{"id":5607,"date":"2015-06-17T00:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5607"},"modified":"2015-06-15T22:11:24","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T03:11:24","slug":"churchill-as-author-reader-actor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5607","title":{"rendered":"CHURCHILL AS AUTHOR, READER, ACTOR"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following interview was done with the award-winning historian, Jonathan Rose.\u00a0 Rose teaches at Drew University.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Books about Winston Churchill abound. In light of the glutted Churchillian landscape, what motivated you to write this particular book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: Literature is the one aspect of Churchill\u2019s life that hardly anyone has explored in any depth.\u00a0 And yet, even before he entered Parliament, he had established himself as a tremendously popular author.\u00a0 He wrote history, biography, war reportage, literary criticism, futurology, even a novel.\u00a0 Moreover, his political agenda was profoundly shaped by what he read and wrote.\u00a0 So Churchill is too important to be left to the political historians: you won\u2019t fully understand him unless you study him as a man of letters.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: I was surprised to learn how much Churchill utilized various insights gained from studying the American Civil War.\u00a0 Would you unpack that some for us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: His American grandfather, Leonard Jerome, was part-owner of the New York Times and a supporter of the Union cause, even in the face of the Draft Riots of 1863.\u00a0 So he was an inspiration for Winston, who saw no clear boundaries between warfare and journalism.\u00a0 And in his lifelong struggle to preserve the British Empire, Churchill\u2019s model was the Civil War, which he viewed as a successful effort to preserve the American Empire.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t quite see that there were important differences between the two cases.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: It is fascinating to see how much the theater influenced Churchill in his various public roles.\u00a0 Describe that a bit.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: All his life he was a passionate theatergoer.\u00a0 He learned his brilliant oratorical skills by watching actors at work.\u00a0 As a parliamentary performer, he was always on stage and in character.\u00a0 And his distinctive wit owed much to his two favorite dramatists, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.\u00a0 The theatre offered Churchill a script for political action: as Home Secretary he enacted penal reforms after seeing John Galsworthy\u2019s prison drama Justice.\u00a0 And though he never wrote a play, his history of the Second World War is written with a fine sense of drama, timing, and climax.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Ecclesiastes 12:10<\/a> speak of the preacher searching \u201cto find just the right words.\u201d\u00a0 Churchill spent much time getting his words right.\u00a0 What can we learn from his care and concern over language?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: He dictated most of his books and speeches to a secretary, then he would grab the typescript from her and scribble extensive revisions in ink.\u00a0 That\u2019s why his writing had an oratorical resonance.\u00a0 Sometimes, when delivering a speech, he would appear to hesitate, grope for the right word, and inevitably hit on it.\u00a0 But that was an act: in fact his speeches were carefully scripted.\u00a0 There he was poles apart from today\u2019s politicians, who robotically repeat catchphrases pretested on focus groups.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: You mention some of the favorite books of both Churchill and Hitler.\u00a0 It is interesting to see Don Quixote<\/em> listed as one of Hitler\u2019s favorite books.\u00a0 Did more grandiose stories spark Hitler\u2019s imagination?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: Hitler read compulsively: racist tracts, creepy occult books, and Wild West stories by Karl May, a German author who never ventured west of Buffalo, New York. He loved The Merchant of Venice, and (still more chillingly) his personal library included a booklet on poison gas.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Political conservatives love to retrieve Churchill for inspiration, but most don\u2019t seem to know of Churchill\u2019s concern over what we call today, \u201ccrony capitalism.\u201d\u00a0 Why is this particular concern of Churchill\u2019s not well known?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: This was a crusade that Churchill launched early in his political career, before 1906, and it drove him to repudiate the Conservative Party.\u00a0 Inspired by Adam Smith, he believed in free market capitalism tempered by a social safety net, but he was deeply hostile to any form of corporate welfare.\u00a0 In fact, if libertarian conservatives and Tea Partiers knew better this side of Churchill, they would admire him even more.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Churchill was not completely alone in appreciating the threat of Nazism, but many did not.\u00a0 What made Churchill so prescient?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: Churchill always hated totalitarian regimes, starting with the schools he attended.\u00a0 And you could say he recognized the threat of Nazism when Hitler was still a schoolboy.\u00a0 Churchill\u2019s 1899 novel, Savrola, was a third-rate political melodrama, but also uncannily farsighted: it\u2019s about a brilliant orator who fights an unspeakably wicked Middle European dictator.\u00a0 So when the actual Hitler appeared on the political stage, Churchill leapt into the heroic role he had created thirty years earlier.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: One of David McCullough\u2019s favorite books is Churchill\u2019s little book on painting.\u00a0 Painting was more than a hobby for Churchill, wasn\u2019t it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: Certainly, it was also therapy.\u00a0 The Gallipoli fiasco plunged him into a deep depression, and painting pulled him out of it.\u00a0 It gave him a sense of control when his life was spinning apart.\u00a0 He compared composing a work of art to planning a military campaign \u2013 except that when you brush paint on a canvas, it stays put.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Many reading this interview are Christians.\u00a0 Many minister in various full-time vocational capacities.\u00a0 What are a few things these folks could benefit from in reading your book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rose: They may be surprised to learn that Churchill grappled seriously and deeply with theological questions.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t a conventional Christian, but he always had a clear moral vision and fought for it relentlessly.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following interview was done with the award-winning historian, Jonathan Rose.\u00a0 Rose teaches at Drew University. Moore: Books about Winston Churchill abound. In light of the glutted Churchillian landscape, what motivated you to write this particular book? Rose: Literature is the one aspect of Churchill\u2019s life that hardly anyone has explored in any depth.\u00a0 And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,12,71,19,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","category-book-review","category-interview","category-leadership","category-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5607"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5609,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607\/revisions\/5609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}