How the Stars at Churchill’s Birth Formed the Constellation of His Life.
Speech at the Birthday Dinner for Sir Winston S. Churchill, The Right Honourable Winston Spencer Churchill Society of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, November 30, 2023.
The stars I’m talking about tonight have nothing to do with the ones in the sky—with neither astronomy nor astrology. You will be relieved to know that I’m also not talking about the ‘stars’ held up to us by the entertainment industry. I am talking about some prominent individuals born in the year 1874: Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Guglielmo Marconi, Carl Bosch, and Chaim Weizmann. Of these men, all but Weizmann became Nobel Laureates.
That year saw Great Britain at or near the zenith of its long imperial history. Queen Victoria’s empire ruled nearly 25 percent of the land on earth with some 33 percent of its population. And of course, Britannia ‘ruled the waves,’ keeping open the sea lanes in a worldwide commercial as well as military and political empire. It was the newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who had Victoria named Empress of India, a move that rather endeared him to her.
Disraeli was a founder of the modern British Conservative Party. The Conservatives were animated by an aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. In response to the rise of modern democracy in America and elsewhere, Conservatives implemented the second of the two Reform Acts that widened the electoral franchise. Disraeli himself had been instrumental in the passage of the 1867 Reform Act, which doubled the number of British voters in Parliamentary elections. This began what would later be called “Tory Democracy,” a phrase coined by none other than one of Disraeli’s successors in the prime ministry, Randolph Churchill. Under Disraeli, Tories also began, albeit in piecemeal fashion, another characteristic feature of modern politics, the welfare state, which was intended to stave off the more extreme forms of socialism—a strategy Winston Churchill, as Liberal Party Home Secretary prior to the First World War, would continue. Nor would Conservatives move seriously to cut it back until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure, more than a century after Disraeli.
The dominant foreign policy crisis of Disraeli’s term in office derived from what was called the Eastern Question: Who would benefit from the ongoing decline of the Ottoman Empire? Disraeli wanted to make sure it wasn’t Russia, whose czar would invade Ottoman territory in 1877, hunting in wild mountains of the Balkans, where the Bulgarians and the Serbs had revolted against weakening Turkish rule. Russia won that war; Bulgaria and Serbia got out of the empire. Russia’s push southward alarmed the British, for whom the Mediterranean served as the geopolitical buckle between their island and their own imperial holdings in the East. The Disraeli government’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875 was one major piece of British strategy in the region, which also included pressuring the Turks to cede Cyprus to Great Britain. These moves all instantiated a strategy aimed at containing Russia in the south. Disraeli had used the British navy to prevent Russian entry into the Dardanelles, and it is arguable that Churchill’s interest in the Dardanelles during both world wars flowed from similar geopolitical considerations, now centered on Germany but very much with an eye on Russia, too.
One last thing to recall about Disraeli: He was Jewish—thoroughly ‘assimilated,’ to be sure, but a sort of marker for a man like Churchill, who enjoyed cordial relations with British Jewish leaders throughout his career. Would or could Jews be assimilated into British society, and into European society generally? Disraeli’s example said ‘yes’; the Russian czar and, a few decades later, the French Right and then the Hitlerites would say ‘no.’ Churchill supported both Jewish rights in Great Britain and the right of Jews to a homeland of their own. In a 1920 article, “Zionism versus Bolshevism: As Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” he quoted Disraeli as saying, “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Churchill commended Zionism for providing an alternative to both democratic socialism and communism, movements in which Jewish leaders had gained prominence, following Marx. While Russian czars and, later, the Nazis, would kill Jewish bodies, Churchill worried that Marxism would kill Jewish souls.
In 1874, Herbert Hoover’s America was still recovering from the devastation of the first fully modern war, that new trial of American souls. The French Revolution had begun, and Napoleon had perfected, the democratization of war, following the democratization of civil society, with the mass mobilization of armies that also fought en masse, but the American Civil War had added the devastating power of modern weaponry—long-range rifles, exploding bullets—weapons capable of killing en masse. As it happened, German military strategists denigrated this New-World lesson of slaughter. Americans were incompetent, they said, amateurs at war. When we Germans fight, it is different, as we proved in the Franco-Prussian War, only three years earlier. The German debacles of 1918 and 1944 would prove otherwise, and not only Churchill and Hoover but Marconi, Bosch, and Weizmann would all figure in the world constellation that formed in the twentieth century, as a result of the geopolitical alignment that had crystallized in the last quarter of the nineteenth.
