Churchill and Empire: A Portrait of an Imperialist

By Lawrence James. Pegasus Books, 452 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

An imperialist from birth, Winston Churchill held firm to the notion that the British Empire was a great gift to the world, that it raised primitive people out of the torpor of aimless existence and pointed them toward useful lives, and that India was the crown jewel of it all.

Churchill’s greatest glory while he was British Prime Minster was in rallying his people, both at home and across the Empire, against Adolf Hitler in 1940, convincing them to hold fast until the free world caught up to him. His heart and soul were firmly rooted in the best that Victorian England had to offer and he used those roots to urge England and the Empire on to victory.
British historian Lawrence James has written two other books on the empire. In this one, he studies Churchill, who has frequently been ranked as the greatest man of the 20th century. Agreeing with that assessment, James first turns to Churchill’s years in the colonies for validation.

Imperial geo-political considerations were always uppermost in Churchill’s mind whenever he had to make major strategic decisions in World War II. Domestic matters were included only when they intruded on Churchill’s imperial preoccupations.

Churchill’s first posting was to Gen. Sir Herbert Kitchener’s staff in 1898 in India just before the battle of Omdurman. “Imperial glory was followed by imperial shame,” James writes, as injured Dervishes were left to die or were shot and bayoneted.
Kitchener’s “callousness after the battle appalled a young man with quasi-religious faith in a humanitarian Empire.” As a Cabinet minister he battled “frustrated and vengeful subordinates who suspended the moral principles which he believed were the foundations of Empire.”

James writes, “Churchill repeatedly insisted that the Empire was a precious asset, not just for Britain, but for civilization as a whole.” James argues that the British Empire, for all its faults, was more benign in its treatment of native peoples than the empires of Germany, Japan Italy, and even France.

Churchill absorbed the credo of the Anglo-Saxon imperialist and early on sought fair treatment for all peoples, albeit with the additional caveat that the Crown always knew best.

While World War I was very much about empires, James writes that World War II was also an “imperial war…whose [Axis] objectives included the elimination of British influence in the Mediterranean and Middle East and the annexation of British colonies in Africa, the Far East and the Pacific.

James argues, “[I]mperial geo-political considerations were…always uppermost in Churchill’s mind whenever he had to make major strategic decisions” in World War II. Throughout his career, “Domestic matters [were] included only when they intruded on Churchill’s imperial preoccupations.”

That imperial emphasis inevitably helped lead to Churchill’s defeat at the polls in the summer of 1945. The British people, having endured and won the war after six years, were ready to look inward to their own needs, rather than worry about what was happening in colonies and dominions.

When the prospects in World War II were at a low point in 1942 and there was clamoring for freeing India and other possessions, he declared, “I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

And yet, that was precisely what happened after the war. By the time of his death in 1965, India was two free nations, African colonies were gaining their independence, and British control of Middle Eastern oil had passed to the United States.

James succinctly describes the tensions in relations with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Marshall Joseph Stalin. Churchill’s view was always an imperial one.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

Scalia: A Court of One

By Bruce Allen Murphy. Simon & Schuster, 656 pages, $35.

Reviewed By Jules Wagman

Of all the subtitles given to a book, “A Court of One,” is arguably the most apt. It certainly fits this thoroughly readable biography of ultra-conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Named by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, he is the longest-serving associate justice.

Prof. Bruce Allen Murphy of Lafayette College has written three books on other Supreme Court justices. Of Scalia, he believes that he “will continue to be torn between his originalism and textualism decision-making theories, his traditionalism as dictated by his religious beliefs, and the partisan conservative results that he wishes to achieve…”

Scalia does not lead the Supreme Court’s conservative wing, but Murphy writes the associate justice has every reason to believe that he is not done yet.

When he joined the Court, Scalia’s associates and friends saw him as a unifying and compromising force. Murphy comments, “Scalia was indeed ready to serve on a court that spoke ‘with a single voice,’ so long as it was his voice.”

Scalia quickly ruffled feathers. Attorneys get only 30 minutes for argument, so justices limit their questions. In his first appearance, he used more than four minutes on 10 questions. That prompted Lewis Powell to whisper to Thurgood Marshall, “Do you think he knows that the rest of us are here?”

Scalia is not averse to blunt language in his opinions and his words can sting associate justices. Early on, he lost points with Sandra Day O’Connor and Powell, when he wrote in a draft opinion that she “mistakes the object of the inquiry” and “misidentifies the interests to be balanced.” Powell was “offended by the personal attack on O’Connor” and “scrawled ‘I don’t like this,’ on Scalia’s draft.”

