March 27, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 30

By Joseph L. Hern

THE FOUR VISITS of Winston Churchill to Boston, Massachusetts illuminate constant qualities and themes at four very different stages of his life; but the circumstances that brought him to the cradle of American liberty were quite different.


In 1900 and 1932 Boston was just one stop on lecture tours that took Churchill to many other North American cities, though his themes on those first two visits varied greatly: the first in defense of a British war, the second in support of Anglo-American destiny. At both, only paying audiences inside hired halls heard him. In 1943 and 1949 he came as a world and allied statesman to deliver major addresses: the first on the state of World War II, the second on the prospects for the postwar world. Both speeches were broadcast to world audiences.

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1900: Return of the Red Coats

The years 1895-1900, Churchill wrote, “exceed in vividness, variety and exertion anything I have known—except of course the opening months of the Great War.”1 His last half of 1900 would be vivid enough for anyone. In July he had left South Africa, the war and the army, returning to England to campaign for Parliament and to complete his fourth and fifth books. He also toured Britain and North America to lecture on the war and his renowned escape from the Boer prison camp. Between electioneering and lecturing, he was speaking on one platform or another several nights a week for nearly six months.

Though young, Churchill was astute about the business of lecturing. While still in South Africa he had received a proposal from Major J. B. Pond of the Lyceum Lecture Bureau in the United States to organize an American lecture tour about his adventures. After having Pond vetted, Churchill accepted, and a December-January tour was arranged, to commence immediately after WSC’s month-long British lecture tour.2 He later described his lectures: “[A]ided by a magic lantern, I unfolded my adventures and escape, all set in the general framework of the war.”3 Boston was Churchill’s sixth American city. He spoke at Tremont Temple on 17 and 22 December 1900. In between he appeared in Hartford, Connecticut; and New Bedford, Springfield and Fall River, Massachusetts.

Major Pond’s publicity arrangements offended young Winston, who wrote to his mother complaining of “the vulgar and offensive advertisements Pond has circulated everywhere…which I suppose are calculated to suit the temperament of the public.”4 Pond may have had his finger on the public pulse, for a competing attraction in Boston was the “Polychromo-Telephono-Pantophonograph performance of Weber’s Parisian Widows” at the New Palace Theater. “And they don’t wear crepe, either,” promised the advertisement.

The Boer War was covered extensively in the Boston press, where headlines told of shifting fortunes. The Boston Daily Globe announced on 17 December 1900, the day of Churchill’s arrival: “VICTORY STORY—Elates British, Cast Down by Disasters—Report of the Total Defeat of a Boer Force.” The next day’s Boston Herald proclaimed “BOER RAIDS—Cape Colony Invaded at Two Points.”

It was in Boston that Churchill finally met the American author Winston Churchill, with whom he had generated profound literary confusion in recent years. (See “That Other Winston Churchill,” Finest Hour 106, website page 747.) Their meeting was headline news in next day’s Boston Herald.

Churchill, his valet and Major Pond arrived at Boston’s new South Station the morning of December 17th. Churchill and valet proceeded to the Hotel Touraine, while Pond went to the post office to collect Churchill’s mail—but it had been forwarded to the American Churchill’s 181 Beacon Street home. Feeling run-down, Churchill took to bed, but Major Pond soon brought American Winston to call upon the prostrate English Winston. “Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill,” was Pond’s spare but portentous introduction. “The man on the bed turned over on his side and held out his hand,” reported the Herald.5

The two spent much of the day together, walking through Boston Common and to the middle of a bridge over the Charles River. There English Winston said to American Winston, “Why don’t you go into politics? I mean to be Prime Minister of England. It would be a great lark if you were President of the United States at the same time.” Six decades later, in his father’s official biography, Randolph Churchill wrote that the American Winston must have thought the Englishman “a swollen-headed saucy boy who was talking through his already inadequate hat.”6

If a pact was struck on the bridge, the Briton fulfilled it forty years later, and would yet be Prime Minister nearly fifty-five years later. The American evidently tried, being elected to the New Hampshire legislature and running unsuccessfully as a Teddy Roosevelt Bull Moose Party candidate for governor. But their relationship was never close after this initial meeting, possibly because the American Churchill, a close friend of Roosevelt, absorbed some of TR’s well-known dislike of the Englishman.