By 1874, however, America was teaching itself another lesson, namely, that the political aftermath of a costly military victory is as important as the victory itself. You must win the peace, too, and Reconstruction of the former rebel states of the South was failing. Churchill would write one of his greatest books on exactly this topic: The Aftermath, part of his monumental history of The Great War. In it, he argued that the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War I left the Eastern Question reconfigured but not resolved—even worsened, given the Bolshevik Revolution—and what might be called the Western Question—What will become of Germany?—resolved, but unsatisfactorily. That is, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the new regime in Russia menaced Germany, Great Britain, and France immediately, given the Soviet network of Communist Party members in those countries, while Germany remained a potential menace to Russia, Great Britain, and France, given Germans’ resentments over the postwar settlement.
When asked what his strategy was for winning the Second World War, Churchill reportedly said, in an uncharacteristically laconic way, “Drag the Americans in.” A dedicated Quaker whose greatest achievement was to organize the American relief effort in Europe during the aftermath of the Great War, hoping to see that the reconstruction of Europe had a chance not to end as the American Reconstruction had done, Herbert Hoover devoted a decade of his life attempting to present Americans from getting dragged into another cataclysm an effort he chronicled in his long-suppressed memoir, Freedom Betrayed. His great work aiming to win the peace began to falter during his presidency, with the ever-increasing weakness of German democratic republicanism and the beginning of the Great Depression, as Stalin’s Russia hovered to take advantage and the Hitler movement marched on in Germany.
Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany: Both Churchill and Hoover understood the greatest moral and political threat of their careers as statemen: the perverse yoking of modern technology with ideologies purporting to justify aggressive war by mass, mechanized militaries, ideologies that justified the tyrannical form of mass politics—taken together, ‘totalitarianism.’ Both men immediately saw the Soviet Union for what it was: a lethal threat to the lives and liberties of citizens, to all human beings who refused to be subjects of a self-styled “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Churchill equally saw Nazi Germany for what it was, the twin brother of Bolshevism, organized not around hatred of a social class, the bourgeoisie and its ‘capitalism,’ but around the hatred of a race, a race Hitler charged with surreptitiously ruling the United States, Great Britain, and all the republics—ruling them from the banking houses of the capitalism Hitler despised as much as Lenin and Stalin did.
Hoover understood Hitler as a threat, as well. Unlike Churchill, he met the man, describing how certain topics would ‘trigger’ him into a rage. His thumbnail portrait of Hitler in the pages of Freedom Betrayed is a telling description of what a later writer would call Germany’s “insane tyrants.”
Why, then, did they diverge in their strategies in the 1930s? Hoover hoped and expected that the two brother tyrants would commit fratricide, deadlock militarily over Eastern and Central Europe. If so, America’s best course was to stay out of any future European war, as George Washington had recommended. What Hoover didn’t anticipate, and never fully saw, was the close collaboration of Hitler and Stalin in the years immediately prior to the war; nor did he foresee that Stalin and his generals could do to Hitler what Czar Alexander I and his generals had done to Napoleon—allow the winter to wear down his army, then counterattack with a larger army backed by initially shorter supply line. In a way, Hoover’s hope was the photographic negative of Stalin’s who expected, in good Marxist-Leninist fashion, that the capitalist republics of France and Britain and the supposedly capitalist tyranny of Hitler would finish off each other, giving his Soviet Union the opportunity to sweep up the spoils. That is, Hoover and Stalin both indulged in wishful thinking. With his far more realistic analysis of the geopolitics of his time, Churchill frustrated his well-intentioned American rival and his malign Russian enemy—to say nothing of the Axis powers.
A citizen of the least of those future powers, Italy, the class of 1874’s Guglielmo Marconi won a Nobel Prize in 1909 for inventing the first technology that could use radio waves for long-distance communication—radio the only intimate means of mass, democratic communication, the only means by which a stateman can speak to every citizen, every family, one-to-one. Radio enabled Churchill to hold English spirits firm as the RAF and the Luftwaffe fought it out in the English skies. Marconi had acquired funding for his research in London, where he obtained a British patent in 1896 and not incidentally got in touch with the Admiralty, an institution the young Churchill would eventually oversee. The capacity of British naval vessels to communicate over long distances with each other and with bases on shore contributed substantially both to British military preparedness in the years prior to the First World War (in which Italy was an ally) and to the maintenance of the Empire.
