August 15, 2013

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 30

BY PHILIP P. LARSON

Churchill s visits to the Windy City revealed his great qualities. Contemporary reports recall the man in all his brilliance, and the city in all its luster.

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JANUARY 1901: “A CERTAIN DASH AND ELOQUENCE”

The front page of the Chicago Tribune featured an impressive looking young man above the caption: “Man of the Future…who may some day be Premier.”¹ Winston Spencer Churchill was twenty-six; although it would take another thirty-eight years to fulfill its prophecy, the newspaper had recognized his potential.

In America’s heartland, Churchill already enjoyed a recognition afforded few foreigners. His adventures during the British campaigns in India, Egypt and the South African Boer War had been well publicized. American newspapers painted him as a military and journalistic hero. He was also an accomplished author: five books, all published in American editions, and a syndicated column on the Boer War that appeared in the Chicago Tribune among other newspapers.²

There were family ties, too. His American grandfather, Leonard Jerome, epitomized the country’s spirit, being part owner of The New York Times and a millionaire sportsman who had made and lost several fortunes.³ His American mother was on the social register of two continents; his father had been a notable politician.

Nevertheless there was confusion. The name Winston Churchill was exactly the same as a popular New Hampshire novelist of the period (see “That Other Winston Churchill,” FH 108). In fact, at the time of Churchill’s first visit to Chicago, a theatrical rendition of the American Churchill’s novel, Richard Carvel, was playing in the city; a newspaper review panned it, “Churchill’s Novel, A Mere Burlesque.”⁴

A humorous incident happened while Churchill was staying at the Auditorium Annex. Observing him riding in a Hansom carriage, a busboy recently emigrated from Britain exclaimed: “Don’t ‘e look better than ‘is pictures, now? He’s every hinch a soldier and a gentleman. The pictures make ‘im look delicate-like, but ‘e’s a Churchill, ‘e is!” It was suggested that his American blood was particularly significant, but “the lad waved the remark aside and repeated “‘E’s a Churchill every time.”⁵

Churchill was in the Midwest as part of a speaking tour arranged by Major James Pond of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau: a grueling three-month blitz of eastern and central North America.⁶ Pond’s ideas of promotion bordered on the ridiculous (Churchill called him “a vulgar Yankee impresario”) and caused the speaker to “revolt” before his Chicago engagements. The New York Times said Pond had threatened the “vengeance of the law” after Churchill said he was too tired to go on.⁷ But the quarrel was resolved, and young Winston prepared to meet his first Chicago audience.

The omens were not all good. Chicago’s Irish, instinctively anti-British, were joined by numerous Boers and Dutch. The Boer War had created much sympathy for the underdog Boers, whom Americans perceived as being exploited by the mighty British Empire. This struck a nerve at a time when many Americans were protesting the U.S. occupation of the Philippines and Cuba as the unwelcome start of a colonial empire.

Despite an audience liberally sprinkled with these critics, Churchill’s lecture, “The Boer War as I Saw It,” came off well. “Cool nerve and consummate tact alone prevented a clash,” said one reviewer. Using a Magic Lantern, young Winston first displayed “a typical Boer soldier.” Cheers erupted, with a “Hurrah for the Boers” from a gallery spectator that drew hisses from pro-British listeners. Churchill took immediate charge: “Do not hiss,” he told them. “There is one of the heroes of history. The man in the gallery is right. No true-hearted Englishman will grudge a brave foe cheers.”

That magnanimous remark won their attention. He kept it by giving a balanced and fair account of the war. “All rose to a point of enthusiasm seldom equaled when he continued: ‘As an Englishman, I do not want to see the British flag remain above Pretoria unless it carries with it justice, liberty, and proper administration of the common law.'”⁸ He added generously: “For a pastoral people, devoting their lives to religious contemplation, the Boers have the most modern and improved guns in the world, and all the armies in Europe are now busy copying the military equipment of a people that never meant to harm anybody.”⁹

The reviews were mainly glowing: “distinct originality, a keen perception, pronounced ideas, a nonchalant manner and withal a certain dash and eloquence.”¹⁰