A Boston Daily Globe 5:00 p.m. extra described the city’s English visitor:

Lieut. Churchill has the self-assertiveness of a young man who has done something, but not the egotism of having been “born so”….Thoroughly English, he is still broad in his consideration of enemies and opponents, quick in his answers, with a vein of wit and repartee, and well conversant with the subjects propounded to him.7

The qualities perceived by this reporter would reveal themselves consistently throughout Churchill’s life.

If Churchill read that newspaper, he might have also glanced at page 1 headlines proclaiming that a returned Boer soldier would be speaking at the Boston Central Branch of the United Irish League the next day. John M. Hart of Worcester, just back from the Transvaal, had fought with American volunteers for the Boers and was captured by the British in the fall of Pretoria and deported. Hart spoke practically next door at the Parker House the evening of December 18th, possibly as a “counterdemonstration” to Churchill’s lectures.

American Winston hosted a dinner for English Winston at the Somerset Club, across from Boston Common. Efforts to avoid confusion were unavailing. Not only had the American received the Briton’s mail, but the British guest had received the American host’s dinner bill; however, in the end it was all sorted out.

An extensive description of young Churchill’s lecture appeared in next day’s Herald. Perhaps the most telling review was from the Boston Evening Transcript: “Mr. Churchill has a charming personality—after one gets used to him.…He is modest, even diffident in demeanor, and has a hesitancy in his speech that detracts somewhat from the force of his delivery.”8

Churchill later recalled how he had been received in Boston, in contrast to other U.S. cities where “a great many of them thought the Boers were in the right; and the Irish everywhere showed themselves actively hostile. [An] enormous pro-British demonstration was staged, and even the approaches to Tremont Hall were thronged,” he wrote. The platform held 300 Anglophile Bostonians in red uniforms. Churchill concluded that the Boston meeting was “magnificent.” He would not be so well received again until he crossed into Canada.9

1932: “Okay, big boy; you’re next”

Churchill did not return to the United States for nearly three decades after his first lecture tour. An extended holiday in 1929 did not bring him to Boston, but in the summer of 1931—out of office and deep in debt—he resolved on a paid lecture series which would again include the Massachusetts city.

Nothing about this tour went well from the start. Delayed by a House of Commons debate on India, Churchill reluctantly sailed on the fast German liner Europa, then holder of the Atlantic Blue Ribband. He arrived in New York on 11 December, only in time to lecture that evening in Worcester, Massachusetts. Before he could give a second lecture he was struck by a car while crossing Fifth Avenue in search of his friend Bernard Baruch’s apartment. Like many Britons in America and vice versa, he had looked the wrong way before crossing the street. He was hospitalized over a week and convalescent a further month.

All his lectures had to be rescheduled and did not resume until 28 January 1932. For the next six weeks Churchill rarely slept in the same bed twice, as he traveled by rail for nearly nightly lectures throughout the East, South and Midwest. Churchill later wrote that, in his injured condition, he lived all day on his back in a railway compartment and addressed large audiences at night. “On the whole I consider this was the hardest time I have had in my life,” he concluded.10

“The Destiny of the English Speaking Peoples” was Churchill’s theme when he came to Boston on 10 March 1932, for the final performance of this extended and exhausting tour. Imagine how fatigued the fifty-seven-year-old, auto-battered Churchill must have been! He likely was preoccupied with thoughts that this would be his last lecture, that tomorrow he would be sailing for England after being away over three months. One can almost read this on his face in photographs published in Boston newspapers. One reporter described him as “patently tired out, with one ‘impression’ firm in his mind—that he had only spent two of the past ten nights in a real bed.”11

Churchill arrived at South Station at 8:20 a.m. by overnight train from Philadelphia, accompanied by his bodyguard, Sergeant Thompson. Reporters waiting on the platform attracted curious commuters. Churchill smilingly made his way through the throng, raising his hat, to a waiting car and motorcycle escort that brought him to the Copley Plaza.12 There he received the press for photographs and interviews.

