s longtime private secretary Sir Anthony Montague Browne wrote that Montgomery, while not entirely inventing Churchill’s remark, was seriously misinterpreting the old man’s opinion. Consulting no one, Montague Browne immediately released to the press a statement of Churchill’s views on the subject in a private, unpublished letter to his Woodford constituency chairman, Mrs. Moss, in August 1961.” Extracting from Churchill’s statement, on pages 273-74 of Long Sunset:

For many years, I have believed that measures to promote European unity were ultimately essential to the well-being of the West. In a speech at Zurich in 1946, I urged the creation of the European Family, and I am sometimes given credit for stimulating the ideals of European unity which led to the formation of the economic and the other two communities. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the key to these endeavours lay in partnership between France and Germany.

…They, together with Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, are welding themselves into an organic whole, stronger and more dynamic than the sum of its parts. We might well play a great part in these developments to the profit not only of ourselves, but of our European friends also…. I think that the Government are right to apply to join the European Economic Community, not because I am yet convinced that we shall be able to join, but because there appears to be no other way by which we can find out exactly whether the conditions of membership are acceptable.

Fence-sitting

Montague Browne admitted that this was “a fence-sitting letter,” with fairly mild opinions. But it “took the heat off and pacified” both the Euro-skeptics and the Euro-enthusiasts. “Now the whole scenario is so out of date as to render the letter irrelevant….”

Churchill held more stock in the “Special Relationship” with the United States than what was then the European Community, Sir Anthony said, but he did not think they were mutually exclusive: “Moreover, the British Commonwealth, or at least the old Commonwealth, was not then the charade it has now become….If Britain had taken the initiative before the Treaty of Rome in 1957 things might have been different.”

Futile speculation

In fairness, it has been pointed out to me by a respected historian that Montgomery was telling the truth. But Churchill’s remarks were about the EEC, not the EU, or anything like it. Thus, on the matter of Britain remaining in or leaving the EU, they are non-sequitur.

These passages represent Churchill’s ultimate views on European Unity, or Union. The EEC began as a free trade agreement, providing practical and benificent commercial arrangements for member nations. It has morphed into something entirely different. The British electorate voted accorcdingly.

So let’s stop all this futile speculation over how Winston Churchill would view the Brexit debate. That was then, this is now. It is impossible to know how today’s choices before Great Britain vis-à-vis the European Union would be viewed by Churchill. And to quote Sir Anthony: “improper use should not be made of him.”