One paper held otherwise: “Mr. Churchill speaks with the regulation English stutter, while he rests his hands on his hips, and moves around in an ungraceful, jerky manner….the lecture made no pretensions to consecutive or rhetorical effort [though he] displayed great tact and weathered the storm.”¹¹ Off the stage in an interview, Winston was more combative: “These Boer sympathizers are to my mind ridiculous. It would be okay [sic; he had already picked up American slang!] to send hospital supplies or help them get back into farming, but to shout in America about their grief over Boer defeats is as bad as if I should stand up and sympathize with the Filipinos.”¹²

Chicago socialites such as Mrs. Potter Palmer entertained him at house parties, and directly after the first speech he was given a reception in the relaxed atmosphere of the University Club. Here he took up a lifelong theme: the close bonds between the Americans and British. Unfortunately his well-meaning reflections stirred up controversy.

His first problem came when discussing the commonality of language, when he stressed the danger of English “going to the dogs” unless there was a central authority, like the French Academy, to police deviations. A Chicago Tribune editorial said such fears were groundless and the cure impractical: “Slang of yesterday sometimes becomes pure speech of tomorrow.”¹³

Next, Churchill had quipped that “the symbol of Anglo-Saxon unity is in the bath tub and toothbrush.” Under the headline, “Mr. Churchill and the Tub,” another paper scoffed that Englishmen of his class had only recently allowed commoners the necessity of bathing, and scolded that Americans seldom entertained strangers “by telling them when they last tubbed [and] when they expect to tub again.”¹⁴

Churchill fared better in his encounter with “Dynamite Dick,” an Irishman whose real name was J. N. King, who had served with the Irish-American Ambulance Corps in the Boer War. Seizing the opportunity for his fifteen minutes of fame, Dynamite Dick claimed responsibility for blowing up the armored train, which had resulted in Churchill’s capture by the Boers. Churchill’s subsequent escape, he added, had been abetted by a friend who gave him a passport and allowed him to dress in his daughter’s clothes. Churchill angrily denied the fabrication.¹⁵

Dynamite Dick’s facts may have been shaky, but they made good copy. His forum may also have given away his credibility: he was featured at Middleton’s Clark Street Museum along with “Professor Black in his Great Cremation Act” and “Diane, the Flying Lady.”¹⁶

Churchill later recalled: “In Chicago I encountered vociferous opposition. However, when I made a few jokes against myself, and paid a sincere tribute to the courage and humanity of the Boers, they were placated. On the whole I found it easy to make friends with American audiences. They were cool and critical, but also urbane and good-natured.”¹⁷

OCTOBER 1929: “NIBBLE SOME OF THE GRASS”

Nearly three decades passed before Churchill returned to Chicago. In the interim he had temporarily risked the city’s ire by writing “The Chicago Scandals,” a review of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in 1906: “Here in the compass of a few hundred pages has been collected all that can be said against the canning industry Mr. Upton Sinclair has done for the ‘packers’ what Mr. Henry Lloyd did some years ago in Wealth Against Commonwealth for the Standard Oil Trust.” His criticism of the Chicago stockyards would be safely relegated to history when, in 1929, he would tour the same stockyards with canner P. D. Armour.

His 1929 visit was personal. “I want to see the country and meet the leaders of its fortunes,” he said. “I have no political mission and no ax to grind….One must have time to feel a country and nibble some of the grass.”¹⁸ With him were his brother Jack, his son Randolph, and Jack’s son Johnny—the two young Oxford men invited, as Winston put it, “to see these mighty lands at a period in their lives when the proportions of things are established in the mind.”¹⁹

The trip had been arranged mainly by financier Bernard Baruch, a friend of Winston’s from World War I, who even provided a private rail car for part of the trip. Baruch later remarked: “From that time on I was privileged to have the friendship of this extraordinary man, one of the greatest in history, [and to know a man who] pauses to admire the beauty of a rose or to lecture the goldfish in a pond as he feeds them.” Baruch also referred to “cables I have received from this master of English prose [expressing] his enthusiasm over some development with a brisk ‘Oh boy.”²⁰

