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“Winston’s half American and all English.”
That wisecrack about Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill’s unique genetic composition was often repeated by journalists and others as his larger-than-life career unfolded during the first half of the twentieth century. As a political figure, statesman, and writer, he kept a steady and searching eye trained on the United States throughout those decades, when his mother’s homeland evolved into a dominant world power. Churchill’s fascination with the former thirteen British colonies across the Atlantic Ocean grew to include not only America’s rise after 1900 into an industrial, commercial, and military leader but also the country’s history and development in earlier times. His paper trail of prose on Yankee themes is closer to a several-lane motorway.
Whether Churchill would applaud the 2026 activities surrounding the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is unknown—his fidelity to the British Empire and Commonwealth was bulldog-resolute—but the commemorations offer an opportunity to explore documents in the Churchill Archive directly related to the different ways he thought about his interactions with Americans and his reactions to key events in the New World’s progression from largely undeveloped wilderness inhabited by indigenous peoples to an immigrant-settled and constantly changing nation with global influence. Churchill considered the Declaration of Independence (as he wrote in The Age of Revolution, the third volume of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples) a “historic document” and “the symbol and rallying centre of the Patriot cause.” Once this manifesto of secession from the rule of King George III and his government was proclaimed throughout the colonies, Churchill argued, “The waverers were forced to a decision. There was now no turning back.”
Particularly after Churchill’s close involvement with the U.S. as a principal ally during World War II, he referred to America as “the great Republic,” a phrase—with a definite article and a capital R—capturing both his appreciation and admiration for a country he never seemed to tire of visiting. He set foot on U.S. soil sixteen times between 1895 and 1961, with twelve of those sojourns taking place during the years from 1941 to 1961. His grandson, Winston S. Churchill, assembled a collection of his elder namesake’s writing about America and called it The Great Republic, which Random House published in 1999. The articles, book chapters, and speeches—all available from the Churchill Archive—offer a comprehensive overview of subjects Churchill probed and wrote about: everything from the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620 (with a few of his ancestors as pilgrims) to his acceptance of honorary U.S. citizenship in 1963. Three notable examples of his published essays include “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” a tour de force of alternative history originally written for the American magazine Scribner’s in 1930 and published in the collection If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931, CHAR 8/298); “The Union of the English-Speaking Peoples” that appeared in News of the World in 1938 (CHAR 8/614); and “If I Were An American,” published by Life in 1947 (CHUR 4/360).
Churchill’s wartime visits to the White House for conferences with President Franklin D. Roosevelt produced a succession of significant documents and revealing statements important to understanding military history and diplomatic decision-making. Thirteen days into the prime minister’s first and longest White House sojourn during World War II, which began shortly after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, he cabled back to London, “We live here as a big family in the greatest intimacy and informality, and I have formed the very highest regard and admiration for the President.”
The familial “intimacy and informality” established with FDR between December 22, 1941 and January 14, 1942 resulted in four additional rendezvous at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington or at the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York. During a two-week stopover in September 1943, he traveled to Boston on September 6 to receive an honorary degree and to deliver an address at Harvard University. In his speech, which emphasized his abiding faith in Anglo-American unity, he went so far as to suggest “common citizenship” for the peoples of the two countries. “This gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance,” he stated, “and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship. I like to think of British and Americans moving about freely over each other’s wide estates with hardly a sense of being foreigners to one another.” (CHAR 9/196A/34-44)
Churchill recognized the significance of his Harvard address and wanted to make sure officials in the U.K. government were aware of what he said. He requested a compilation of the press response from American sources. This detailed report—prepared by the Oxford don and philosopher of ideas Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy in Washington during the war—was circulated among the War Cabinet as soon as the prime minister and his entourage arrived back in London (CHAQ 1/6/5).
On this U.S. trip, which took place after the first Quebec conference, Churchill found himself in a unique situation. Roosevelt deserted the White House for a long weekend’s respite at his Hyde Park home, and he left the British prime minister behind to conduct meetings on his own in Washington. The residence and workplace of one world leader became the domain of a foreign counterpart.
After Churchill lost the premiership in the General Election of 1945, he turned his attention to the delivery of major speeches, including his “Sinews of Peace” address at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, which popularized his phrase (and aspiration) of a “special relationship” between the U.K. and U.S., as well as to writing his personal history, The Second World War. One particular section in the sixth (and final) volume, Triumph and Tragedy, focused on the Allies’ seemingly slow-motion offensive through Europe to Berlin. Churchill saw no reason for British and American forces to relinquish territorial advantage to the Russians. There, however, was a problem in what Churchill had written in a draft of the chapter “The Final Advance.”
The Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was primarily responsible for deciding the pace of troop movements. He, however, decided to enter politics in 1952 and was elected president of the United States in November of that year. Churchill, who had returned to 10 Downing Street in 1951, did not want to convey the perception that he was in any way critical of the new president, especially as Cold War anxieties mushroomed. One passage he crossed out included this bold comment: “Our troops could, and in my opinion should have liberated it [Prague], but in fact were restrained from doing so by the direct intervention of the highest American authorities. Berlin, Prague, and Vienna were needlessly yielded to the Soviets. Here may be discerned the Tragedy in our hour of Triumph.” (CHUR 4/385) Given the foreboding title of the sixth volume, it’s as though an explanation of the arresting phrase ended up in the rubbish bin.
