August 13, 2013

Finest Hour 125, Winter 2004-05

Page 33

Inside the Journals

ABSTRACT BY DAVID FREEMAN

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Lee M. Jenkins. “‘If We Must Die’: Winston Churchill and Claude McKay.” Notes & Queries 50 (September 2003): 333-37.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Claude McKay first published his sonnet “If We Must Die” in the July 1919 issue of The Liberator, a left-wing magazine published in New York under the editorship of Max Eastman. McKay’s friend Frank Harris, the Irish-American writer and editor, felt betrayed, as he believed the poem owed something to his inspiration and wished to claim the prize of being the first to publish it in his own Pearson’s Magazine. In fact, Harris did not inspire McKay to pen the verse, which was actually a reaction to the race riots that took place in the United States during the 1919 “red scare.” McKay had been born in Jamaica but emigrated to the U.S. in 1912 and become active in radical politics. He later traveled to the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Africa, remaining outside the U.S. for almost the entirety of the Harlem Renaissance.

After World War II the black poets Melvin B. Tolson and Kamau Brathwhite, and author Arna Bontemps (The Negro Renaissance), alleged that Churchill had quoted all or part of McKay’s poem to either or both the House of Commons in 1940 and the U.S. Congress in 1941. This urban legend focused on the irony of a famous white leader citing a black poet. In fact, there is no evidence that Churchill cited the poem in any speech. No reference can be found in Hansard or the Congressional Record. Nor could the quote be verified by the Churchill Archives Centre or The Churchill Centre. The author Gore Vidal opines that it is very unlikely Churchill, assuming he knew the poet’s identity, would have quoted the lines before a Congress controlled largely by Southern racists.

The confusion stems perhaps from the fact that the poem sounds like something Churchill would have said. It is even possible that he was familiar with the words, as in 1919 McKay left the U.S. for London, where he worked for Sylvia Pankhurst’s radical newspaper, the Worker’s Dreadnought, and Churchill was well known for reading papers across the political spectrum. Perhaps the more egregious appropriation of McKay was carried out not by Churchill (if he ever did quote the poem), but by those who seek to restrict the poet to a black studies paradigm that distorts the emphatically