The photographers found him en suite, “smoking a sizable cigar and attired in a paisley-patterned dressing gown and a pair of house slippers of reptile skin”; not wishing to be photographed thus, he ducked back into his bedroom and emerged in a sack suit with the familiar polka dot tie, still wearing the reptilian slippers. When the photographers were done, Churchill commanded the reporters to draw near: “Now the artillery can withdraw. Bring on the infantry.”13

If Churchill read the evening papers he might have seen not merely his interview but also something about the successes a certain Governor Roosevelt was enjoying in the presidential primaries, and President von Hindenberg’s decision to run again for the German Presidency in order to thwart Adolf Hitler; these might not have meant anything to him, yet his fate and that of his nation would one day be bound up with those two emerging leaders. He would also have seen screaming headlines about the Lindbergh kidnapping, including an offer from Al Capone to help if the government would release him from Federal prison.

Churchill was taken to the State House to meet the Governor of Massachusetts, and to City Hall to meet the Acting Mayor. He was left cooling his heels at the State House for an hour before being ushered in to Governor Ely by an aide’s announcement: “Okay, big boy; you’re next.”14

That evening he spoke at Symphony Hall. The next day’s Boston Herald reported on its front page that the hall was packed with 3000 listeners (the Globe said he “filled” the hall with 2600). The Herald wrote that he “reiterated again and again that Anglo-American relations have never been more harmonious and saw an invulnerable tie in the common language of the two nations.” Their common language was a theme he would stress further during his 1943 speech at Harvard.

The Herald reported: “The blond, ruddy Englishman, stout but with a bearing which gave evidence of his earlier years as a soldier, developed his serious subject with a light touch.”15

The Globe covered the lecture on page 12 under the headline CHURCHILL SEES U.S. OF EUROPE. It quoted WSC—fourteen years before his “Iron Curtain” Fulton speech and seventeen before his “Mid-Century” MIT speech—as saying, “We are sure to be involved in a long, slow contest with Communism, which teaches that the individual counts for nothing and that the state is all.” The Globe decided that he was “outspoken, eloquent and witty,” and said of his brilliance: “The quality that perhaps cost him a Prime Ministership makes him an eminent lecturer.”

After the lecture, Churchill was out of Boston like a shot on the midnight train to New York and his waiting berth on the steamship Majestic. He sailed the next night for England, not to return for nearly a decade. “Thus, Winston Churchill left America for a fourth, and in a sense final, time,” wrote Robert Pilpel. “Churchill the man would never return to this side of the Atlantic. Next time he came he would be Churchill the legend.”16  

1943: In like a lamb, out like a lion

Churchill could not complain of vulgar advance publicity for his 1943 visit to Harvard; there was none whatever. He came into town quite secretly in response to a standing invitation from Harvard to receive an honorary degree. He had found the time while still in America following the Quadrant conference in Quebec:

The President was very anxious for me to keep a longstanding appointment and receive an honorary degree at Harvard. It was to be an occasion of a public declaration to the world of Anglo-American unity and amity. On September 6, I delivered my speech.17

Churchill’s physician, Charles Moran, like Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson, had a knack for illuminating the truth without recognizing it. Moran wrote in his diary that on the train to Boston: “One might think, from his irritability, that the P.M. had the bug. For some reason, which I cannot fathom, he is taking the speech he is to make at Harvard very seriously.”18

Churchill meant this to be a significant speech. The text, published in Finest Hour 80, has been described as the first of a grand trilogy on Anglo-American unity, the other two being the 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton and the 1949 mid-century speech at MIT, discussed opposite.

Unknown to the public (but a closely kept open secret with Harvard and the press), Churchill arrived by special train from Washington accompanied by Clementine, his daughter Mary, and several British officials. This time it was the Massachusetts Governor’s turn to wait. Governor and Mrs. Leverett Saltonstall and Harvard’s President and Mrs. James Conant awaited Churchill’s arrival at the Boston & Albany’s Beacon Park rail yards in the Allston district.

Several hundred police and secret service agents lined the route. The Prime Minister and his entourage motored to Harvard across the same Charles River over which as a twenty-six-year-old he had predicted his premiership forty-three years before. This time he would not make a paid lecture to a limited audience, but an unpaid broadcast to the world.

