Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

C H U R C H I L L P R O C E E D I N G S
GREAT MAN THEORY...
Writing in Great Contemporaries about Lords
Roseberry and Curzon, Churchill extols the capabilities
of two men he knew well, while making it clear that he
did not believe the new political reality could accommodate
such Old World aristocrats. But could the new
Britain, for all its hard-won democracy, produce the sort
of politicians who could preserve and perpetuate their
inheritance Churchill believed the answer was yes.
“Whatever one may think about democratic government,”
Churchill wrote,
it is just as well to have practical experience of its rough
and slatternly foundations. No part of the education of a
politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
Here you come in contact with all sorts of persons
and every current of national life. You feel the
Constitution at work in its primary processes. Dignity
may suffer, the superfine gloss is soon worn away; nice
particularisms and special private policies are scraped off;
much has to be accepted with a shrug, a sigh or a smile;
but at any rate in the end one knows a good deal about
what happens and why. 16
In all of this, Churchill was not simply speculating
in the dark. He already had before him the example of
his great colleague and mentor David Lloyd George. The
Welsh Wizard’s famous “People’s Budget” of 1909 had
been the very catalyst of what Churchill characterized as
“a tidal wave of democracy.” The same radical reformer
had then proven equally effective as a war leader in
Britain’s most desperate crisis to date. Indeed, all of the
leaders who gathered at Versailles’ table of victory in
1919 represented democratic powers. In the Twenties
and Thirties Lloyd George was still viewed as someone
who might once again become prime minister.
Churchill held a much dimmer view of Ramsay
MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister.
MacDonald came from even humbler origins than Lloyd
George, but Churchill disagreed with him on almost all
points. Yet it was not in Churchill’s nature to despair.
Writing during the time of the first socialist government
in 1924, Churchill noted:
One may condemn unsparingly the actions and opinions
of such a man at such a time without failing to recognize
the qualities of sincerity, of strength of character, of
tenacity of purpose, and the disregard of unpopularity
which he unquestionably displayed, and which in happier
circumstances might have been, and may perhaps still be,
of exceptional service to his fellow countrymen. 17
And so that brings us back to Churchill’s Boxing
Day speech before the United States Congress in 1941.
As Lincoln contemplated in his Gettysburg Address,
Churchill too faced the question—as we again face it
today: Can a democracy fight a war of survival without
compromising its principles
“I have been in full harmony all of my life,”
Churchill told Congress,
with the tides that flow on both sides of the Atlantic
against privilege and monopoly, and I have steered confidently
towards the Gettysburg ideal of ‘government of
the people by the people for the people.’ I owe my
advancement entirely to the House of Commons, whose
servant I am. In my country, as in yours, public men are
proud to be the servants of the State and would be
ashamed to be its masters. 18
At the end of “Mass Effects in Modern Life,”
Churchill notes that Britain does have the
option of abandoning democracy in favor of a
strong man, an Il Duce, but he is clearly proud to note
that that is not yet a path the British people have chosen
to follow—or, by implication, are likely to follow.
But would it continue to prove so under the
gravest duress Ultimately the only answer to these questions
would be experience. By his leadership in the
Second World War, Churchill showed that universal
democracy was more than up to the challenge: that it
could, did and will continue to prevail. ,
Endnotes
1. Winston S. Churchill, “Mass Effects in Modern Life” in
Thoughts and Adventures (London: Odhams, 1947), 192.
2. Ibid., 193.
3. Ibid., 194.
4. Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, ed.
Robert Rhodes James, 8 vols. (London: Chelsea House, 1974),
VI:6356.
5. Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking
Peoples, vol. 3, The Age of Revolution (Norwalk, Connecticut: Easton
Press, 1992), 111.
6. Ibid., 142.
7. Ibid., 132.
8. Ibid., 139-40.
9. Ibid., 142.
10. Ibid., 220.
11. Ibid., 221.
12. Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking
Peoples, vol. 4, The Great Democracies (Norwalk, Connecticut: Easton
Press, 1992), 53.
13. Ibid., 258.
14. Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (New York:
Norton, 1991), 40.
15. Ibid., 61.
16. Ibid., 6.
17. Winston S. Churchill, “Ramsay MacDonald: The Man
and the Politician,” in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4
vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), III:35.
18. Churchill, Complete Speeches, VI:6356.
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