August 13, 2013

Finest Hour 125, Winter 2004-05

Page 34

“WHAT AN EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE”

What Churchill Owed the Great Republic
“…a life which before 1895 seemed destined to yield a narrow range of skimpy achievements became, from 1895 onwards, a life of glorious epitomes and stunning vindications….Winston’s exposure to his mother’s homeland struck a spark in his spirit that illuminated the long and arduous road…to his rendezvous with greatness.”

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By Robert H. Pilpel

Robert H. Pilpel is the author of Churchill in America, To the Honor of the Fleet, and other works of history and fiction. He has donated the rights to Churchill in America to The Churchill Centre, which seeks a grant to republish this seminal work. Opposite: Churchill in 1899.


It was November of 1895, and Winston Churchill, a newly commissioned subaltern on leave from the 4th Hussars, was bound for Havana with a commission of a different sort from the Daily Graphic, which had agreed to pay him five guineas for each dispatch he sent back to London with news of the latest Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule. Not yet 21, Churchill had in characteristic fashion also wangled an assignment from the Director of British Military Intelligence to report on a new type of bullet the Spaniards were field-testing on the insurgents.

Although his mother was American, young Winston had given little advance thought to his first encounter with the United States. Impatient as always, he was bent on getting to Cuba with all despatch. Peace might break out at any moment, after all, and his golden guineas go a-glimmering. Indeed, if there had been a faster route from London to Havana, he’d have jumped at it, by-passing his maternal homeland entirely.

Remembering Jennie’s warning that “NY is fearfully expensive, and you will be bored to death there,” he wrote her while en route aboard Cunard’s Royal Mail steamship Etruria, “It is possible we may cut down our stay in NY to a day and a half instead of three.”

The possibility did not eventuate. For waiting at dockside to greet Winston and his traveling companion, brother officer Reggie Barnes, was Bourke Cockran, the Tammany Hall orator and Democratic Congressman, who had enjoyed a liaison with Jennie in Paris just a few months before. With the charismatic Cockran as his cicerone, Churchill’s stay in New York proved not just memorable but transformative. “I must record the strong impression this remarkable man made on my untutored mind,” Winston recalled in My Early Life. “I have never seen his like, or in some respects his equal.” And to Jennie he wrote, “Mr. Cockran is one of the most charming hosts and interesting men I have met….We have great discussions on every conceivable subject from economics to yacht racing.” (See “William Bourke Cockran: Churchill’s American Mentor,” FH 115, Summer 2002. —Ed.)

One wonders how they found time for such discussions, since Winston’s first two days in New York featured lunch with a local belle, Eva Purdy, tea with the socially prominent Hitt family, and drinks with Cornelius Vanderbilt, followed by dinner with members of the judiciary his first night, and with the iron magnate husband of one of Jennie’s cousins the next. “We have engagements for every meal for the next few days about three deep,” he wrote his mother.” They really make rather a fuss over us.” And to his brother he confided, “What an extraordinary people the Americans are! Their hospitality is a revelation to me & they make you feel at home & at ease in a way that I have never before experienced. This is a very great country my dear Jack.”

Needless to say, all thoughts of shortening his stay had vanished from his mind. In fact, in his next letter to Jack he wrote, “We have postponed our departure from New York for three days as there is lots to see and do.” The activities included sitting in on a celebrated murder trial, watching companies of firemen respond to practice alarms, visiting forts and barracks of the Atlantic Military District, inspecting the ironclad battle cruiser New York, and taking a full-day tour of West Point. Although Winston was distinctly unimpressed by “the American Sandhurst,” finding its levels of regimentation incompatible with his very Victorian conceptions of an officer’s status, he was not unappreciative of the hospitality extended to him by the Military Academy’s staff. A full six decades after his visit, in fact, he remarked to his physician, Lord Moran, that even though he’d been only a second lieutenant at the time, he’d been treated like a visiting general.

His initial exposure to the United States continued even after he left New York, since the steamer Olivette, which would carry him to Cuba, lay at anchor off Tampa, necessitating a two-day train journey via Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and the seaboard states of the Old South. As he gazed out the train window at bustling northern cities and sleepy whistle-stop hamlets, at stately plantation manors and rickety sharecropper shacks, he had occasion to reflect on the brash and wondrous nation that would henceforth figure so prominently in his view of the world.