Chicago headlines on October 2nd read, “Statesman Greets Interviewers with Smile—but Closed Lips.” WSC, “chuckling and smiling…walked like a spry youth along the train platform….Dressed in a tight fitting gray business suit, he was the picture of a healthy middle-aged man with apparently not a care in the world.” Dodging reporters, the party hurried off to the Drake Hotel.²¹

For a gentleman of leisure, he kept a full schedule for his three days in town. On Wednesday, after accompanying Armour to the stockyards, he attended his first prize fight at the Coliseum, promoted by the legendary Jack Dempsey (“Britain’s most famous statesman was mingling his well mannered applause with [the crowd’s] less polite shouts”).²² On Thursday he visited the Gary steel mills and the Insull (now Commonwealth Edison) power plant. On Friday he attended a Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Chicago Club, and that evening he gave his only Chicago speech, to the Commercial Club in the Blackstone Hotel.

A society reporter gossiped of a private lunch between Churchill and actress Ethel Barrymore, to whom Winston had once proposed. Miss Barrymore quenched the story by saying they were old friends, along with his wife and children. The thwarted columnist said “it would have been a nice story…”²³ Just three years later Miss Barrymore would visit the convalescing Churchill after he’d been hit by a car in New York City. Discussing fate and lucky escape, Churchill would conclude: “You know Ethel, I have a terrible past.”²⁴

Before 300 at the Commercial Club, Churchill asserted no anxiety about America building a fleet which might threaten naval parity: “…we think it is more likely that our fleets…will be used together for some higher purpose in the preservation of world peace.” Again there was recurrent theme of British-American partnership: “Here we have a vast, unifying process which is proceeding between the English-speaking peoples,” he said, “linking them together in a thousand natural ways.”²⁵ He also dismissed the need for a naval treaty: “… a rigid settlement, narrowly, jealously and suspiciously interpreted…might work well enough between some countries,” but it was superfluous for “Englishmen and Americans with their sturdy love of independence.”²⁶

The doyen of Chicago, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Tribune, had planned personally to entertain Churchill but was forced to cancel. He wrote a letter regretting that he was “not able to return the charming hospitality which you have extended in London.” He did dispatch his right-hand man, John T. McCutcheon, to meet the Churchills at the Commercial Club and to take them on a tour of the Tribune Building, “where they admired the illuminated city from its summit.”²⁷

Winston Churchill completed his second visit to Chicago by reaffirming his strong optimism about America’s future. Soon afterward, in New York, he would witness Black Thursday and the stock market crash, which would destroy his own investments. Afterwards, Churchill observed, “No one who gazed on such a scene could doubt that this financial disaster, huge as it is, cruel as it is to thousands, is only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people who by fierce experiment are hewing new paths for man, and showing to all nations much that they should attempt and much that they should avoid.”²⁸

February 1932: “OPTIMIST ALARMIST”

Churchill’s 1932 visit more closely resembled that of 1901: it was purely a money raiser, with Churchill again working through an American lecture agency. Its flyer, picturing a smiling WSC, called him the “stormy petrel of British politics, ” a speaker “scintillating with wit.”²⁹ But plans were interrupted in New York. On his way to meet Baruch, he looked the wrong way crossing Fifth Avenue and was almost killed by a passing motorist. He had committed the cardinal sin of forgetting on which side of the road cars were driven in foreign countries.

Besides physical problems he was receiving threats from a secret Indian society, transmitted by the State Department and the British India Office: “Churchill will not be permitted to leave the United States alive!”³⁰ The cause was WSC’s campaign against the India Act. Walter Thompson, his bodyguard, was on high alert.

Colonel McCormick eased anxieties by hosting Churchill at his palatial townhouse just off Lake Shore Drive. Here WSC was “wont to park himself in front of a certain Cezanne which he considered supremely beautiful,” to spend time reading Fannie Hurst, “which caused him blissfully sad moments of tearful emotion.”³¹ Although still convalescing from his accident, Churchill had energy enough to hike to his fourth floor quarters where, servants complained, he returned each night to work on his biography Marlborough until three or four in the morning.³² Even when traveling, the dynamo writer never stopped.

