Churchill's American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship

“Churchill had laid the groundwork for the courtship of America decades before World War II by forging an American network of friendly and influential elites to promote Britain’s geopolitical interests and Churchill’s own financial interests.”

During the first year and a half of the Second World War, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill courted President Franklin Roosevelt and other influential Americans in an effort to persuade the United States to join the war against Hitler’s Germany. As Cita Stelzer shows in her lively book Churchill’s American Network, Churchill had laid the groundwork for the courtship of America decades before World War II by forging an American network of friendly and influential elites to promote Britain’s geopolitical interests and Churchill’s own financial interests.

This is Stelzer’s third book on Churchill in which she approaches her subject not as a historian but rather as an interested observer of particular aspects of Churchill’s life and leadership. Her previous books dealt with Churchill’s “policymaking at the dinner table” and the women who assisted Churchill during his parliamentary career.

In Churchill’s American Network, Stelzer relies on the usual sources, such as Martin Gilbert’s authorized eight-volume biography and its accompanying 23 volumes of Churchill documents and Churchill’s own books, articles, and speeches, but also press reports of Churchill’s visits to the United States that Stelzer characterizes as “rarely consulted” and undervalued in understanding Churchill’s appeal to Americans.

Stelzer writes that Churchill learned the value of having a network of influential elites from his mother, the American-born Jennie Jerome, who forged her own network in both England and America to promote Winston’s career. Churchill used his mother’s network in both military and journalism circles to get assignments to Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa, where he made a name for himself as both a combatant and a writer. His early books about his experiences in conflicts in those countries earned him fame and political appeal.

And Churchill saw to it that his early books were promoted in America. He hired James Burton Pond as a literary agent who arranged for Churchill to deliver 37 lectures in 31 U.S. cities in 1900–1901. Churchill had been in America once before—in 1895 on his way to covering the rebellion against Spain in Cuba. While in New York, Churchill stayed with Congressman Bourke Cockran, a friend of Churchill’s mother. Cockran was the first member of Churchill’s American network. “Thanks to Cockran,” Stelzer writes, “Churchill was to meet not only New York’s elite, but people in a variety of walks of life during his stay.” 

Stelzer notes that Churchill and Cockran differed politically, but Churchill didn’t let political differences get in the way of promoting his financial interests, and later Britain’s interests. This pragmatism was on display again and again throughout Churchill’s life and career. What was important in dealing with politicians like Cockran and later Franklin Roosevelt, presidential advisers like Averell Harriman and Harry Hopkins, financiers like Bernard Baruch, and press titans like Robert McCormick, Henry Luce, and William Randolph Hearst, was not their political views but whether they could help Churchill and Britain.

The forging of Churchill’s American network paid dividends for Britain in World War I, when the United States belatedly entered the war on Britain’s side and helped to turn the tide against Germany and its allies. That network also benefited Churchill financially. American publications paid him handsomely for articles about global politics. American publishers promoted U.S. editions of his books, including Marlborough: His Life and Times and The World Crisis (Churchill’s multi-volume history of the First World War). And financiers like Baruch helped Churchill make money on Wall Street until the crash in 1929 when Churchill lost a small fortune.

Stelzer notes that Churchill’s American network also made his stays and travels in the United States very comfortable and, in some instances, extravagant. He was treated to the best railroad cars, luxurious hotels, and great mansions of the rich and famous in America. During some of his American visits, he toured Civil War battlefields, including Gettysburg and Chickamaugua. He visited with, and was feted by, presidents, governors, titans of business and journalism, and Hollywood celebrities.

If there was a common theme in Churchill’s articles and speeches in America it was the importance of an alliance among what Churchill called the “English-speaking peoples.” That refrain appeared again and again in Churchill’s courting of America and Americans. It would serve as the subject of another of his multi-volume works—A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. During the Second World War, it was that alliance—forged by Churchill’s courtship—that saved Britain and Western civilization from experiencing what Churchill called a “new Dark Age” of Nazi tyranny. And, as Churchill knew, it was that alliance that maintained Britain’s relevance in the emerging postwar world.

Churchill’s American network lasted until the very end of his life. His last visit to America in 1961 included a cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis’ yacht and a visit in New York City from Baruch. Two years later, President Kennedy declared Churchill an honorary U.S. citizen, noting that Churchill as “a son of America, though a subject of Britain, has been throughout his life a firm and steadfast friend of the American people and the American Nation,” and that “his bravery, charity and valor, both in war and peace, have been a flame of inspiration in freedom’s darkest hour.”