“A great, crude, strong, young people are the Americans,” he wrote home, “like a boisterous healthy boy among enervated but well bred ladies and gentlemen …a great lusty youth who treads on all your sensibilities, perpetrates every possible horror of ill manners, whom neither age nor just tradition inspire with reverence, but who moves about his affairs with a good-natured freshness which may well be the envy of older nations of the earth.”

Anyone with a knowledge of Churchill’s own demeanor and behavior at this stage of his life will note the startling similarity between the lusty boisterous youth symbolic of the American nation and the brash young subaltern exhilarated by his first encounter with it. Here he’d experienced a sense of acceptance, and found that the brotherhood of English-speaking peoples could span oceans with its congeniality intact. So after having been shot at without result for the first time in his life, and been moved to “take a more thoughtful view” of his intrusion into Cuban affairs, he returned to England more seasoned, more confident, more mature.

His second visit to the United States began almost precisely five years after his first visit ended, and was more of a business trip than a voyage of discovery. As he wrote Bourke Cockran just before his Atlantic crossing, “I pursue profit not pleasure in the States this time.”

He could hardly be faulted for such a mercenary attitude, since he’d just been elected to Parliament for the first time, and MPs in those days were paid next to nothing or, more precisely, nothing at all. To be sure, he’d amassed a modest trove of capital in the five years since his first visit, having published four chronicles— The Story of the Malakand Field Force, The River War, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, and Ian Hamilton’s March—and a novel, Savrola, which he “consistently urged [his] friends to abstain from reading.” He had also been on the winning team in the Indian Army’s Inter-Regimental Polo Tournament, participated in what proved to be the last significant cavalry charge in history at the Battle of Omdurman, been captured and imprisoned by the Boers, attained celebrity by escaping from their custody, and, bravest of all, embarked on the British lecture circuit. Now he had just enough time for a U.S. speaking tour before Parliament convened.

“I am not here to marry anybody,” Winston quipped to reporters after debarking from the Cunard liner Lucania on 8 December 1900—a humorous reference to the ongoing proliferation of alliances between wealthy American women and impecunious British aristocrats. “I am not going to get married and I would like that to be stated positively.”

Having thus clarified his matrimonial intentions, he proceeded to a dinner in his honor at the New York Press Club, where he launched into an exegesis on personal hygiene that made a profound impression on his audience. “After seeing many nations,” he said, “after traveling in Europe and having been a prisoner of the Boers, I have come to see that, after all, the chief characteristic of the English-speaking people as compared with other people is that they wash, and wash at regular intervals. England and America are divided by a great ocean of salt water but united by an eternal bathtub of soap and water.”

The youthful orator’s flight of rhetoric prompted a severe editorial eructation in the following day’s edition of The New York Times:

The very far from preponderating fraction of all Englishmen which have recently acquired the habit of bathing…continues to be so vastly astonished at its own emergence from grimy barbarism that for some time to come we must expect to hear, every now and then, talk of the kind in which Lieut WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL indulged….Without the slightest apparent suspicion as to the good taste of his remarks, the amiable Lieutenant ran on at great length about the superior cleanliness of Englishmen and Americans as compared with all the rest of the world, and pictured them as advancing hand in hand from land to land, introducing the bath tub wherever they go, and so elevating reluctant nations to unwonted heights of civilization….Fortunately all this was very funny, for it was also rather just a little disgusting.

Churchill’s de facto status as a poster boy for “What an Extraordinary People”… British imperialism may have played a role in the Times’ s decision to unloose such a massive editorial barrage, one whose none too subtle animadversions on British cleanliness might well have been intended to suggest moral as well as corporeal grime. The rapidly growing progressive segment of the American electorate viewed the South African conflict as a valiant effort by freedom-loving Boer yeomen to stave off yet another of John Bull’s gluttonous land grabs. So when Mark Twain introduced young Churchill at the latter’s New York debut in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, his introduction was peppered with references to the ongoing South African bloodshed:

“Mr. Churchill and I do not agree on the righteousness of the war,” said Twain, softening this blunt assertion with a humorous disclaimer: “But that’s not of the least consequence, for people who are worth anything never do agree….I think that England sinned when she got herself into fighting she could have avoided, just as we have sinned by getting into a similar war in the Philippines.” He then concluded his remarks on a lighter note, saying, “Mr. Churchill by his father is an Englishman and by his mother an American, no doubt a blend that makes the perfect man. England and America; we are kin. And now that we are also kin in sin there is nothing more to be desired. The harmony is perfect, like Mr. Churchill himself, whom I now have the honor to present to you.”

