Churchill on America

Yesterday was Winston Churchill's birthday and in commemoration of the event, the Claremont Institute featured essays from their archives on the great man.  Steven Hayward's review of Sir Martin Gilbert's book, Churchill and America, was among the essays unearthed.  It is particularly relevant considering the current president's disdain for any talk touching on American exceptionalism.  Churchill championed American exceptionalism and "was one of the few foreign statesmen of the last century who embraced American exceptionalism and understood its importance for the world."  Here is more on Churchill:

Churchill's appreciation of American exceptionalism was arguably hereditary; he was half-American ("half-alien and wholly reprehensible," his critics liked to say). "What an extraordinary people the Americans are!" he wrote to his American mother during his first stateside visit in 1895 at age 21. Beyond America's democratic character, Churchill came to believe in what we call the American Dream. As he told Harry Truman en route to Fulton, Missouri in 1946, "If I were to be born again, there is one country in which I would want to be a citizen. There is one country where a man knows he has an unbounded future—the USA."

Churchill's thoughts on the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence are very  interesting and are worth close study.  Here is Churchill from a speech given on the 4th of July, 1918:

The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking peoples are founded.... The political conceptions embodied in the Declaration of Independence are the same as those expressed at that time by Lord Chatham and Mr. Burke and handed down to them by John Hampden and Algernon Sidney. They spring from the same source; they come from the same well of practical truth....

As Hayward notes, this statement is good as far as it goes but the Declaration wasn't just a document for Englishman; it was a document for all men, regardless of tradition and geographic location.  Churchill may very well have believed that to be true, and his appreciation for the political science of the Federalist certainly gives credence to this view (Harry Jaffa recently recalled when, sometime in the late 1920s, Churchill was given a copy of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics by his friend, Lord Birkenhead.  He returned it some weeks later saying that it was all very good but that he already had thought most of it out for himself.  It is one more reason not to underestimate the man and that we always try to understand someone as they understood themselves.).

Churchill was one of America's great champions.  I certainly hope that the next person to take the White House continues on that tradition.