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Rumbles on the Right: The Raico Case Against Winston Churchill
- By MICHAEL MCMENAMIN
- | September 27, 2022
- Category: Churchill for Today Truths and Heresies
Q: A libertarian indictment?
I’ve read Ralph Raico’s article, “Rethinking Churchill,” which dates to the 1990s but has recently been reposted. An accompanying piece by Adam Young is entitled “The Real Churchill.” The articles made Winston Churchill sound like a war-mongering, fuming socialist liberal, a cheap power-mad opportunist. It really upset me. Has there been any answer to these indictments? —R.B., UK
A: A libertarian response
That certainly is an eclectic mixture of Churchillian sins. Around the time Dr. Raico wrote, I published a detailed response by Michael McMenamin. With the author’s permission, it is here updated, with the addition of links and footnotes. See also the author’s notes below.
Dr. Raico (1936-2016) was Professor of History at Buffalo State College and a distinguished libertarian scholar, but his thesis seemed one-dimensional. He could not get over Churchill’s reliance on the State where he thought it had a role. Churchill was seeking a way (the “Minimum Standard” as he called it) to address the legitimate needs of the citizen without compromising constitutional liberties. That is a fine line, but his aim was to forestall socialism, and thus to avoid it. You might wish to read the most scholarly account of this: Larry P. Arnn, Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Survival of Free Government. From there, Dr. Raico expanded his critique to Churchill’s entire career. —Richard M. Langworth
Rumbles on the Right
by Michael McMenamin
In the wake of the Iraq war in 2003, Winston Churchill fell under attack from both right and left. Many critiques originated in America, prompted by opposition to the war, as well as by invocations of Churchill by American politicians who supported it. The conservative critique, by Adam Young, was a heavily condensed, footnote-free reprise of Ralph Raico’s earlier piece, “Rethinking Churchill.”1 The latter was 10,000-plus word essay in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories (1999). Their argument comes from the libertarian right, which usually favors a non-interventionist foreign policy absent an attack on American soil.
Many admire Churchill for reasons other than his political thought. They can be found among many political persuasions, spanning the gamut from left to right. Churchillians do not share a common view on the Iraq war, or the subsequent occupation—or indeed about Churchill himself.
We all welcome whatever light Churchill’s experience may shed on contemporary issues. He went through a lot, and was rarely without an opinion—frequently right, sometimes wrong, hardly ever uncertain. What we don’t like is when people distort his record and beliefs for their own purposes. And that is what happened here.
Full disclosure: I am and have been for over 40 years a contributing editor of the libertarian magazine Reason. Consequently, I agree with many positions of Raico, Young and their publisher, the Mises Institute. But their take on the Second World War and Churchill is not one of them.
Young to Raico
Mr. Young argues that the Churchill described by admirers is not the Churchill known to “honest history.” Rather, this is…
…a fictional version of the man and his actions. With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. Winston Churchill must be ranked with Karl Marx, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the destroyers of the values and greatness of Western civilization.
It is perhaps a minor quibble that this is Mr. Young’s first mention of Woodrow Wilson or Herbert Hoover, people Churchill did not hold in the highest regard, even if he would never have placed them in the same category as Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin.
Young’s article is heavily condensed from Raico’s, so it is convenient to consider them together. Both advance comparable arguments: Churchill had no political principles; he was an opportunist who sought power at all costs; he loved war and his hatred of Germany led him to reject a negotiated peace which led to the Holocaust. Young quotes The Spectator in 1911: “We cannot detect in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue.”2 Young does not quote the Glasgow Herald in 1924, when Churchill was running as a free-trade “Constitutionalist”: “A predestined champion of the individualism which he has served all his political life under both of its liveries.”3
War and peace
Paraphrasing Raico, Young claims that Churchill “lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of true, classical liberalism.” Raico in his 1999 essay makes the point more clearly:
In 1925, Churchill wrote: “The story of the human race is war.”4 This, however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue. Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy of classical liberalism. In particular, he never understood that, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor. Peace, not war, is the father of all things.
It can be argued however that contra Young and Raico, the story of the human race is war. The relatively recent creation of market economies based on free, peaceful and voluntary exchange between peoples is an antidote to war which has yet to be fully accepted by those on the left and right who believe force, individually or institutionally, is a better way to organize society.
