Woods Corner - FH 114

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A Bibliophile's column Named for the late Churchill bibliographer Fred Woods


CHURCHILL AND HAYEK
G. W. Simonds

Mr. Simonds ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a member of the Churchill Society (UK) in Doncaster, England.

Alan Ebenstein's recently published biography* of Friedrich Hayek, 1974 Nobel price winner and possibly the 20th century's greatest political thinker and economist, shows that he was a longtime admirer of Winston Churchill, although best known for his influence on Margaret Thatcher. Churchill's portrait hung over Hayek's desk for many years, even when in later life he returned to his native Austria to work. (1) Those who believe that the four foremost conservative political thinkers of the 20th century were Reagan, Thatcher, Goldwater, and Churchill may be interested to know that all four were, in different ways, influenced by Hayek. (2)

Frederich Hayek, born in Austria in 1899, came to the London School of Economics in 1931 and, with the worsening situation in Germany, later offered his "considerable knowledge of Austrian affairs" to the Ministry of Information. (3) His offer declined, he remained at L.S.E. throughout the war. Consequently he and Harold Laski, with Lionel Robbins, became the prominent influences there and, when the wartime evacuation to Cambridge took place, he came into close contact with John Maynard Keynes.

In the May 1945 election Churchill made oblique reference to Hayek, (4 )one presumes because of having read Hayek's 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. Ebenstein quotes Churchill's 1945 campaign speech: "No socialist system can be established without a political police. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance."

This same speech excerpt is quoted critically in Kramnick and Sheerman's biography of Laski. (5) The words in italics come from a little later in the speech, after "No Socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent"-  as can be seen from Churchill's war speech volume, Victory (1946).

Laski's biographers, and many others over the years, claimed that the "Gestapo" remark contributed to the election of a majority Labour Government and Churchill's loss of the Premiership. Certainly maximum use was made of this remark by Attlee and others. Clementine Churchill, who had read her husband's speech in draft, advised this sentence be dropped: not the first time her instincts were correct. (6)

This point apart, it is clear that both Churchill and the Conservative Central Office thought highly of The Road to Serfdom: Hayek was offered precious rationed paper for an abstract, prior to the election, but it could not be printed in time. At this time Laski, as chairman of the Labour Party, objected to Churchill's invitation to Attlee to go with him to the Potsdam Conference with the election as yet undecided, saying, "the Labour Party shall not be committed to any decision not debated in the Party Executive." So Churchill may have had a point.

In the first, founding meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, Hayek was unwittingly and incorrectly described as being Winston Churchill's adviser on economic affairs. (7) It may be that Attlee's riposte to the "Gestapo" speech contributed to this misunderstanding.

In a later biographical interview Hayek commented that Churchill believed at one time that cabinet secrets had been leaked to Harold Laski, but that this was untrue: Laski had just guessed. (8)

Much later in life the young Margaret Thatcher admitted she had read Hayek's books, particularly The Road to Serfdom, and, during his time at the (London) Institute of Economic Affairs embraced him as one of her major philosophical influences. (9) Hayek is probably now best known in Britain for this; indeed it is believed that despite his political leanings, Tony Blair is also an admirer.

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* Friedrich Hayek: A Biography, by Alan Ebenstein. New York: St. Martins Press. References below refer to Ebenstein's biography unless otherwise indicated
1) p. 316.
2) p. 209.
3) p. 104.
4) Winston S. Churchill, Victory (London: Cassell, 1946), pp. 186-92, especially the second and third paragraphs on p. 189.
5) p. 138, footnote 37.
6) Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (London: Cassell, 1979), p. 382.
7) p. 144.
8) p. 182.
9) p. 291.


RACE, ISLAM AND THE RIVER WAR

Thanks to Gregory Smith for finding the powerful quotation in The River War ("Quotation of the Decade?", FH 113:5). I have a one-volume paperback (Prion: London 1997) and cannot find it, or passages I remember hearing on the Books on Tape production. I must add that I remain troubled by passages like this: "The indigenous inhabitants of the country were negroes as black as coal. They displayed the virtues of barbarism....The smallness of their intelligence excused the degradation of their habits."
‹Andy Guilford


Editor's response:
The Prion paperback edition is a further abridgement of a previous abridgement first published in Frontiers and Wars. (See my Connoisseur's Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill, page 37.) But the 1902 Longmans, 1915 Nelson, and 1933 Eyre & Spottiswoode one-volume editions also fail to produce Mr. Smith's highly relevant quotation. The Books-on-Tape audio version, which is based on the same text, also lacks this quotation.