After being awarded an honorary doctorate of laws, Churchill spoke in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. His speech was relayed to 10,000 in Harvard Yard and to the world by radio broadcast. He told assembled Americans that “the price of greatness is responsibility” and that the United States could not rise “in many ways to be the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.” The United States and Britain, he said, “do not war primarily with races as such. Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks.” He foretold the establishment of the United Nations and stressed the importance of maintaining the Anglo-American alliance after the war, for the safety of the world.19

After the ceremonies, Churchill went into Harvard Yard to speak impromptu to 6,000 uniformed students. He warned the officers in training that the climax of the war had not been reached, and that “the heaviest sacrifices in blood and life…lie before the armed forces of Britain and America.” He stressed the importance of their intensive military studies, because an abundance of well-trained officers enables the troops to “get their tasks done with incomparably less loss of life.”20

Following luncheon in Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, he returned to the rail yards and entrained back to Washington. As quickly as he had come, he was gone. Churchill had spent only four hours and fifteen minutes in Boston and Cambridge.

1949: “On the path for the elephants”

Churchill returned to Boston in March 1949 to deliver a keynote speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Mid-Century Convocation, a three-day symposium on the “Social Implications of Scientific Progress” and the inauguration of a new university president. If his 1943 movements were shrouded in secrecy, his 1949 itinerary was bathed in publicity. Churchill’s schedule and the routes of his comings and goings were announced in the Boston papers, and large crowds gathered wherever he was due to drive by or appear.

He spent the week preceding his speech in New York and Washington. There was great anticipation about what he would say, heightened by the assembling of the foreign ministers of twelve signatory nations in Washington to sign the North Atlantic Treaty. A crowd of 6000 awaited his arrival at South Station the morning of March 31st. At the Ritz Carlton, his party took up the entire 16th floor, where he remained secluded while he polished his remarks. Clementine later remarked that he had not been pleasant company for the previous two weeks he had worked on it.

So great was demand to hear Churchill that MIT had no space large enough to accommodate the audience. It reluctantly booked the down-market Boston Garden, with its 14,000 chewing gum-encrusted seat capacity, scene of a hockey riot only the night before, and set up an overflow closed circuit projection for an additional 4500 at MIT’s Rockwell Cage.21 Churchill evidently had no misgivings about the site, which seemed to appeal to his boyish side. His limousine entered the Garden by a service entrance. Mindful that the circus had appeared there, Churchill remarked as he and his party got out of the limousine, “The animals were being released from their cages,” and as they ascended the ramp leading to the stage, he said, “Here we are on the path for the elephants.”22

Besides the world radio broadcast, his speech was to be televised live—a first for WSC, who was intrigued by how he would appear on the new medium.23 The first thing he told the audience was that Britain suffered from a lack of university-level institutions like MIT, which were critical for advancing technology and raising living standards. MIT had a profound effect; his endorsement of the subsequent founding of Churchill College Cambridge as a scientific institution rooted in the humanities is the obvious evidence of how much.24

At the onset of the 20th century, Churchill remarked, “little did we guess that what has been called the Century of the Common Man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facility than any other five centuries put together in the history of the world.” The development of the airplane, as a civil and military instrument, was a mixed blessing for mankind. It affected profoundly human affairs, expanding man’s prospects and outlook but without any noticeable advance in his mental faculties or moral character. “His brain got no better, but it buzzed the more.”25

Churchill devoted much of his speech to relations between the West and the Soviet Union. He said that the warnings he had given three years before at Fulton—warnings that had then “startled and even shocked” many in Britain and the United States—had been “vindicated and fulfilled in much detail” by events. He applauded the new climate of opinion and actions of the West, particularly the Atlantic pact. The immense changes in outlook and the unity of the free world would not have occurred but for the “astounding policy of the Russian Soviet Government,” the “thirteen men in the Kremlin, holding down hundreds of millions of people and aiming at the rule of the world.” For his biggest bombshell, and next day’s headlines, Churchill bluntly stated:

I must not conceal from you tonight the truth as I see it. It is certain that Europe would have been communized like Czechoslovakia and London under bombardment some time ago but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the United States.26

After this speech Churchill’s work—but not his duty—was over. One of the commitments he kept was a luncheon hosted the next day by his publishers, Houghton Mifflin, at the Club of Odd Volumes on Beacon Hill (Finest Hour 121, Winter 2003-04).27 After spending most of the afternoon there Churchill attended a gala dinner at the Statler, which became a surprise sixty-fourth birthday party for Clementine. Reappearing at the Boston Garden on the Convocation’s second night to hear the keynote speech by Harold Stassen and to receive an unprecedented honorary lectureship, WSC couldn’t help upstaging poor Stassen in his brief remarks:

