Q. Is Mr. Churchill really backed by all the British people?
A. Mr. Churchill is the most popular and trusted leader the British people have had within the memory of living man. The man who caused the defeat of the General Strike in 1926 is if anything more popular among the working classes than among the upper classes. In the House of Commons he usually receives heartier applause from Labor members than from Conservatives even though he is the head of the Conservative party. This is partly because the Conservatives cannot rid themselves of a tinge of resentment at the man who was always, consistently, unfailingly right about the coming of the war, and what it would be like, while they were always, consistently, unfailingly wrong. The Conservatives out of a rooted misconception of the character and intentions of Hitler, felt an instinctive sympathy for him almost up to the time he actually began to drop bombs upon them. The Labor party on the other hand shared Churchill’s antipathy for Hitler from the very beginning, and there was thus early established a bond between the great British aristocrat and the British working classes which has been greatly strengthened by his leadership of the war. I doubt if there is a single Labor party leader with as devoted a following among the British workers as Churchill has.
Q. What part in the war has the British workingman played under Churchill’s leadership?
A. The British workingman, inspired and informed by Churchill, has been superbly and intelligently patriotic. It is this union of Churchill with Labor which has warded off defeat in the most desperate hour, and which with our help will eventually win the war. British Labor’s attitude toward the struggle which will decide the fate of all the world for generations to come is a reproach to that minority of American labor which has failed to understand the fact that the liberty and the life of every individual American workingman depends on the outcome of this war. During those awful months following the evacuation of Dunkirk, the British trades unions voluntarily gave up all the trades unions rules which, designed to protect the interests of labor in peacetime, hampered production and became a danger in war. They lengthened hours, took less pay for more work, stayed on the job to the point of complete exhaustion. In the course of about three months the British workingman doubled the production of weapons and munitions, and almost tripled airplane production by the end of the year. It could not have been done without Churchill. From 1932 to 1939, for seven years, Churchill had been tirelessly teaching, preaching, exhorting, and pleading with the British public and the British government to meet the German menace. By the time the war came the British working classes had learned from Churchill what it was about. They learned much faster than the Chamberlains and many a muddleheaded rich appeaser.
Another impressive sign of the wisdom of the British Labor Party from the leaders to the rank and file is that you do not hear from them the demands for a “definition of war aims” which are so loudly voiced by groups of American liberals. These Americans who are so concerned about establishing the chemical purity of British intentions, and who insist on a blueprint of the peace settlement, and a guarantee that the world will be made over in a style that meets with their approval—these Americans show precisely the incomprehension of Hitler that Chamberlain showed with his appeasement. Your ordinary British dock worker knows more about the meaning of the war than scores of American intellectuals who are still bleating about war aims. As the British Labor publicist, G. D. H. Cole, put it, “The Labor leaders and the great majority of their followers alike believed firmly that the defeat of Hitler mattered immeasurably more than anything else. For this reason they were ready to put aside even their socialism and the greater part of their reforming policy and even to abstain from criticizing openly the government’s mistakes rather than run any risk of dividing the national elements which stood for a vigorous prosecution of the war.”
Q. Is Churchill what you would call a realist or an idealist?
A. Churchill is both. He is a hardheaded, tough-minded idealist and an imaginative, generous realist. He is convinced that the policy which works for the good of all will also work best for the good of the individual. This is the foundation stone of civilization. Hitler believes that the smart man is the man who exploits others. Hitler’s are the ethics of the “heel,” the gangster, the racketeer, the cheat who is always on the lookout for a chance to swindle, or rob, betray, or murder for profit. The Churchill attitude is that of the moral man, the member of society. The Hitler attitude is that of the amoral man, the bandit preying upon society.
I do not think Churchill is formally a religious man, although he attends divine services and thus sets an example for the nation under his leadership. But Churchill’s beliefs add up to something closely approaching practical Christianity. It seems to me that very few Americans really understand what Churchill stands for. He is so much in the public eye as a war leader, that we are bound to think of him as a warrior first. We forget or never were told that he is first of all a builder. Before the war, in the field of international relations he believed passionately in the life-and-death necessity of sustaining the League, of collective security through the League.
Then as now, and in England as here in America, there were great numbers of persons who thought they were being hardheaded realists by rejecting the League as romantic. Their successors today are our isolationists or noninterventionists, as they shamefacedly call themselves now. Churchill remorselessly revealed how suicidal was this refusal to cooperate among nations for the maintenance of security for all. Long before Litvinoff coined the phrase Churchill was preaching that “peace is indivisible,” that only through collective security could the security of any single state be secured. His scorn for the British counterpart of our isolationists was withering: “It is of the utmost consequence to the unity of British national action that the policy of adhering to the Covenant of the League of Nations shall not be weakened or whittled away. I read in the Times a few days ago a letter in which a gentleman showed that these ideas of preventing war by international courts and by reasonable discussion had been tried over and over again. He said they had been tried after Marlborough had defeated Louis XIV and after Europe had defeated Napoleon, but, he said, they had always failed. If that is true it is a melancholy fact but what was astonishing was the crazy glee with which the writer hailed such lapses from grace. I was told the other day of a sentence of Carlyle’s in which he describes ‘the laugh of the hyena on being assured that, after all, the world is only carrion.’”
It is of course plain to everybody now that the world is being torn apart because crazy people prevented the League of Nations from functioning, crazy people who believed they were as shrewd as the Americans who today would like us to wait for the Germans to land on United States soil before we fight. It has always been considered by cheap and vulgar men that it is clever to be entirely selfish, and so our Lindberghs, Wheelers, and Nyes even whisper temptingly the base suggestion that we may profit by this war if Britain falls and her Empire crumbles. What retribution would be ours were we to listen to such voices! Churchill, whom no detractor has ever called a stupid man, is not afraid to come out boldly and declare: “I think we ought to place our trust in those moral forces which are enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Do not let us mock at them, for they are surely on our side. Do not mock at them for this may well be a time when the highest idealism is not divorced from strategic prudence. Do not mock at them, for these may be years, strange as it may seem, when Right may walk hand in hand with Might.” This he spoke in 1937. How the words are crammed with meaning now for America whose vital self-interest to bring about the defeat of our enemy is identical with the highest idealism.