Mark Twain was a tough act to follow, but the perfect Mr. Churchill rose to the occasion, defusing pro-Boer and anti-British feelings during the course of his talk by showing a magic lantern slide of a Boer cavalryman, and responding to the applause this elicited with the words: “You are quite right to applaud him; he is the most formidable fighting man in the world—one of the heroes of history.” This magnanimous tribute to Britain’s adversary won over even the most pro-Boer of his listeners—and foretokened his famous 1942 paean to Field Marshal Rommel, whom he described as “a very daring and skillful opponent, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.”

When Churchill finished, Twain concluded: “I take it for granted that I have the permission of this audience to thank the lecturer for his discourse, and to thank him heartily that, while he has extolled British valor, he has not withheld praise from Boer valor.”

How did the man who would one day earn a place among the greatest orators of all time look and sound at age 26, on the eve of his Parliamentary career? Thanks to the Times correspondent and dispatches appearing in the Boston Herald and Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, we have a composite description of Churchill’s persona and delivery:

“His accent is pronounced, his mannerisms ultra-British and his stage presence rather awkward,” the Republican noted. “But he speaks readily, without notes, and makes a decidedly favorable impression of gallantry, tact, and manliness.”

The Times reporter described him as “a very fair man of the purely English type. His face denotes a highly strung temperament and the broad brow considerable mental capacity.” The Herald’s reporter found him

very youthful in appearance with a quiet, modest manner which is most engaging. Hesitating occasionally as he goes, he puts his audience in a slightly apprehensive mood. You think, when you have heard him for a while, with those simple and perfectly unstudied gestures of his, in which the whole body moves in alternation with movements of the hands and arms, that he is going to commit some gaucherie; but as he proceeds and you get accustomed to him, the simplicity takes on the appearance of the most subtle art, the gestures are seen to be perfectly appropriate to the situations described, while the hesitating delivery becomes a means to effects which even veteran lecturers would be glad if they could imitate.

Now began a highly demanding schedule, with one city hard on the next—New Haven, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Boston (where the British Winston Churchill lunched with the American Winston Churchill, a well-known novelist of the time who would one day become a member of the New Hampshire state legislature but whose lineage was entirely distinct from that of his British counterpart). Next came New Bedford, Hartford and Springfield (where Winston visited the famous Armory). Then a foray into Canada and back to the U.S. for appearances in Chicago and Minneapolis, followed by a long trek to Winnipeg and yet another return to the States. And on and on and on.

“I have only 18 [sic!] more lectures,” Winston wrote Jennie on 9 January 1901, “so the worst is over…. If the tour were much longer I do not think I’d be able to go through with it.” Adding to his downbeat mood—a portent, perhaps, of an occasional tendency toward depression—was the death of Queen Victoria less than a month into the 20th century. For someone who revered the British monarchy as much as Churchill did, this “great and solemn event” was especially poignant.

The tour’s final lecture took place at Carnegie Hall on the evening of 31 January, and Winston spent Friday, 1 February, in blessed idleness at Bourke Cockran’s house, where he and his host once again conversed “on every subject from economics to yacht racing.”

Saturday, February 2nd, was set aside for Queen Victoria’s state funeral, and it was observed as a day of mourning all over the world. Escorted by Cockran, Churchill went down to the Hudson River docks and, after bidding his host farewell, boarded the very same ship that had first brought him to the United States in 1895. As the Etruria steamed through the Narrows into Lower New York Bay he watched the city’s skyline fade into the winter mists. Weary though he was after all his adventures and exertions, he took satisfaction from the knowledge that he had now amassed more than sufficient capital to sustain his Parliamentary career. And now it would begin.

We can never know for certain how a person would have developed if one or another aspect of his life had been different. But what is clear with regard to Churchill—as his letters at the time and his writings in later years attest—is that a life which before 1895 seemed destined to yield a narrow range of skimpy achievements became, from 1895 onwards, a life of glorious epitomes and stunning vindications.

Credit Bourke Cockran, New York’s overflowing hospitality, the rail journey to Tampa. or the rampant vitality of a nation outgrowing itself day by day. Credit whatever you will, but do not doubt that Winston’s exposure to his mother’s homeland struck a spark in his spirit. And it was this spark that illuminated the long and arduous road that would take him through triumphs and tragedies to his rendezvous with greatness.

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