Reform and individualism
It is important to recognize, in evaluating Churchill’s political thought, that for most of his life he identified with the American Democratic Party. When Churchill was coming of age, his political mentor was a free-trade, laissez-faire Democrat, the New York Congressman Bourke Cockran.5 Since the Civil War, Republicans had been the party of government, privilege and protection, backers of big business and the high tariffs it demanded. The Democrats, with their strength in the agrarian South and the working class in industrial Northern cities, were the party of Free Trade. All that was to evolve over the course of the 20th century: today the Free Traders are largely Republicans, the protectionists Democrats. But this change did not occur in Churchill’s lifetime.
Young labels Churchill’s and the Liberal Party’s early 1900s reforms—insurance against sickness, unemployment and old age—as nothing more than “a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and America.” Raico is more nuanced, but his message is the same.
Churchill did support a “Minimum Standard”6 below which citizens would not be allowed to fall and above which they might compete freely. But that makes him no more a collectivist or socialist than Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan or Milton Friedman. As Paul Addison accurately summarized:
[T]he most consistent strand in his rhetoric was his exposition of the virtues of capitalism. It was always a form of capitalism in which the state maintained a balance between the classes, and sought to shield the poor and the working-class through fiscal or social policy. Churchill, in Kenneth Morgan’s phrase, stood for “free enterprise with a human face.” Beyond this he detested all peacetime plans for the regulation and control of the economy. They smacked to him of regimentation and dictatorship. Churchill was often dismissed as an adventurer but it was, of course, this quality of individualism for which, above all else, he stood.7
Power versus principle
Young and Raico accuse Churchill of being an opportunist who sought only power. Young disagrees with President Bush’s post-Iraq comparison of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Churchill as a man who sought “the right thing and not the easy thing.” No, says Young: “Churchill was above all a man who craved power….to advance himself no matter what the cost.” (Raico made the same observation before the Iraq war.)
Mr. Young is no student of Churchill and shows no signs of having read much about him besides Dr. Raico’s essay. Raico read widely, if selectively. He cited critical Churchill biographers John Charmley, Clive Ponting, David Irving and Dietrich Aigner. But the charge rings false to anyone familiar with the five periods during Churchill’s public career when he did not hold a cabinet or sub-cabinet position.
1900-06
The Tories were in power but as a young Tory, Churchill did nothing to ingratiate himself with them. Openly ambitious and disrespectful of his elders, he criticized their conduct of the Boer War (1899-1902). He supported army retrenchment and reform. Churchill was instrumental in the Liberal Party’s defeat of War Secretary St. John Brodrick’s proposal for a large standing army or European expeditionary force. He supported and argued for Free Trade, ignoring Conservative elder Joseph Chamberlain’s demand to “study tariffs.” None of this was calculated to win him power.
1915-17:
Churchill was crushed, even depressed, by the Tory revenge in 1915, forcing him out of the Admiralty. He could have stayed home in a modest Cabinet position, but chose instead to take a commission in the Army. Rejecting high rank, he preferred to command forces under fire in the front line. He didn’t return to power until his friend Lloyd George replaced H.H. Asquith as Prime Minister.
1922-24:
Defeated for reelection in 1922, Churchill was out of power and Parliament for two years. He did nothing to curry favor with the ruling Conservatives during the 1923 election, campaigning as the free-trader he always was. In January 1924 the Liberals embraced collectivism in a coalition with the Socialists. This led to Britain’s first Labour Party government under Ramsay MacDonald. So Churchill left the Liberal Party and worked to unite free-trade Liberals with the Conservatives. He ran as a “Constitutionalist” with Conservative support in November 1924, again stressing his Free Trade credentials. The new Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made him—to his surprise—Chancellor of the Exchequer, Free Trade principles and all.
1929-39:
Home Rule, India, the rise of Nazism, German rearmament, the Abdication—rarely has one politician, so prominent in his party, taken so many positions contrary to the party line. Reasonable people may disagree today on the stances Churchill took. But to state that he placed power over principle in those years is groundless.
