Through War & Peace

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chaos of 1932. The New Deal exchanged part of the American dream of opportunity for a new and perhaps more illusory dream of security. Most of the nation loved the warmhearted, skillful, and sometimes fuzzy-minded politician who had presided over the exchange. EURJ U.S. union labor, moribund in the '203 and feverishly feeble until 1933, got a boost from Roosevelt. Sit-down strikes ("When they tie a can to a union man, sitdown, sit-down") established unions in the automobile industry. As 1949 ended there were 16 million members of U.S. unions — five times as many as in 1933. Huey Long proved that the U.S. was not safe against Fascism. His Share Our Wealth Society promised to make "Every Man a King." Huey blamed the people's woes on the big money interests. His followers sang:

Black Sheep, Wall Street, have you any

gold?

Yes, sir; yes, sir, all I can hold. Thanks to the New Deal I've made a

billion more And I've stuck it all away in my little

chain store.

Huey was becoming a national menace when he was assassinated in 1935; in 1949 his followers and his ideas were still lurking in the back alleys of U.S. politics.

Spain, an anachronism, finally came face to face with igth Century democracy, and immediately thereafter with 20th Century Communism and Fascism. As the resultant civil war wore on, Germany and Italy intervened more & more openly to help Francisco Franco; Moscow's Communists used terrorists to fasten their grip on the Loyalists. It ended with a civil war within a civil war; the Loyalist hero of Madrid, Jose Miaja, fought his Communist allies in the streets as the Fascists closed in for the kill. The confusion of the world's liberals was extreme; by default, they let the Communists take over the Loyalist cause, then the liberals stood in gape-mouthed admiration for Communist initiative.

In 1936 France's Communists took the lead in organizing a Popular Front with the nationalist slogan, "For a free, strong and happy France." The world's liberals were misled again. Most of them thought the Communists fine fellows; some liberals changed this opinion after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact; some needed the stern lessons in Communist aggression that 1946-49 was to bring.

Gandhi, beginning his nonviolent resistance in 1920, had by the '305 created a force in India to which the British government had to bow. Laborite Ramsay Mac-Donald and Tory Stanley Baldwin began the British retreat. Churchill, breaking with Baldwin on the issue, stayed in the Tory Party, disgruntled and almost alone, about to take up his greatest work.

The Wasted Years?

By this time Churchill was four men, working in close partnership from 1930 to 1950. The personal Churchill was happy, reveling in the good things of life, both the simple and the complex. He laid bricks and built dams at his country home, enjoyed the best food and sampled, thoroughly, the best brandy. From painting, for years his main hobby, he derived "a tremendous new pleasure." Only Winston Churchill could have said: "Painting a picture is like fighting a battle ... It is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained, interlocked argument." Churchill's happiness is an important element in his political leadership. The forces of dictatorship are