'If We Must Die': Winston Churchill and Claude Mckay

Notes and Queries

Volumn 50, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 333-337

  Jenkins, Lee M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK   (Ireland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249645616     PISSN: 00293970     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/nq/50.3.333     Document Type: Note

References (22)

1. Claude McKay, Selected Poems (New York, 1953), 36
2. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (London, 1986), 32-3
3. Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), 72
4. The author's attempts to verify whether Churchill had indeed quoted McKay's poem yielded the following responses via email: 'I have been unable to find a speech using the words [of the poem]' (Christine Randall, House of Commons Information Office, 14 May 2001); 'I am sure he never used this poem' (Norman Harvey Rogers, Secretary of the Winston Churchill Society, 17 June 2001); 'I am afraid that we do not recognise this quote' (Louise King, Archive Assistant at the Winston Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College Cambridge, 11 May 2001). Louise King referred the author to Winston Churchill's grandson, Winston Churchill, who stated, 'I fear I cannot help you from memory', but did refer the author to the Winston Churchill Archives Centre (30 May 2001). The historian Nicholas Cull directed the author to Darrell Holley's Churchill's Literary Allusions, in which McKay's poem is not listed (8 February 2002). Finally, Churchill's most recent biographer, Roy Jenkins, stated that he 'has no relevant knowledge on the poem' (13 November 2001)
5. Melvin B. Toison, 'Claude McKay's Art', Poetry, lxxxiii (1954), 287
6. Melvin B. Tolson, Harlem Gallery and Other Poems, ed. Raymond Nelson (Charlottesville, 1999), 332
7. Lloyd Brown, West Indian Poetry (London, 1984), 39
8. James R. Giles, Claude McKay (Boston, 1976), 16
9. Tyrone Tillery argues that '[t]he poem was universal enough for Winston Churchill to have quoted from it at the conclusion of his oration before the American Congress when he was seeking American involvement in World War II (ironically, just twenty years earlier, the poem had been censored by the Justice Department and denounced as inflammatory and seditious by Congress)' (Claude McKay (Amherst, 1992) 35). The relevant Department of Justice Publication is mentioned in n. 10, below. Tillery's source of reference for Churchill's recitation of the poem is Arna Bontemps's essay 'The Negro Renaissance', which itself provides no sources of reference
10. This document is Exhibit No. 10 of the Investigative Activities of the Department of Justice, Senate Executive Documents, 66th Congress, 1st Session, Sen. Ex. Doc. 153, vol. XII, 166
11. Arna Bontemps, 'The Negro Renaissance', in Anger and Beyond, ed. Herbert Hill (New Yoprk, 1966), 22
12. Edward Kamau Brthwaite, History of the Voice (London, 1984), 20, 22
13. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery (Madison, 1989), 89
14. 'War at Attica', Time, 27 Sept. 1971, 12
15. Gwendolyn Brooks, letter, Time, 18 Oct. 1971, 2
16. Lothrop Stoddard, Re-Forging America (London, 1927), 276
17. Almost as provocative to McKay as this attack from the arch-racist Stoddard must have been the fact that the text from which Stoddard quotes is Alain Locke's New Negro anthology of 1925. McKay had earlier had a contretemps with Locke, when Locke altered the title of McKay's poem 'The White House' to 'White Houses' and ignored McKay's persistent demands that the original title be restored in the final text of the anthology
18. James R. Keller, 'The Politics of Compromise in Claude McKay's Protest Sonnets', African American Review, xxviii, 3 (1994), 450
19. Claude McKay, 'A Roman Holiday', Liberator, ii (July 1919), 21
20. See Congressional Record, Volume 87, Part 9, 26 November 1941 to 2 January 1942, pp. 9143-10152
21. and Volume 89, Part 4, 14 May 1943 to 14 June 1943, pp. 4389-5838
22. James Weldon Johnson (ed.), The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York, 1922), 43-4