I carry away from this great gathering sentiments which will enable me for the rest of my life to view in an entirely different light the Boston Tea Party, of which I heard in my early days.28

To make his exit, Churchill called for the Marine Band, which President Truman had lent, to play the Marine Hymn. To “The Halls of Montezuma” he strode off the stage, out of the Garden, and into his car. From there he entrained for New York, where he would sail for England. The next day’s Boston Globe headline read: “Churchill, Eyes Moist, Bids Boston Farewell.” The New York Times editorialized the day following his departure:

Winston Churchill has been visiting this country at intervals for a long time….The people of this country have thus known him in his impulsive and adventurous youth, in the midstream struggles of his great career, and now as an elder statesman. His physical strength has diminished, but the pungency of his thinking and speaking has not. The man who acted so splendidly has given us also splendid, resounding words….He has spoken and acted for human liberty at the moments of its greatest crises. He so speaks and acts now. With each visit he is increasingly welcome here. May he come soon again.29

The Times editorial, published on the morrow of Churchill’s final departure from Boston, aptly summarizes Boston’s four experiences of Winston Churchill during a half century.


Mr. Hern, a Boston attorney, heads New England Churchillians. This article was developed from his PowerPoint lecture introduced last year at Boston’s Tremont Temple, where in 1900 the young Churchill lectured on the first of his four visits to Boston. Mr. Hern has since presented it at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire, in their “Adventures in Learning” program, and at The Club of Odd Volumes, a private club still in existence, where Churchill lunched in 1949. Photographs by courtesy of the author, Susan Brearley and Richard Batchelder. The author thanks Cyril Mazansky and Richard Batchelder, who organized the Churchill’s Boston tour at the 1995 International Conference.

Endnotes:

1. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930, 59-60.

2. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. I: Youth 1874-1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966, 523.

3. My Early Life, 361.

4. WSC to Lady Randolph Churchill, 21 December 1900. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Companion vol. I, Part 2, 1222-23.

5. Boston Herald, 18 December 1900, 1.

6. Winston S. Churchill, vol. I, 341-42.

7. Boston Globe, 17 December 1900, 12.

8. Boston Evening Transcript, 18 December 1900, 12.

9. My Early Life, 362-63.

10. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War I, The Gathering Storm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948, 78.

11. Boston Evening Transcript, 10 March 1932, 4.

12. Boston Evening Globe, 10 March 1932, 8.

13. Boston Evening Transcript, 10 March 1932, 4.

14. Boston Herald, 1 April 1949, 36.

15. Boston Herald, 11 March 1932, 4.

16. Robert Pilpel, Churchill in America 1895-1961. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 113.

17. The Second World War V, Closing the Ring, 123-24.

18. Lord Moran, Churchill, Taken From the Diaries of Lord Moran. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966, 124.

19. Finest Hour 80, third quarter 1993, 24; www.winstonchurchill.org, Speeches 1941-1945.

20. Harvard University, Ceremonies in Honor of The Right Honorable Winston Spencer Churchill Held at Cambridge in Massachusetts September 6th 1943. Cambridge, 1943, 19.

21. James R. Killian, Jr., The Education of a College President, A Memoir. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985, 95-96.

22. Ibid., 101.

23. Boston Herald, 2 April 1949, 2. See also Henry A. Laughlin, First Citizen of the World: My Encounters with the Charismatic Churchill. Finest Hour 121 (Winter 2003-04), 35.

24. The Education of a College President, 111-14.

25. The New York Times, 1 April 1949, 10. The speech may also be found at Winston Churchill Address: MIT Mid-Century Convocation March 31, 1949, libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/ midcentury/mid-cent-churchill.html.

26. See, e.g., CHURCHILL SAYS BOMB STOPS REDS, Boston Herald, 1 April 1949, 1; “Churchill Holds Atom Bomb Saved Europe from Soviet,” The New York Times, 1 April 1949, 1.

27. First Citizen of the World, 35-36.

28. Boston Globe, 2 April 1949, 2.

29. The New York Times, 3 April 1949, E8.

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