Unfortunately, in 1923 Marconi would join the Italian Fascist Party. Mussolini made him president of the Royal Academy of Italy and thereby a member of the Fascist Grand Council. In that post, Marconi went so far as to compare his joining of electric rays into a bundle with the fasces, the joining of rods symbolizing, as Marconi put it, “all the healthy energies of Italy into a bundle, for the future greatness of Italy.” What he didn’t know was that Churchill’s (genuinely) Great Britain and Mussolini’s pseudo-Roman Italy would collide some twenty years later, and that his own discovery would be used by the British statesman to help prevent the future greatness of Italy.
In Germany, the weightier of the Axis powers in Europe, Carl Bosch, another member of the birth-class of 1874, also became a Nobel laureate, in honor of his work in high-pressure industrial chemistry. In the years before World War I, working for the BASF corporation, he figured out how to produce mass quantities of synthetic nitrate, used in manufacturing many products to this day, including the nitrogen fertilizers that helped to feed a substantial portion of the world population. After that war, he extended these techniques to the production of synthetic fuels, which would power German tanks in the next war. Founding and heading the I. G. Farben corporation in 1925, of which BASF became one component, he initially collaborated with the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, receiving a contract to expand production of synthetic fuel. But Nazi anti-Semitism repelled him—a number of his engineer colleagues were Jewish—and this led to his dismissal a few years later, in 1937, after which he descended into depression and alcoholism. He died in 1940. A few years later, I. G. Farben would supply, through a subsidiary firm, Zyklon B gas for the death chambers of the Reich.
The Hitler genocide spurred worldwide support for the Zionist movement, which Churchill had supported for decades. Still another man born in 1874, Chaim Weizmann, became the first president of modern Israel in 1949, after almost exactly a half century’s work on behalf of the Zionism. Born in Russia, Weizmann was a Ph.D. biochemist, an expert on industrial fermentation, especially the process that produces acetone, which is used in the manufacture of cordite explosives. This brought him to the favorable attention of British officials. Churchill, who encouraged Weizmann to mass-produce acetone for use by the Navy in the First World War, had already met Weizmann in 1905 while Churchill was campaigning for a seat in the House of Commons in Manchester, opposing the Conservative Party’s Aliens Bill, which would have excluded Russian Jews fleeing Czarist Russia from Great Britain. Five years later, as Home Secretary, Churchill signed Weizmann’s citizenship papers. More important in Zionist terms, Weizmann became friendly with Arthur Balfour, persuading him to select Palestine as the Jewish homeland in a conversation that occurred in the fateful year of 1914; the Balfour Declaration was issued three years later. The British pushed the Ottomans out of Palestine. In effect, the “Jewish Question” of the twentieth centuries came out of the “Eastern Question” Disraeli had addressed in the previous century. For his part, in a White Paper prepared in 1922, Churchill declared that Jews live in Palestine “of right and not of sufferance,” a right resting upon their “ancient historic connection” to the land.
During the 1930s, anticipating war with Germany, Weizmann wrote a letter assuring British leaders of his firm support in any future conflict, and in 1944 he met with Churchill to discuss the partition of Palestine in the aftermath of that war.
England’s Disraeli, America’s Hoover, Italy’s Marconi, Germany Bosch, the future Israel’s Weizmann: the stars at Churchill’s birth formed the constellation of his life.
Postscript
Had Churchill not been Prime Minister during the Second World War, he would be remembered today primarily as a literary figure, author not only of major histories of the world wars but of The River War and The Life of Marlborough. Two other important writers were also born in 1874: G. K. Chesterton and Gertrude Stein, a pair who could scarcely have been more distant from one another in conviction and sensibility. Churchill met Chesterton, although they were never close; the two men concurred in their sympathies with Zionism and their antipathies for Hitler, but Chesterton was a ‘Little Englander,’ not an imperialist, and they took opposite positions on the eugenics controversy that roiled English politics in the years before the First World War. As a Catholic Christian, Chesterton firmly opposed forced sterilization of mentally handicapped persons, whereas Churchill endorsed legislation (which failed) in its favor. The American expatriate Stein, who spent most of her life in Paris, never met Churchill, who traveled in rather different circles. During World War II, Stein became an ardent admirer of Marshall Philip Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation. She escaped arrest and detention in a concentration camp because she was friendly with one of the French Nazis, who protected her from persecution. One might be forgiven for suspecting that she liked the Vichyites not for any political reason but simply because she would do anything to remain in her beloved France.
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