1945-51:
After losing the 1945 election, Churchill yearned to return to office and displace the Socialists, which he eventually did in 1951. But he did so using the same individualist rhetoric which had helped usher him out of power in 1945. An opportunist would have softened his words the second time around. Yet Churchill campaigned in 1951 on the individualist themes he had espoused all his life: “We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait his place until his turn comes.”8
Though addressing different issues at different times, the 76-year-old Churchill of 1951 bears a remarkable resemblance to the 29-year-old Churchill of 1903. His youthful views were, in his own words, “powerfully influenced” by his classical liberal Irish-American mentor, Bourke Cockran. Where in all this is Churchill the opportunist?
Churchill and war
Whether we admire or disparage Churchill, one’s opinion often comes down to May 1940. It unquestionably does with Dr. Raico, whose world view is that of the 1930s Republican right: isolationists and members of America First, who wanted to avoid U.S. involvement in another European war at all costs. They believed America joining the First World War was a mistake as well. Their positions were honorable, held by honorable people. So too were the positions of those who disagreed with them.
Both Young and Raico hold Churchill responsible for American involvement in the First World War. “While Winston had no principles,” Raico writes, “there was one constant in his life: the love of war.” He cites Churchill’s playing with soldiers as a boy; attending Sandhurst “instead of the universities.” He notes Churchill’s remark to Violet Asquith in the early days of the war: “I cannot help it—I love every second I live.”9 Yet that last quote expresses something quite different from the love of war itself.
Against this, we need to contrast Churchill’s 1901 speech attacking his own party and “Mr. Brodrick’s Army”—the creation of three regular army corps. Adamantly he opposed having a standing army, ready at a moment’s notice to engage in a European war:
[A] European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and the exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.10
Can this be the same man Raico would have us believe “loved war as few modern men ever have”?
War-monger or conciliator?
Before the 1914 war, Raico says, Churchill spread “wild rumors of the growing strength of the German navy, just as he did in the 1930s about the build-up of the German air force.” Young echoes Raico: “Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and, during the crises that followed, used every opportunity to fan the flames of war.”
Young’s bibliography references Robert Massey’s excellent Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War. But nothing in Massey supports the Raico-Young thesis that Churchill used “every opportunity” to foment war. From Massey we learn that it was Churchill who abandoned the “Two-Power Standard,” maintaining a navy as strong as the next two naval powers combined. (He settled for a 60% superiority over the German fleet.)11
Churchill’s first speech as head of the Admiralty offered “conciliation and compromise” to the Germans. He proposed a “naval holiday,” a halt in building new battleships. The Royal Navy was 60% larger than the German High Seas Fleet. So Churchill declared that Britain would cancel four dreadnoughts if the Germans canceled two. Then, he suggested, France, Italy, Austria and Russia might follow suit. But the Germans didn’t bite. Massey says the German ambassador worked “to prevent an official British proposal for a Naval Holiday from reaching Berlin.”12
Postwar disarmament
Raico and Young claim that during the 1920s, “Churchill denounced all calls for Allied disarmament even before Hitler came to power.” It was Churchill’s “protracted fantasy” that Germany would submit forever to the shackles of Versailles. Both are demonstrably wrong.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill in cabinet opposed a 1925 defense pact with France aimed at Germany. No pact should be concluded, he said, unless it included an arrangement with Germany as well. This was, in fact, acknowledged by Churchill as “appeasement” of Germany’s legitimate grievances—long before that word acquired negative connotations. Churchill believed the same thing about the unrealistic level of German reparations. But he could do nothing to alleviate them without the United States offering relief to its own former allies—something the United States resolutely refused to do.13
Second World War
For Young and Raico, Churchill can do nothing right. Here is Raico’s take on Churchill in the 1930s:
Though a Conservative MP, Churchill began berating the Conservative governments, first Baldwin’s and then Chamberlain’s, for their alleged blindness to the Nazi threat. He vastly exaggerated the extent of German rearmament, formidable as it was, and distorted its purpose by harping on German production of heavy-bombers.
Neither Raico nor Young mention what the purpose of German rearmament was—only that Britain need not be concerned because it didn’t include heavy-bombers. Far from exaggerations, Churchill’s warnings were based on intelligence estimates from his private sources within the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments. They accurately reflected what the British government knew at the time about German rearmament.
Churchill and the Holocaust
So we come to May, 1940, and the principal Raico and Young thesis: Churchill should have cut a deal with Hitler. Because he didn’t, Churchill was responsible for the Holocaust. Raico writes:
Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him—the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent in world affairs. One may add that it probably also doomed European Jewry. It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits to historical debate.” (Emphasis added.)