His first speech, “The World Economic Crisis,” was delivered at the Union League before 1200 people, another 500 listening in the lounge via loudspeakers. Upon being introduced to this “extraordinarily distinguished gathering of solid men,” Churchill mounted the platform “by means of a chair, instead of going around to the steps on the other side.” He returned quickly to his familiar theme: the United States and British Empire were a team, with the power to remedy any situation. Presaging Franklin Roosevelt’s remarks to him after Pearl Harbor nine years later, Churchill said: “We are in the same boat…we have slipped off the ledge of the precipice and are at the bottom. The only thing now is not to kick each other while we are there.”³³

A Tribune literary editor thought Churchill had delivered “a completely successful, cagey lecture. He spoke an hour without really saying anything, but did it impressively in well-rounded sentences made up of well-chosen words spoken in the best British accent.”³⁴ Another paper described him as the “insurgent conservative, the optimist alarmist…cold, hard, heavy facts, he dealt them swiftly, one overlapping the other, and his audience seemed to relish the dish served up to it.”³⁵

Churchill’s second speech took the same line as his first. One paper reported: ‘”All roads lead to Rome’ might have been applied to Orchestra Hall yesterday where most of the town elegantes… gathered to hear that astute British spokesman.”³⁶ Now he included stern warnings about Communism, which he likened as slavery to despotic government: “I see two imminent forces that will be brought to bear in the shaping of mankind’s destiny—the armed Asiatic concept of Communism and the English-speaking ideal of individualism. Our disunion may make the struggle end the wrong way. That the struggle will come, I have no doubt.” He closed with a refrain that would become well known across America in later years: “We hear when we draw close together in international affairs, the whisper [he put his hand to his ear] and sometimes the cry, Ah, look! The English and the Americans are working together!'”³⁷

Prohibition was still in force on this visit, and Churchill discussed the different approaches of Britain and America on the “evil of intemperance” in a lighter vein. Churchill believed the problem should be treated as a disease, not a moral issue. He described how Britain had been more successful with taxing liquor: “What a help that was! When I see you looking about for something new to tax [here he went through a brief but comical pantomime of looking about], I cannot but think how helpful you too would find ten or twelve millions in taxes…collected by the tax gatherer instead of now, by less desirable hands.” This statement received “vigorous and prolonged applause.”³⁸ (In 1929 he had said of “near beer” that its excess alcohol was “thrown to the dogs” lest it “spread its maddening poison…”³⁹)

Phyllis Moir, Churchill’s American secretary hired for this trip, parlayed her brief experience into a book, I Was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary, after he became Prime Minister. WSC, she said, “expects complete satisfaction from those he employs [and is] bent on giving complete satisfaction himself.” He is “always at his best when fighting something.. .works under great pressure and seems to enjoy it.” Because of constant refinements, he never gave the same speech twice: like the man, his speeches “never stop growing.”⁴⁰

Detective Thompson had quite a different perspective. After the Orchestra Hall speech, while Churchill was chatting near the front door, a well-dressed Indian burst through the door and made directly for him. Thompson headed him off, drawing his gun. The suspect turned and crashed into the arms of two American detectives. The man was not armed, but the incident demonstrated Thompson’s great tension.⁴¹

Churchill left Chicago “having a very successful tour,” as he wrote a friend. “I have never seen anything like the friendliness of the sentiments towards us in any of my former visits.”⁴² But his iron will had pushed him through his physical problems. “I feel I need to rest and not to have to drive myself so hard. You have no idea what I have been through. “⁴³ The city remained close to his heart. He later reminisced: “There was a splendor in Chicago and a life thrust that is all its own.”⁴⁴

1965: FINAL SALUTE

Upon Churchill’s death, Chicago demonstrated an outpouring of grief and affection. By order of Mayor Daley all government flags were lowered to half-mast for a week, and at the state level Governor Kerner sent a delegate to London for the funeral.

The Tribune led with a three-column front page picture. The Daily News featured a photo of WSC in the rubble during the Blitz, with a memorable Kennedy quotation, “The most honorable man to walk the stage of human history in the time in which we live.”

