Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

HITLER AND CHURCHILL...
Indeed a 1922 Nazi memo, no doubt inspired by Hitler’s
insights, urges that “one should, for the first time, not rent
a too-large hall. Better to have a small, fully packed hall
than a large room only half full or even conspicuously
empty.” 10
That is exactly the thinking behind Churchill’s 1943
speech on rebuilding the House of Commons Chamber: “It
should not be big enough to contain all its Members at
once without overcrowding….If the House is big enough to
contain all its Members, nine-tenths of all debates will be
conducted in the depressing atmosphere of an almost empty
or half empty Chamber.” 11 In other words, when it comes to
size of audience, most people simplistically believe that
bigger is better, but both leaders realized that political psychology
is often counter-intuitive: Not size but context and
appearance matter.
Churchill and Hitler did take different routes to discuss
the challenge of speaking in front of an audience to be won
over. Churchill does so in fictional form, and the performance
of the hero of his early novel Savrola is a fantasy—
prophetic, to be sure—about someone the author would like
to become. Hitler
devotes many pages
to his actual performances
during the early
1920s, when he discovered
his vocation,
and, concurrently, the
Nazis, under his
imperious control,
first became a force to
be reckoned with.
Both men
insisted on the need
to eschew rhetoric
that might engage
the more influential
and therefore better
educated audiences
rather than the proverbial little man. In preparing his
important speech, Savrola aims for “that correct diction
which is comprehensible even to the most illiterate, and
appeals to the most simple.” 12 Likewise Hitler notes that the
successful speaker “will become so primitive and clear in his
explanations that…even the weakest members of the audience
is not left behind.” To persuade the doubters, he will
repeat the argument “over and over in constantly new
examples.” 13
Hitler goes so far as to express profuse admiration for
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose wartime
speeches “testified to a positively amazing knowledge of the
soul of the broad mass of the people…[as in his] use of
easily intelligible examples of the simplest sort.” 14 Dare one
wonder why, two decades later, Hitler could not, “across the
havoc of war” (Churchill’s words about Rommel in 1942),
appreciate the far greater achievement of Lloyd George’s
one-time lieutenant
One way of pitching rhetoric to the level of the audience
is to flatter it by contrasting the beauty of the nation
and the nobility of its people with the corrupt government
which the people do not deserve. Here is Savrola’s version:
When I look at this beautiful country that is ours and was
our fathers’ before us, at its blue seas and snow capped mountains,
at its comfortable hamlets and wealthy cities, at its
silver streams and golden cornfields, I marvel at the irony of
fate which has struck across so fair a prospect the dark
shadow of a military despotism. 15
And here is Hitler’s oddly similar version:
Millions of men are diligently and industriously at work….
The blacksmith stands again at his anvil, the peasant guides
his plow, and the scholar sits in his study, all with the same
painstaking devotion to duty….If today all this is not yet
expressed in a rebirth,…it is the fault of those who…have
governed our people to death since 1918. 16 Having found the
Churchill famously said, “If I were a Boer, I
hope I should be fighting in the field,” even
as Hitler....quite remarkably for him: “If I
were a Frenchman, and if the greatness of
France were as dear to me as that of
Germany is sacred, I could not and would
not act any differently from Clemenceau.”
FINEST HOUR 148 / 28
right verbal wave
length, the speaker
faces the second
challenge: hostile
hecklers. Political
oratory differs from
lectures meant to
educate the audience
and from speeches to
the converted (like
those of Hitler in
power) meant to
turn agreement into
zeal and activism. In
electioneering politics,
by contrast, one
often must contend with audiences to be persuaded, as well
as enemies to be neutralized.
Hence Savrola, addressing a large meeting, was interrupted
by “a man in a blue suit, one of a little group similarly
clad, [who] shouted out: ‘Traitor and toady!’ Hundreds of
voices took up the cry; there was an outburst of hooting and
groaning; others cheered half heartedly.” Savrola turns on the
noisemakers by demonizing them as “paid agents of the government,”
with the result that “fierce looks turned in the
direction of the interrupters, who had, however, dispersed
themselves unobtrusively among the crowd.” 17
Hitler had a—shall we say—more forceful way of handling
opposition. Initially he accepted the fact that the entire
audience might not necessarily be sympathetic to him.