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Articles
Video: The 20th Century: Its Promise and Realization, M.I.T., 1949
- By WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
- | December 18, 2023
- Category: Churchill for Today Resources The Literary Churchill
Boston, 31 March 1949
The 20th Century: “I frankly confess that I feel somewhat overawed in addressing this vast scientific and learned audience…. I have no technical and no university education and have just had to pick up a few things as I went along. Therefore, I speak with a diffidence, which I hope to overcome as I proceed.”
Nearing the half-way mark in the 20th century, Winston Churchill addressed a convocation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A review of the past five decades, it was one of his signal speeches abroad. It ranks in our opinion with his great fighting speeches to U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament in 1941. It formed the coda to his famous words at Harvard on Anglo-American unity in 1943, to which he proudly referred: “[T]o use an expression I used first at Harvard six years ago, the [unity] most precious to me is the fraternal association between the British Commonwealth of Nations and the United States.”
Although we have encountered news reports of the speech and partial videos of it, we were unaware that Massachusetts Institute of Technology had published the full proceedings. The video begins with Churchill’s introduction by his longtime friend Bernard Baruch, which we had never seen. It omits nothing. Our thanks to Richard Cohen, founder of the highly successful Winston Churchill Facebook Group, for bringing this production to our attention.
A transcript is available to readers who may email [email protected]. It differs in detail from later printed versions since it was taken directly from the video.
Introduction
Churchill had last addressed “academic groves” in America at Harvard in 1943, with the Second World War at its apogee. Now the war was over—and a new struggle, the “Cold War,” enveloped the world. It was, Churchill reflected, “a hard experience in the life of the world. After our great victory, which we believed would decide the struggle for freedom, for our time at least, we thought we had deserved better of fortune.” Ever the optimist, he offered hope:
Many favourable processes are on foot. Under the impact of Communism, all the free nations are being welded together, as they never have been before, and never could be, but for the harsh external pressure to which they are being subjected…. [U]nities and associations are being established by many nations throughout the free world with a speed and reality which would not have been achieved perhaps for generations.
“Common men killing each other”
Churchill pulled no punches: the 20th century had to date been a disappointment. He could not disguise his regret:
[F]or us in Britain, the 19th century ended amid the glories of the Victorian era, and we entered upon the dawn of the 20th century in high hope for our country, our Empire and the world…. In 1900 a sense of moving hopefully forward to brighter, broader, and easier days predominated. Little did we guess that what has been called the Century of the Common Man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries put together in the history of the world.
He then considered with considerable prescience, as we look back on it today, the intrusions of the State into basic liberties:
In the name of ordered but unceasing progress, we saluted the age of democracy…. We saw no reason then why men and women should not shape their own home life and careers without being cramped by the growing complexity of the State, which was to be their servant and the protector of their rights. You had the famous American maxim, “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” We both noticed that the world was divided into peoples that owned the governments and governments that owned the peoples. At least I heard all this around that time and liked some of it very much.
Churchill as historian
His listeners in Boston then received a history lesson from someone who had witnessed, made and wrote history. What happened, he asked, to the ordered progress that seemed within reach in 1900?
For several generations Britannia had ruled the waves—for long periods at less cost annually than that of a single modern battleship. History, I think, ladies and gentlemen, will say that this great trust was not abused. American testimony about the early period of the Monroe Doctrine is upon record. There was the suppression of the slave trade and piracy. During our prolonged naval supremacy, undeterred by the rise of foreign tariffs, we kept our ports freely open to the commerce of the world….
But in the first decade of the 20th century with new patterns of warships, naval rivalries became acute and fierce. Civilized governments began to think in dreadnoughts. It was in such a setting very difficult to prevent the First World War, far more difficult than it would have been to prevent the Second.
Looking back to the Second World War, Churchill described it as an “ordeal even more appalling…. Once again, the English-speaking world gloriously but narrowly emerged, bleeding and breathless, but united as we never were before.” Churchill the optimist was there to give hope that unity would hold. It did, for the most part, though difficulties and divergences threatened it repeatedly. How stands it today? That is a question thoughtful readers may ponder.
“The collapse of China”
Churchill predicted that tyranny wouldn’t stand. On the main tyranny of that time, he would be proven right:
Laws just or unjust may govern men’s actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehoods and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man, thus held in trance, or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where, and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.
Another tyranny was already arising, and Churchill saw it. “The worst disaster” since 1945, he said, was “the collapse of China under Communist attack and intrigue. China, in which the United States has always taken a high interest, comprises an immense part of the population of the world.”
“Scientific ability to control men’s thoughts…
A stark warning, not much noticed then, was part of his message. Since youth Churchill had assailed rule by technocrats. As early as 1901 he warned about letting “the government of States to get into the hands of the experts.” At M.I.T. his learned audience heard this theme again:
Dr. Burchard, the Dean of Humanities, spoke with awe of “an approaching scientific ability to control men’s thoughts with precision.” I shall be very content personally if my task in this world is done before that happens….
No technical knowledge can outweigh knowledge of the humanities, in the gaining of which philosophy and history walk hand in hand. Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honour, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow.
Those whose minds are attracted or compelled to rigid and symmetrical systems of government should remember that logic, like science, must be the servant and not the master of man. Human beings and human societies are not structures that are built or machines that are forged. They are plants that grow and must be tended as such.
Churchill’s words speak to us across the years—perhaps nowhere more than that day in Boston, so many years ago.
Never was our future laid out in such a clear fashion, Churchill knew his history and could clearly see he pitfalls that lay ahead. A man of his time, with a sure vision for the future.