Political cartoonists, forsaking their usual satire and hyperbole, rose to the occasion. The Tribune’s Joseph Parrish offered “the Momentous Choice—the choice between individual liberty and state domination,” then pictured Churchill and “History” under the caption, “Old Friends.” Jensen of the Daily News drew a cigar smoking figure with a cane, flashing the “V” sign and casting a huge shadow across the open book of history.

Merrill C. Meigs, the man for whom Chicago’s downtown airfield was named, recalled a visit to Churchill in his darkest hour. The PM, he said, had been resolute and optimistic, saying: “I am sure all this we are going through has some good purpose. I feel and know that democracy is bound to win, and from it humanity will reap many benefits.” As Churchill was showing him out, the statue of Lord Nelson was visible in the distance over Trafalgar Square, where it had defied the Luftwaffe. Churchill said, “Nelson still stands, and the old boy can take it—so can we.”

Chicago witnessed Churchill’s greatness and his personal side alike. As the Daily News put it, “Churchill lived, wrote and guided history—but so have many great men. What is unique with Churchill, Lincoln and their kind is [that] in gaining a worlds respect they also won its love. As long as there is a Britain, that love will endure for the squared-jawed little man with the bowler hat, the cigar and the twinkling eye, who lifted a great people to their finest hour.”

Mr. Larson and his wife Susan are the directors of the Winston S. Churchill Friends of Greater Chicago. Materials from the 1929 lecture tour by kind courtesy of the University of Iowa Library.

Endnotes:

1. Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1901.

2. Chicago Tribune, 18 February 1900.

3. Anita Leslie, The Remarkable Mr. Jerome. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1955, 4-5.

4. Inter-Ocean Daily (Chicago), 24 January 1901.

5. Chicago Journal, 10 January 1901.

6. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. I: Youth 1874-1900. London: Heinemann, 1966, 540-1.

7. New York Times, 29 December 1900.

8. Chicago Journal, 11 January 1901.

9. Ibid.

10. Chicago Evening Post, 10 January 1901.

11. Inter-Ocean Daily, 11 January 1901.

12. Chicago Times-Herald, 11 January 1901.

13. Chicago Tribune, 13 January 1901.

14. Inter-Ocean Daily, 13 January 1901.

15. Ibid., 11 January 1901.

16. Chicago Times-Herald, 6 January 1901.

17. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life. London: Odhams Books Ltd., 1965, 356-57.

18. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 2, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935, London: Heinemann, 1981, 9-10, 16-17.

19. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. V, Prophet of Truth 1922-1939. London: Heinemann, 1976, 335.

20. Bernard Baruch, The Public Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, 122.

21. Chicago Daily News, 2 October 1929.

22. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill vol. V, op. cit., 346-48.

23. Chicago Herald and Examiner, 6 October 1929.

24. Jack Fishman, My Darling Clementine. New York: David McKay Co., 1963, 77.

25. Chicago Tribune, 5 October 1929.

26. New York Times, 5 October 1929.

27. Colonel Robert R. McCormick Research Center of the First Division at Cantigny, Wheaton, 111.

28. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill vol. V, op. cit., 350.

29. Redpath Chautauqua Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

30. Jack Fishman, My Darling Clementine, op. cit., 72.

31. Chicago Tribune, Cousin Eve;s column, 17 February 1932.

32. Chicago Tribune, 25 January 1965.

33. Ibid., 3 February 1965.

34. Fanny Butcher, Many Lives—One Love. New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 187.

35. Chicago Daily News, 3 February 1965.

36. Chicago American, 8 February 1932.

37. Chicago Tribune, 8 February 1932.

38. Ibid.

39. Robert Pilpel, Churchill in America 1895-1961. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 83-84.

40. Phyllis Moir, I Was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary. New York: Wilfred Funk, Inc., 1941, 162.

41. Walter H. Thompson, Assignment Churchill, New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1955, 114-15.

42. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill vol. V, op. cit., 426.

43. Ibid., 427.

44. Kay Halle, Winston Churchill on America and Britain, op. cit., 265.