June 21, 2015

Finest Hour 104, Autumn 1999

Page 34

By Richard M. Langwortn

The Great Republic: A History of America, by Sir Winston Churchill, edited and arranged by Winston S. Churchill, 460 pp., illus. Published at $25.95, member price $19 + shipping from Churchill Center Book Club, PO Box 385, Contoocook NH 03229.


Recently I received in the post a new book, The Great Republic, by Sir Winston Churchill. Attached was a card: “With the compliments of the author.” This certainly demonstrates Sir Winston’s long reach—all the more impressive when we think that, 99 years ago, Winston Churchill was first introduced to a Boston audience.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

Churchill was on a lecture tour in which he gamely engaged American audiences on the Boer War from the British point of view—a view not shared by his listeners. Whenever he displayed a magic lantern slide of a Boer cavalryman, they would break out into applause—but Churchill would disarm them, saying, “You are quite right to applaud him; he is the most formidable fighting man in the world.”

In New York he was introduced by Mark Twain, patriarchal with his flowing white hair, seen by Churchill as “very old”—Twain was in fact 65—and combining “with a noble air a most delightful style of conversation. Of course we argued about the war…I think however that I did not displease him, for he was good enough to sign at my request every one of the twenty-five volumes of his works for my benefit, and in the first volume he inscribed, I daresay, a gentle admonition: ‘To do good is noble; to teach others how to be good is nobler, & no trouble.'”

Alas there is no Mark Twain to introduce Winston Churchill now, so you’ll just have to settle for me. But I have dug out and will shortly read exactly what Mark Twain said that night in 1899, because it is relevant to the Winston Churchill of 1999.

The “author” of The Great Republic is indeed Sir Winston Churchill— but the person who had the imagination to assemble it is his grandson— who has had a remarkable career of his own. If we allow that his mother, the late Pamela Harriman, later became a naturalized American citizen, we might stretch a point and say he is like his grandfather half-American! Like Sir Winston, his grandson earned early fame as a journalist and war correspondent, writing with his father Randolph one of the best accounts of the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, The Six-Day War. Like his grandfather, Winston set off as a young man on a tour of Africa—Sir Winston rode around on elephants and steam engines, his grandson flew an airplane. Winston is a more accomplished pilot than his grandfather, having flown St. John Ambulance emergency medical flights around Europe for many years, whereas his grandfather abandoned flying after urgent remonstration from his wife following several near-misses in the fields around Kent and Sussex.

Like his grandfather, Winston ran for and was elected to Parliament—not, mind you, for a safe seat, but for a suburb of Manchester which he had to fight hard to win and hold. Running as a Conservative in the Davyhulme constituency is rather like running as a Republican in Maryland, or a Democrat in Alaska. It’s really great, but you’re never sure you’ve got the hang of it. Winston held his seat for twenty-seven years until it was yanked from under him by what Americans call redistricting. Politically we find him today in his Wilderness Years—which, like his grandfather’s, are anything but a Wilderness for Winston the journalist and writer.

The Great Republic is not the first posthumous book by Sir Winston Churchill, who has managed to publish a dozen new titles since his death in 1965. But I think this may be the best so far. Not only does it contain everything Sir Winston wrote about America in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, but another twenty-six articles and essays including his three speeches (unique among foreigners) to joint sessions of Congress; and perhaps the greatest speech he ever gave abroad, on Anglo-American unity, at Harvard in 1943. And there is my own favorite essay, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” in which I was pleased to see my remarks, which I’d cut and pasted and e-mailed to Winston when he was planning the book—which in turn he cut and pasted and e-mailed to Random House!

In short I cannot recommend The Great Republic more. Think of it—only $19 (for members) to experience the accumulated wisdom of Sir Winston Churchill with regard to America. This wisdom is perhaps best summarized in young Churchill’s letters to his mother and brother after first arriving in the United States in 1895: “What an extraordinary people the Americans are! Their hospitality is a revelation to me….They make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I have never before experienced….This is a very great country my dear Jack.”

Mark Twain’s 1900 Introduction

“I shall presently have the pleasure of introducing to you an honored friend of mine, Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament, and although he and I do not agree as to the righteousness of the South African war, that’s not of the least consequence, for people who are worth anything never do agree.

“For years I have been a self-appointed missionary for the joining of America and the motherland in friendship and esteem [Applause.] Wherever I have been and whenever I have stood before a gathering of Englishmen or Americans, I have urged my mission and have warmed it up with compliments to both countries.

“Mr. Churchill will tell you about the South African war, and he is competent to tell you about it. He was there and fought through it and wrote through it, and he will tell you his personal experiences. I have an inkling of what they are like, and they are very interesting to those who like that kind of thing. I don’t like that kind of thing myself. I saw a battlefield—once. It was raining, and you know they won’t let you carry an umbrella, and when shells are added to the rain it becomes uncomfortable.

“I think that England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa which she could have avoided, just as we have sinned by getting into a similar war in the Philippines. Mr. Churchill by his father is an Englishman, by his mother he is an American, no doubt a blend that makes the perfect man. England and America; we are kin. And now that we are also kin in sin, there is nothing more to be desired. The harmony is perfect—like Mr. Churchill himself, whom I now have the honor to present to you.”


This review is based on an introduction of Sir Winston’s grandson by the editor at The Boston Athenasum on October 12th.

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.