The quotation falls in Volume II, Chapter XXII, "Return of the British Division," which Churchill omitted starting in 1902. Likewise culled was Chapter XXI, "After the Victory," which contains some of Churchill's finest writing on the meaning of war for the common soldier, particularly the Dervishes. We republished this in Finest Hour 85, still available for $5 postpaid from The Churchill Center in Washington.

The bad news is that unabridged original copies of The River War (1899 1900) cost from $1000 up. The good news is that an entirely new two volume edition is coming, thanks to Professor James Muller and The Churchill Center. Look for it in our new book service in 2003.

Churchill's prejudices were those of his time; but compare his "negroes as black as coal" remarks to what he wrote in My African Journey about the natives of Uganda (Chapter 5): "...an amiable, clothed, polite, and intelligent race dwell together in an organized monarchy....More than two hundred thousand natives are able to read and write. More than one hundred thousand have embraced the Christian faith. There is a Court, there are Regents and Ministers and nobles, there is a regular system of native law and tribunals; there is discipline, there is industry, there is culture, there is peace. In fact, I ask myself whether there is any other spot in the whole earth where the dreams and hopes of the negrophile, so often mocked by results and stubborn facts, have ever attained such a happy realization." Patronizing? Yes, but considering today's Uganda, one is forced to wonder what its people got in place of the British Empire.

Churchill defies pigeonholing. In this passage, as in his stubborn defense of the native African in London to Ladysmith (see sidebar), he is neither racist nor reformer. Anthony Montague Browne said years ago that Churchill never flinched from criticizing those whom he thought deserved it: thus the Zionist Churchill railed against Zionist terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and with it his friend Lord Lloyd. When Churchill saw Africans he thought were degraded, he said so - and vice versa. But politicians of Churchill's stripe were as scarce in 1900 as they are in 2002.

A few eerily relevant quotes about the original work from my book, written long before 11 September 2001...


The West and Islam
(Connoisseur's Guide, page 27, on The River War)

Arguably the most aesthetically beautiful of original trade editions of Churchill's books, The River War is a brilliant history of British involvement in the Sudan and the campaign for its reconquest: arresting, insightful, with tremendous narrative and descriptive power. Though published 100 years ago, it is uniquely relevant to our times: combined with Churchill's personal adventure, there are passages of deep reflection about the requirements of a civilized government of ordered liberty. Far from accepting uncritically the superiority of British civilization, Churchill shows his appreciation for the longing for liberty among the indigenous inhabitants of the Sudan; but he finds their native regime defective in its inadequate legal and customary protection for the liberty of subjects. On the other hand, he criticizes the British army, and in particular its commander Lord Kitchener, for departing in its campaign from the kind of respect for the liberty and humanity of adversaries that alone could justify British civilization and imperial rule over the Sudan.


Churchill and Race
(Connoisseur's Guide, page 51, on London to Ladysmith)

I often wish modern writers who say Churchill was a racist would read his conversation with his Boer captors in London to Ladysmith. This was, remember, 1899, when every Englishman alive supposedly believed in the utter supremacy of the white race, English branch. "Is it right," the Boer guard asked Churchill, "that a dirty Kaffir [native] should walk on the pavement [sidewalk] - without a pass? That's what they do in your British Colonies. Brother! Equal! Ugh! Free! Not a bit. We know how to treat Kaffirs....They were put here by the God Almighty to work for us. We'll stand no damned nonsense from them. We'll keep them in their proper places."

Churchill remarks: "What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man. British government is associated in the Boer farmer's mind with violent social revolution...the Kaffir is to be declared the brother of the European, to be constituted his legal equal, to be armed with political rights...nor is a tigress robbed of her cubs more furious than is the Boer at this prospect." After the statements of his captor, Churchill concludes, "[he and I had] no more agreement...Probing at random I had touched a very sensitive nerve."

Now it is accurately said that Churchill's view of native Africans was not that of, say, Martin Luther King, Jr. half a century later. Churchill was paternalistic, and held, if not in these pages then in the African Journey, that immediate equality was impractical and unworkable. But his views in the Ladysmith are in striking contrast to those of most contemporary Britons. Of course, whatever improvements might have evolved in a South Africa under pure British government, the Union of South Africa in 1910 led to something different. By combining the Boer dominated Transvaal and Orange Free State with the British Cape Colony and Natal in a Union where only whites could vote and Boers outnumbered Britons, Great Britain established the Boer patrimony which the Boers had failed to achieve by arms; and from that Union grew the policy of Apartheid. It is interesting to find Churchill in 1899 representing the same essential approach to native emancipation as the South African reformers of the early 1990s -and agreeable to know that Nelson Mandela is an admirer of Winston Churchill.

*A Connoisseur's Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill is available for $34 postpaid from the Churchill Center Book Club, PO Box 385, Contoocook NH 03229.