Raico cites in a footnote a Goebbels diary entry in March of 1942, to support his claim that Churchill “doomed European Jewry”:
Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime…. [T]he fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America are today organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe—and that’s only right.14
By March 1942, Hitler had invaded Poland (1939); had invaded France, Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium (1940); thought about but passed on Britain (1940-41); had invaded Greece, the Balkans and the Soviet Union (1941); and had declared war on the United States (1941). Yet Raico believed Churchill was responsible for the Holocaust because he didn’t seek peace terms in 1940.
Fascism versus communism
What particularly bothers Dr. Raico is that, by holding out as Churchill did, America eventually joined the war against Hitler. Here Raico is correct, but why is he upset? The answer is communism. Raico believes that the Soviet Union was a much greater threat than the Nazis. Why, he asks, should there be a double-standard? Why compromise with one dictator while collaborating with the other?
This has been a common theme of isolationists since the 1930s—see Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire (2002). But contrary to Raico, there is powerful evidence that in 1940, communism was a lesser threat. The reasons are lucidly explained by John Lukacs in The Duel: 10 May-31 July 1940: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler (1992):
In spite of its international pretensions and propaganda, communism did not go very far outside the Soviet Union…. Alone among the great revolutions of the world—consider only how the American and French revolutions had soon been emulated by a host of other peoples, in Latin America and in Western Europe, often without the support of American or French armies—communism was unable to achieve power anywhere outside the Soviet Union until after the Second World War.15
Even before Hitler, Lukacs continues, authoritarian dictatorships posed a greater threat to market capitalism. For 20 years before 1940, democracy had failed and been abandoned broadly. Churchill saw this in 1933: “The world is losing faith in democracy…. Look at Europe. Much more than half of Europe has degenerated in this century from Parliaments so hopefully erected in the last into arbitrary or military governments, and the movement is steady everywhere.”16
The greater threat
Lukacs expanded on his theme in Five Days in London, May 1940 (1999). In 1940, he wrote, Hitler represented to many a wave of the future: “[H]ad Hitler won the Second World War, we would be living in a different world.” What kind of world? Revisionists need to answer that.
Hitler, Lukacs believed, was “the greatest revolutionary of the 20th century.” His triumph would have inspired, if not imposed, a populist, nationalist (and racist) paradigm for the world. National Socialism would have prevailed. In 1940 Churchill warned of a “new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science.”17 Imagine a world with a Nazi atomic bomb and no Manhattan Project.
Dr. Raico has a historian’s doubt about counterfactuals or alternate history. But he does refer to a 1948 Hanson Baldwin remark. Absent Britain and the United States, Baldwin said, the Nazis and Soviet Union would have fought each other “to a frazzle.” If that’s the best he can do, Raico’s doubt about counterfactuals is well taken. Without the distraction of the British in North Africa, without massive support from the Anglo-Americans, it is difficult to conceive of Soviet survival in 1941. Even then, the USSR included the same diverse ethnic elements which eagerly spun away from Moscow in 1989.
More importantly—referring again to the Holocaust—British neutrality after May 1940 would only have hastened the German invasion of Russia. While there were German and Polish concentration camps before that invasion, SS death squads and the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews came after it. What might Hitler have accomplished if he had invaded the Soviet Union sooner? And with no possibility that allied invaders would one day uncover the ghastly secret the Nazis tried to conceal?
The Cold War
It is clear what Young and Raico think about Churchill’s conduct during the war, and any deals he and Roosevelt made with Stalin. (Leaping back to the 1920s, Young even repeats the false claim that Churchill supported the use of “poison gas” against Iraqis.) It follows that Raico and Young hold Churchill responsible for involving the United States in the Cold War. Echoed by Young, Raico wrote: “With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own policy, there was only one recourse open to Churchill: to bring America into Europe permanently. Thus, his anxious expostulations to the Americans, including his Fulton, Missouri ‘Iron Curtain’ speech.”
Factually, President Truman invited Churchill to give that speech. The Americans had an advance copy of what he was going to say. Churchill wasn’t even in power during any of the early formative years of the Cold War. Britain’s foreign policy was in the hands of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, who supported the Americans. But the Cold War and the strategies behind it were conceived and conducted by the United States—with Great Britain a very junior partner. Predictably, no mention is made by Young or Raico of Churchill’s unsuccessful effort, after Stalin’s death, for a summit conference with the new Soviet leadership.
