Churchill's Surprising Anti-Americanism and Why He Changed

[TomSea]

As the article makes clear, he had a short period of this in the late 1920s, something about WWI war reparations.

Churchill's Surprising Anti-Americanism and Why He Changed
Andrew Roberts

“If we are together nothing is impossible,” Winston Churchill famously said of the United States and Britain in his Harvard speech of Sept. 6, 1943. “If we are divided all will fail. I therefore preach continually the doctrine of the fraternal association of our two peoples … for the sake of service to Mankind and for the honour that comes to those who faithfully serve great causes.”

Churchill, whose mother Jennie Jerome was born in Brooklyn, is rightly considered the most pro-American prime minister in British history. It was he who coined the term “special relationship”, and even proposed that Britain and the United States explore the idea of a common citizenship. Yet one of the greatest surprises I encountered when researching my biography of him, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, was that he went through a short but profound secret anti-American phase in the late 1920s.

As Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929, Churchill had grown increasingly concerned that the American Republican Party’s extremely tough stance over First World War debt and reparations was severely damaging global trade, while simultaneously the United States insistence on building a large navy would imperil the primacy of the Royal Navy. In September 1928, after a private dinner at Chartwell, Churchill’s country house in Kent, the Conservative politician James Scrymgeour-Wedderburn noted how the Chancellor had “talked very freely about the U.S.A. He thinks they are arrogant, fundamentally hostile to us, and that they wish to dominate world politics.”

Read more at: http://time.com/5453734/churchills-surprising-anti-americanism-and-what-changed-his-mind/