Monuments to Winston Churchill abound in the United Kingdom. You can remember the greatest man of the 20th century at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, or by his grave nearby at Bladon. Then there are the Cabinet War Rooms in London, his country house, Chartwell, and, of course, the magnificent Churchill Archives Centre in Churchill College at Cambridge University. As the simple memorial in Westminster Abbey—next to the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square—puts it, there is no shortage of occasions to “remember Winston Churchill” in Britain.
The United States yields to no nation in the honor it pays to Churchill, but has, inevitably, fewer memorials to him than does Britain. At Westminster College in the small town of Fulton, Missouri, the site of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, stands the National Churchill Museum. (The museum is distinguished by the incongruous yet wonderful Church of St. Mary the Virgin; designed in the 17th century by Christopher Wren, the building was carried stone by bombed stone from London.) There are recently installed Churchill busts in the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon.
But few people will stop to see a bust or take a road trip to Fulton. That’s where the National Churchill Library and Center comes in. Dedicated October 29, it resides in George Washington University’s Gelman Library in Washington, D.C. Given Churchill’s many visits to the city, it’s an apt location. Of his 16 trips to the United States, 13 included a stop in Washington. He addressed three joint sessions of Congress and parlayed with presidents—Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—11 times. His son Randolph and grandson Winston visited on his behalf to accept his honorary citizenship from John F. Kennedy in a Rose Garden ceremony in 1963.
Initial funds for the library were raised by the Churchill Centre, until recently based in Chicago. The center publishes an excellent quarterly, Finest Hour, as part of its wider mission to preserve Churchill’s legacy. The library is both a culmination of the vision of the Churchill Centre and its chairman, Laurence Geller, and a new beginning for it. With the opening at GWU, the center moves to Washington, assumes the name of the International Churchill Society, and merges institutionally with the Fulton Museum, thereby bringing all the U.S. platforms dedicated to Churchill under the same leadership.
Churchill is in no danger of being forgotten. But the memory of 1940—like that of the Great War, as we used to call it—can only fade. Keeping the thought of it evergreen requires building institutions that encourage people to remember, or to learn if they are too young to have anything to remember. It also requires defending those institutions: It will take no little determination by director Michael Bishop if the library is not to fall prey to the academic distaste for military and political history (not to say of dead white men) that has so diminished the American academy over the past decades.
The library already holds a collection of primary sources: Churchill’s wartime appointment diaries, which can be viewed (and are being transcribed) online. One priority for future fundraising is to endow a unicorn—or rather, a new GWU professorship in modern British history, a thing rarer in the contemporary academy than any creature of myth. Another priority is to finish the build-out of the National Churchill Library and Center and give it a public entrance, which it badly needs to avoid being entombed in the basement of the Gelman Library.
Above all, the library has the task of encouraging Churchill memory without devolving into Churchill worship. Like any great man or woman, Churchill is big enough to stand on his own: If treated fairly, he will come through. Americans are sometimes inclined to fall into the belief that Churchill, with his American mother, his many visits, and his championing of the “special relationship,” was a sentimental admirer of the United States. This is nonsense. Churchill was many things, but above all he was a British patriot, and patriotic statesmen don’t consult the interests of other nations until they have first consulted their own. Churchill was—as historian Andrew Roberts reminded attendees at the International Churchill Conference held in concert with the GWU dedication—an emotional man, easily moved to tears. But a soppy sentimentalist he was not.
Churchill’s thought on the United States moved in three realms at once: the structural, the governmental, and the cultural. He had a deep respect for the Constitution, even if he believed it drew lines with a clarity that the unwritten British constitution had more wisely left blurred. And like any sane observer, he often disliked the policies of American governments: He may or may not have said Americans would only do the right thing after they had exhausted all the alternatives—but if the words are doubtful, the sentiment hits home. What truly distinguished Churchill was his belief that the English and the Americans share a political culture that emphasizes the value of the individual. This was not sentiment—or if it was, it was sentiment in the service of statecraft, for it reflected a considered understanding of the relationship between culture, politics, and freedom.
The National Churchill Library and Center has a lot to navigate: the toxic obsessions of the academy, the ever-present need for fundraising, and a city already full of events, book launches, and wannabe great men. But as Churchill once observed, the psychology of the Americans is that “the bigger the Idea the more wholeheartedly and obstinately do they throw themselves into making it a success. It is an admirable characteristic, providing the Idea is good.” With the new Churchill library, let us hope, GWU has committed to a big Idea—and surely a good one.
Ted Bromund is the senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in the Heritage Foundation’s Thatcher Center for Freedom.
