The Cult of Churchill and the Non-Cult of Roosevelt

Discussing the historical memory of Winston Churchill many speak of the existence of a "cult" around the figure. There is much disagreement about when and how that cult emerged, with some seeing it as having been an outgrowth of the shabby efforts of British propagandists to evoke and exploit romantic misapprehensions about the Second World War as they tried "selling" the Falklands War to the public, while others see it as having been operative much earlier--indeed, in 1951 already powerful enough to enable the Conservatives to win an election and thus deal the Labour Party's post-war reformism a blow from which it arguably never recovered. Still, if there is much disagreement about its origin one does not see much disagreement about its existence, everyone I have seen acknowledge the claim that there is a cult agreeing that it does exist. Considering that one may wonder at the historical memory of his wartime partner Franklin Roosevelt, and wonder at the lack of such a cult around him in the United States.

I doubt they would have to wonder for very long, though. Arguably such cults--personality cults, the associated mythmaking and all that goes with them (i.e. the "Great Man" theory of history) are something with which the right is more comfortable than those to their left--all as, one may add, it has tended to be what the right thinks that does much more to make up the conventional wisdom, with all that means for our noticing a cult should one exist.

All of this matters because of the very different perceptions of the two figures by the right in their countries. For the British right there is no dissonance in making such a cult around a Conservative Party leader of old aristocratic stock, who had even by the standard of the time been seen as an uncompromisingly reactionary figure, and stood fast against the deimperialization and the economic and social reforms that the British right so despised--not least in Churchill's unfortunate "Gestapo" speech.

However, Franklin Roosevelt was a member of the party the right has traditionally treated as their opposition, the Democratic Party, and associated with the New Deal that has ever since been shorthand for such reforms. However much it was the case that that reform process began with his right-wing Republican predecessor Herbert Hoover, however much it was the case that Roosevelt went about what was a relatively limited reform process in minimalist and tentative fashion, especially hesitant about its more "social democratic" aspects (we got the corporatistic National Industrial Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act well before we got anything like Social Security), quick to retreat (as seen in his hastening to balance the budget as his term's end approached--and in the process plunging the country back into Depression), and all the way through sincerely committed to saving capitalism rather than replacing it with another economic system, Roosevelt and the New Deal remain bywords for what the right has never ceased to despise, lament, fight against, for the near-century since, steadily rolling back the reforms Roosevelt's administration saw in areas like the rights of organized labor (the Wagner Act), the regulation of sectors like finance and utilities (the Banking and Securities Acts that included the "Glass-Steagall" legislation and established the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act), the distribution of the tax burden (a highly progressive income tax structure with a top bracket of 91 percent), the development of a state sector to do the job the private sector wouldn't in areas like the rural electrification needed to further the country's economic development (as seen in the Tennessee Valley Authority), the beginnings of a social safety net (Social Security), and much, much else.

By the same token there been no cult of, for example, George C. Marshall, or even Dwight Eisenhower. (Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army Marshall, after all, is perhaps best remembered for the Marshall Plan whose "statism" the right has never been comfortable with, with it indeed fashionable to belittle its significance in this era of neoliberal dominance of economic thought. And Supreme Allied Commander and two-term Republican President Eisenhower may have been, icon of the '50s so many on the right romanticize as a good time for "the real America" that he remains--such that he is the only President Al Bundy can name--he was still not the Anti-New Deal crusader the right wanted, and there are those at that end of the spectrum who resent his warning about the military-industrial complex in his Farewell Address to this day.)

By contrast, even if they were not national leaders at anything like that level there have certainly been cults of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton--precisely because those figures have, in their personas and their politics, been rather more congenial to observers on the right. Indeed, it seems telling that to this day those interested in reading anything taking a really critical view of either of those figures has to do, at the very least, a lot of searching before they come up with anything but gushing hagiography, and much, much more before one sees any questioning of their military reputations, on which their Names ultimately rest.