Murphy describes in detail Scalia’s “originalism” approach to the Constitution. Scalia stands by what the Framers wrote and what the words meant at that time. He rejects the liberal thesis of a “living Constitution,” adapting to meet contemporary conditions.
Scalia resists compromise, wanting colleagues to yield points to him, while he yields up little or nothing. By the end of the 1991-92 term, Murphy notes a widening gap between Scalia and centrists O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, but he seemed oblivious to it.

By the time Murphy gets to the 2000 election and Bush v. Gore, his tone has changed from one of cautious approval of Scalia to that of growing criticism. He sees Scalia as increasingly isolating himself from the rest of the Court through his acerbic opinions, especially when he is in the minority.

Scalia always had his eye on the Chief’s chair. He addressed law groups to further his quest. But, Murphy writes, his campaign backfired. When O’Connor stepped down, John Roberts was named to her chair. Then, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died and President George W. Bush had another chair to fill.

Scalia was so conservative that he was deemed unable to lead the court to consensus decisions. Bush, looking to his own legacy, wanted someone who would be Chief Justice for a generation or more. That was Roberts. Samuel Anthony Alito Jr., filled the ninth chair.

Kennedy’s swing vote ruled the Roberts Court until the Health Care case. Roberts changed his vote to allow the 2012 election decide its fate.

With Roberts as Chief Justice, Scalia does not lead the conservative wing but “[d]espite his admitted role as a loner on a conservative Court, Scalia has every reason to believe that he is not done yet.” Perhaps some day his teachings will become “the law of the land.”

Then Murphy ends his book with “Or, perhaps not…”

Jules Wagman has reviewed books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency

By James Tobin, Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $30

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

Eighty-one years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a cripple (that was the usage then), was elected president of the United States in the depths of the Depression. Today, there is an increasing belief that he hoodwinked voters into electing him without knowing that he could not walk.

Journalism professor James Tobin examines his life between August 1921, when he was stricken with poliomyelitis, and his election as president. FDR is quoted as saying at Warm Springs, Ga., in 1926 that he wanted to “‘walk into a room without scaring everybody half to death’ and to ‘stand easily enough in front of people so that they’ll forget that I’m a cripple.’”

That, he did.

People knew that polio paralyzed his legs, but they didn’t know how badly. What they saw in newsreels or in person was a man with a huge smile and a barrel chest, seemingly in the best of health. They didn’t realize he was standing in locked braces because his legs had withered into uselessness.

His upper-body strength was legendary. Reportedly once, sitting between two sons at the White House pool, he flipped them both into the water. But he walked with a cane in one hand and gripped a son’s arm in the other. He walked by turning from side to side, swinging each locked leg out, around and forward in ballet-like steps.

FDR fell ill at Campobello, his Canadian vacation home just east of Eastport, Maine. Tobin believes he picked up the poliovirus two weeks earlier at a Boy Scout encampment at Bear Mountain State Park, 40 miles north of New York City. He had just been elected chairman of the Greater New York Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

Tobin, who provides a detailed, layman’s view of how the poliovirus strikes and what it sometimes does to a body it invades, relates that it takes about two weeks for the virus to affect muscles—if it will do so at all.

He adds that the growing understanding at that time of public sanitation and health ironically added to the polio risk by reducing the general prevalence of the virus, thus reducing the build-up of immunity.

FDR began therapy less than a year after being stricken. Tobin says he was determined to walk normally again. The regimen built his upper body but work on his legs produced little results. “His mother wrote later, ‘He was determined to ignore his disability and carry on from where he had left off.’”

Tobin describes how FDR’s wife, Eleanor, recalled the only time she cried during those years of recuperation. He jubilantly showed her his latest achievement. He rolled onto the floor, face down, and pulled himself forward and out the door. He could save himself in case of fire. She burst out crying.

Franklin Roosevelt is helped out of his car during a campaign stop, probably in 1928. His leg braces are barely visible in this photo, one of the few which shows FDR with his braces. National Archives photo.

A supporter of Al Smith, Roosevelt, the 1920 vice-presidential nominee, electrified the Democratic National Convention in 1924 with his nominating speech for Smith. In 1928 he was prevailed upon to run for governor of New York to aid Smith, who was running for president against Herbert Hoover. Smith told reporters, “[T]he governor of the state works with his head, not his feet.”

FDR won but had to give up the strenuous physical work that was gradually building up his legs.

Tobin believes FDR made no special effort to conceal his disability, but news photographers, especially, refrained from showing his infirmity.

Reviewer Jules Wagman lost a first cousin in a 1949 polio epidemic.

©2014 Jules L. Wagman