The deletions and emendations are revealing, but so, too, are the letters Churchill wrote to make sure what he’d said didn’t offend Eisenhower for the decisions he made in the heat of battle. Documents in the Churchill Archive show the extent to which the statesman-author was willing to pull his punches for political purposes. By revising his account and analysis, Churchill achieved his diplomatic objective; however, his alterations came at the expense of history.
In Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary (1995), Anthony Montague Browne pointed out that Churchill made numerous changes in the text “to remove any criticism of Eisenhower. In particular, the wilful failure to take Berlin before the Russians, and the subsequent withdrawal of Allied troops from huge areas of Central Europe, which led disastrously to the Communist position of strength in the Cold War, had been criticised in civilised but scathing terms in the earlier draft. The published version was mild. A pity, I thought. History is history . . . ” (pp. 154–55) What Churchill intended to say before politics intervened can be discovered in the Churchill Archive, allowing those passages to be consulted and evaluated by current and future scholars and writers.
Moreover, in 1957, he drafted a lengthy postscript to The Second World War. First published in Look magazine’s April 29, 1958 issue as “The Cold ‘Peace’ and Our Future,” the essay was published in 1959 as the epilogue of an abridgement of the six volumes. The 1,065-page book was titled Memoirs of the Second World War. No longer constrained by worries that criticism would lead to U.S.-U.K. governmental discord, Churchill put in writing some of the analysis he had removed in Triumph and Tragedy. “The Russians had occupied Prague with, as it seemed, the approval of the Americans,” he said. “They held Poland, whose western boundary, it was agreed, should be moved into the heart of Europe at the expense of Germany. All these steps had in fact been taken by the Russians while their armies were still advancing. Yet the American view seemed to be that all this was a necessary part of the process of holding down Germany, and that the great national object of the United States was not to get drawn into siding too closely with Britain against Russia.” (CHUR 4/400) Churchill didn’t name Americans responsible for the strategy, but it’s clear he held a different viewpoint—tragedy intervening amid triumph.
After resigning the premiership in 1955, Churchill returned to another multi-volume project, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-1958). He had begun work on the series two decades earlier, and he employed a system similar to his account of World War II to complete the massive undertaking. Several historians and researchers prepared background material and sections, which Churchill then used in dictating and revising the text for publication.
The fourth volume in this historical series includes nine chapters about “The Great Republic”—with six of them focused on the U.S. Civil War (including “Slavery and Secession,” “The Union in Danger,” “Lee and McClellan,” and “The Victory of the Union”). Since Churchill decided to conclude his History with the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century, his views of America after 1900 appear in most cases elsewhere, specifically in his extended accounts of the two major wars—The World Crisis (1914-1918) and The Second World War (1939-1945)—and numerous journalistic articles. He even wrote a revealing profile of FDR, which originally appeared in the American magazine Collier’s, titled “While the World Watches,” in 1934 and was republished in revised form and called “Roosevelt from Afar” for the 1938 edition of Churchill’s collection, Great Contemporaries. (CHAR 8/586)
Churchill based his early appraisal of FDR’s presidency on what he read and learned in conversations with Americans. The two had met just once and briefly in 1918, when Roosevelt visited London as assistant secretary of the Navy and attended a dinner that included Churchill, then the Minister of Munitions. The future president was unimpressed with the future prime minister, saying he “acted like a stinker.” Years later and after spending over a hundred days together during World War II, Churchill told the House of Commons and the world how he assessed FDR after his death on April 12, 1945. At the conclusion of his tribute, he put in vivid phrasing the meaning of one man to Great Britain—“. . . in Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old.” (CHAR 9/167)
Churchill got to know FDR well, but he also spent time with ten other incumbent or future presidents. One occupant of the White House that Churchill found wanting was Woodrow Wilson, whom he met at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Churchill, the Secretary of State for War and Air at the time of the postwar assembly, saw that Wilson played domestic politics to the detriment of accomplishing larger and enduring objectives. In The World Crisis (specifically in the fourth volume, The Aftermath), he wrote, “If Wilson had been either simply an idealist or a caucus politician, he might have succeeded. His attempt to run the two in double harness was the cause of his undoing. . . . Peace and goodwill among all nations abroad, but no truck with the Republican Party at home. That was his ticket, and that was his ruin, and the ruin of much else as well.” (CHAR 8/254) Extreme political partisanship stood in the way of effective national and international administration a century ago, and it’s a problem still readily apparent in the U.S. today. Churchill, who formed an all-party coalition government during World War II, understood the value of healthy party loyalty, but he also knew the dangers of carrying partisanship too far.
In the first sentence of his essay, “The Union of the English-Speaking Peoples,” Churchill stated that he wanted “to contemplate the majestic edifice of Anglo-American friendship.” For the next quarter-century, through his words and actions, the “edifice” grew in significance, if not majesty. As the U.S. recognizes 250 years of independence, Churchill’s voluminous writing about “the great Republic,” accessible for scrutiny in the Churchill Archive, provides both historical perspective and personal appreciation of a nation that this “half American and all English” observer found worthy of decades-long contemplation.
The Churchill Archive contains extensive material on Winston Churchill’s engagement with the United States, enabling researchers to trace the evolution of his views and relationships from the early twentieth century through World War II and into the shaping of the postwar world.
The files highlighted below offer valuable entry points into this theme, illustrating both high-level diplomacy—including exchanges with American presidents—and more personal encounters, alongside the wider political and cultural context in which Churchill’s understanding of the U.S. developed. This selection is not exhaustive, but is intended as a guide to key starting points, and should be used in conjunction with the Archive’s search facilities, which allow users to explore material across files by people, places, and topics relevant to their individual research interests.
