May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 16

The Special Relationship – What He Saw and Heard in Georgia

Churchill’s travels in the American South were not widely reported, but his 1932 message received receptive ears—juxtaposed with news of future wartime antagonists.

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By William L. Fisher

Mr. Fisher is treasurer and the immediate past-president of the Winston Churchill Society of Georgia.
*Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London, 1991), 504-05.

“I have always made my living by my pen and by my tongue,” Churchill once remarked, and, following his losses in the 1929 stock market crash, he labored double overtime. In February 1932 he arrived in Atlanta, on a nineteen-city lecture tour which would earn him £7500 (then $35,000).* Churchill the writer, no less than the Churchill the orator, was always inspired by America: this trip produced his famous essay “Land of Corn and Lobsters”; his previous journey in 1929, though ostensibly a holiday, had led to twelve articles under the title “What I Heard and Saw in America.”

The Atlanta visit, and the rest of Churchill’s life, almost never came to pass. The previous December, in New York City, he’d been struck by a car while attempting to find Bernard Baruch’s apartment. Again WSC found grist for his pen: recovering in Manhattan and Nassau, Churchill dictated “My New York Misadventure” (FH 136) and “My Happy Days in the ‘Wet’ Bahamas” (FH 145).

Resuming his lecture tour at the end of January Churchill took as his topic “The Destiny of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples.” His Atlanta appearance was set for the old Wesley Auditorium on the evening of February 23rd. The Atlanta Constitution promised he would bring “a message of hope and encouragement to the American people” and, given the economic climate, advised that ticket prices had been “set as low as possible consistent with meeting essential expenses.”

Accompanied by his daughter Diana, Churchill checked into a suite at the Biltmore Hotel (now urban condominiums). The Constitution covered his lecture the next day, noting his concerns about the growing armaments and armies in Europe. “In the days of Augustus,” Churchill told Georgians, “the Roman Empire maintained the peace of the world with a force of 800,000.” But now, “on the morrow of the War to End War, armies totaling over twenty million jealously guard the frontiers of Europe.” Eventually, he contemplated, “there must come a form of unity to Europe. Yet that may not be an unmixed blessing to the world.”

Returning to his main theme, Churchill admitted that “we have quarreled in the past.” But even then, he continued, “great leaders on both sides were agreed on principle. Let our common tongue, our common basic law, our joint heritage of literature and ideals, and the red tie of kinship, become the sponge of obliteration for all the unpleasantness of the past.” After all, he told his audience, “it is sometimes much safer to quarrel with a man who doesn’t understand your language….”

The next day Churchill and his daughter went a few blocks north to Grant Field, on the campus of Georgia Tech, to review Army and Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets and offer words of inspiration. The student newspaper reported his support of American military preparedness, and compliments to Georgia for its part in the American Civil War. (Since 1929, when he had toured the old battlefields of Virginia, Churchill had been preparing to write his History of the English-Speaking Peoples.)

From Atlanta the Churchills went to South Carolina, where they relaxed several days at the plantation home of financier Bernard Baruch. This friendship was explored at the Churchill Conference in Charleston last March.

Archival Discoveries

Included here are perhaps the only two extant photos documenting Churchill’s Atlanta visit, both taken at Georgia Tech. The March edition of the student newspaper covered his ROTC comments, and I found the photos quite unexpectedly on a photography website. Mike Connealy of New Mexico discovered the negatives among the papers of his father-in-law, an engineering student at the time, who probably snapped them for the student newspaper.

Portents of Armageddon

Poring through microfilm archives of the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Journal, I found the Churchill coverage interesting—but several other events reported in the same days’ papers were nothing short of eerie and, in hindsight, prophetic.

On the front page of the February 23rd Constitution was a headline: HITLER TO OPPOSE VON HINDENBURG IN GERMAN RACE. (Hitler would lose this race for President, but would then be appointed Chancellor.) This was accompanied by an article headlined CHINESE AIR BASE TOTALLY WRECKED BY JAP BOMBERS.

The next day came a Constitution article entitled, HITLERITE OUSTED FROM REICHSTAG. It described how Josef Goebbels, later Hitler’s propaganda minister, had been expelled from the legislature kicking and screaming, for insulting President von Hindenburg. Goebbels had shouted at the delegates, “You do not represent Germany,” and “The man of tomorrow is coming!”

To put an exclamation point on my feeling of “six degrees of separation,” I found yet another odd item, probably “filler,” buried on a back page of the February 24th Constitution, listing recent U.S. Army postings. The U.S. Army numbered only about 100,000 at this time, so it was a short list. And in it was the posting of Major George S. Patton, Jr. (cavalry) to Ft. Myer in Virginia.

Churchill, Hitler, Goebbels, Patton: all four were in the Atlanta newspapers on the same two days in 1932—over seven years before the beginning of World War II. From Churchill there was a message of hope and encouragement, and a plea for Anglo-American unity. In the then seemingly unrelated other articles we find a yet-to-be understood forecast of mighty battles to come.

What other seemingly disconnected headlines in tomorrow’s paper (or iPad) will converge in future years? Ponder this over your morning coffee.