In retrospect
Adam Young’s reprise of Ralph Raico was motivated by his opposition to the Iraq war, an event that remains contentious. What Churchill would have done that Tony Blair didn’t do, we cannot say. Few of Churchill’s admirers would venture an opinion. Reasonable people may differ on this.
Ralph Raico’s position was not reasonable. His disdain for Churchill stemmed from May, 1940. Without Churchill’s premiership, he believed, America would not have gone to war with Germany. That seems to be an entirely logical deduction. But if Dr. Raico could have lived with the consequences of a Nazi triumph, most people in West preferred not to. In their zeal to attack political opposites today, Young and Raico chose to attack the man who made it possible to do so. Churchill would have understood. “Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant and venomous things that are said,” he remarked, “but on the whole we would rather lump them than do away with it.”18
The world which resulted from Churchill’s stubborn courage is better for it, and that world is perfectly willing to accept the judgment of history. It is a judgment that echoes Mary Soames’s note to her 90-year-old father in his last days: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father, I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does—Liberty itself.”19
Endnotes
1 Ralph Raico, “Rethinking Churchill” (1999), Adam Young, “The Real Churchill” (2004); Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2021, both articles accessed 20 May 2022.
2 The Spectator, London, October 1911, quoted in Robert Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Random House, 1992), 769.
3 Glasgow Herald, Glasgow, 26 February 1924, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, Prophet of Truth 1922-1929 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 28.
4 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), The World Crisis, vol. 4, The Aftermath (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929), 451.
5 See Fred Glueckstein, “Great Contemporaries: Bourke Cockran,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2016, accessed 26 May 2022.
6 WSC, Colonial Office, 14 March 1908, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 39.
7 Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front (London: Cape, 1992), 440-41.
8 WSC, Broadcast, London, 8 October 1951, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 395.
9 Michael Howard, “Churchill in the First World War,” cited in Robert Blake & Wm. Roger Louis, Churchill: A Major New Assessment (Oxford University Press, 1993), 129.
10 WSC, House of Commons, 13 May 1901, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 504.
11 Massie, Dreadnought, 822.
12 Ibid., 830-31.
13 Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill and the Presidents: Calvin Coolidge,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2015, accessed 31 May 2022.
14 Josef Goebbels, in Louis P. Lochner, ed. & trans., The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948), 148.
15 John Lukacs, The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 11.
16 WSC, House of Commons, 22 February 1933, in Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, 314.
17 WSC, House of Commons, 18 June 1940, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 5.
18 WSC, House of Commons, 15 July 1952, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 573.
19 Mary Soames, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 1366.
Note by the author, 2022
“Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time” Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons in 1901. I was pleased, therefore, to find that my article indeed has stood the test of time. Dr. Raico had 12 years before
his death in 2016 to rebut me, but did not. In fact, he included “Rethinking Churchill” in a 2010 collection of his essays and reviews without correcting one of the many errors I addressed.
While I would change nothing in my critique, I subsequently learned something that may interest readers. Alan Ebenstein, in his 2001 biography of the classical liberal economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek says Hayek was “a long time admirer” of Churchill ,“whose portrait hung over Hayek’s desk for many years, even when in later life he returned to his native Austria to work.” I found this interesting. Raico received his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in 1970, where the adviser on his dissertation (published in 2010) was none other than Friedrich Hayek.
Given Hayek’s admiration for Churchill, the absence of any mention of Hayek in Raico’s “Rethinking Churchill” seems curious. Raico could hardly have missed that Churchill portrait hanging over his famous adviser’s desk. Raico lumped Churchill with Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin as “one of the destroyers of the values and greatness of Western Civilization.” Might he at least have asked his adviser, one of the most influential scholars of the 20th century, why he thought so well of Churchill? Perhaps he did ask, but sadly
we’ll never know. —MM
The author
Michael McMenamin is the co-author with Curt Zoller of Becoming Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor (2009). He is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and longtime writer of a Finest Hour column “Action This Day,” chronicling Churchill’s life at 25-year intervals. This article is updated with endnotes added, from his “Rumbles Left and Right” in Finest Hour 123, Summer 2004.