April 15, 2015

Finest Hour 123, Summer 2004

Page 28

By Elizabeth Olson

The Library of Congress Churchill Exhibit

While on a trip to New York in 1895, Winston Churchill, then 21, wrote to his brother: “This is a very great country, my dear Jack….Not pretty or romantic but great and utilitarian.”

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His relationship with Americans, beginning with his American-born mother, Jennie Jerome, was cultivated over visits spanning most of his life, and helped make him the best-known and most popular British leader on the American side of the Atlantic. That “mutual love affair,” as his daughter Mary Soames calls it, was celebrated in the first comprehensive exhibition on Churchill in the United States. It opened February 5th at the Library of Congress, with major contributions by the Library and the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, ran until mid-July, and is now on tour. The Churchill Centre in Washington supported the cost of the program book, and produced two academic symposia on the exhibit theme.

More than 200 public and private letters, cartoons, photographs, maps, scripts and even a large globe used in plotting wartime strategy were in the exhibition, which focused on Churchill’s long and close ties with the United States.

“Americans who admired him knew he liked them very much and set store by his relationship with America,” Lady Soames said after viewing the display on February 4th, when President Bush also toured it. Views of Churchill are more uniformly positive in the USA than in England. In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower said of Churchill: “He comes closest to fulfilling the requirement of greatness of any individual that I have met in my lifetime.” A collection of video clips at the beginning of the exhibition features American politicians of nearly every stripe quoting Churchill—not always precisely.

One reason for his grandfather’s enduring popularity in the United States, said his grandson and namesake, Winston Churchill, also in Washington for the opening, is that people still remember his stirring wartime broadcasts. “It’s partly a reflection that he put so much effort into crafting his speeches, and he did it himself,” Mr. Churchill said. “One of his private secretaries said he would invest up to one hour of preparation for every minute of delivery. That would mean a 30-minute speech took up to thirty hours of preparation.”

For the exhibition, the Library of Congress scoured its collections and found fifteen previously unknown Churchill letters. In a newly unearthed letter from 1908, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that Churchill “is a rather cheap character” who, like his father, Lord Randolph, displayed “levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety.”

In another letter being exhibited for the first time, from 1898, young Lieutenant Churchill wrote of being “thoroughly sickened of human blood” during the British Army’s cavalry charge at Omdurman, Sudan. But he liked military life, not least because it gave him a chance to win fame and pave his way into politics. His service in the Boer War finally won him the celebrity he sought. After resigning his commission, he wrote dispatches for a London newspaper describing his daring escape from Boer captivity, which rocketed him to fame.

With his hero status, Churchill reached Parliament and later was appointed civilian head of Britain’s Navy, but almost as quickly he was blamed for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 in World War I. He resigned and spent six months as an infantry battalion officer in the trenches in France, where he wrote his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, in a newly discovered letter from 12 January 1916, asking whether he deserved the family motto, “Fiel Pero Desdichado”—”Faithful but Unfortunate.”

It seemed that way to Churchill during periods in his roller-coaster career, which found him both triumphant and defeated and even voted out of office in 1945, directly after the war.

That Churchill had an appetite for the limelight is clear from the exhibition. At the same time, his wartime letters show his determination and courage, important traits in nourishing his country’s “special relationship” with America.

In his address to a joint meeting of Congress on 26 December 1941—the text was on display—Churchill wrote: “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.”

Ms. Olson is a writer for The Washington Post, by whose kind permission this article is reprinted. TOP: Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet aboard USS Augusta, Newfoundland, 9 August 1941. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, DC.