around & about - Winston Churchill

FINEST HOUR 66, FIRST QUARTER, 1990
In 1990 a writer for the
New York Observer
charged that Winston
Churchill was a racist, an
a cusation still regularly
heard from time to time.
This and other allegations
were taken up by The Churchill Centre’s New York chapter
founder Al Lurie, who noted that the charge of racism was
qualified at best, as illustrated by a related dispute about
H. L. Mencken.
Concerning The Diary of H.L. Mencken in The New
York Times Book Review, a reviewer fastened onto a few of
Mencken’s private diary entries to argue that the great writer
and editor hated blacks and Jews and was pro-Nazi. This
drew the fire of Churchill biographer William Manchester,
who permitted us to quote from his response to the Mencken
review, as well as his comments on Churchill’s attitudes from
his biography, The Last Lion.
In all our thousands of hours together I never heard
Mencken insult Jews or blacks, and perhaps the most
outrageous twisting of the Mencken diary is the charge
that he was pro-Nazi. He dismissed World War II as
“Roosevelt’s War,” but he despised the Third Reich from
the outset. Any defense of Germany was impossible, he
concluded, “so long as the chief officer of the German state
continues to make speeches worthy of an Imperial Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Churchill once described a ruffian as a “sort of
Kaffir” and a “Mulatto.” In Cuba, fresh out of Sandhurst,
he had distrusted “the negro element among the insurgents.”
He never outgrew this prejudice. Late in life he was
asked if he had seen the film Carmen Jones. He had walked
out on it, he replied, because he didn’t like “blackamoors.”
His physician was present, and Winston asked what happened
when blacks got measles. Could the rash be spotted?
The doctor replied that blacks suffered a high mortality
rate from measles. Churchill said lightly, “Well, there are
plenty left. They’ve got a high rate of production.” He
could greet Louis Botha and Michael Collins as equals, but
his relationship with any Indian could never be as between
compeers. It followed that their country must remain a
vassal state.
Churchill and History
WILLIAM MANCHESTER
Professor Manchester was the most lyrical of Churchill biographers,
whose Last Lion brought thousands of people to Churchill. Volume 3
of The Last Lion will be published in 2010 by his friend Paul Reid.
THE DANGERS OF “GENERATIONAL CHAUVINISM”
FINEST HoUR 140 / 21
This was the underside of his position in the great
debates over India’s future which began in 1929. Today it
would be called an expression of racism, and he, as its
exponent, a racist. But neither word had been coined then;
they would not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary or
Webster’s for another generation. Until recently—beginning
in the 1940s—racial intolerance was not only acceptable in
polite society; it was fashionable, even assumed.
Churchill expressed initial enthusiasm for Katherine
Mayo’s book, Mother India. Viewed from the 1980s, her
work seems almost comparable to the Protocols of Zion. Vile
in its insinuations, wildly inaccurate, and above all hypocritical,
this single volume by an elderly prig poisoned the
minds of millions who might otherwise have reflected
thoughtfully on Gandhi’s movement.
Churchill, however, always had second and third
thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It
was part of his pattern of response to any political issue
that while his early reactions were often emotional, and
even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by
reason and generosity. Russia had been more than he could
handle—though it should be remembered that he would
have been content to see a socialist regime there provided it
renounced wholesale slaughter—but his record had been
impressive in South Africa, the Middle East and Ireland.
And Churchill, as a friend of Jews individually and the Jews
collectively, ranked above all other major statesmen of the
20th century.
People who argue from the convenient perch of the
present that Churchill was a racist or bigot are guilty of
what I call “generational chauvinism”—judging past eras by
the standards of the present. The passing of such ex post
facto judgments seems to be increasingly popular. A recent
headline in a Connecticut newspaper read: “Old West Was
Sexist,” though neither the word nor the concept of sexism
existed on the frontier. Soon, perhaps, it will be disclosed
that “Alamo Defenders Were Homophobes.” It is sobering
to reflect on the consequences were the tables turned. How
would past generations judge American sexual behavior in
1990 and the abandonment of the traditional family?
If we are going to adopt generational chauvinism as
dogma, many past heroes will be diminished, including
liberal heroes. The kind of anti-semitism that appears in
Churchill’s private conversations may be found elsewhere:
for example, in the early letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and
Adlai Stevenson. And after FDR’s crutches collapsed during
a 1936 political rally in Philadelphia, he said, “I was the
maddest white man you ever saw”—a remark that, in this
day and age, could lose an election. ,