Is this Churchill quote legitimate? (Says America should've stayed out of WWI)

New York Enquirer ^ | 1936 | na

[x]

Reason Magazine and the Spectator give it as a 1936 quotation by Churchill. It's a classic example of hindsight though. In 1915, 1916, or 1917 Churchill thought anything but this. He and his government would never make a negotiated peace and they were desperate to get America into the war. Only knowing what did come about made him express a contrary opinion. It would be interesting to see if Churchill ever said anything in his official capacity or wrote anything for publication that comply the views of this off the cuff interview by a politician largely forgotten and derided.

[quebecois]

I agree with you. We absolutely should have stayed out of WW I. It was a morally neutral squabble between european powers. Actually, if you look at the actual events that precipitated the war....the Central Powers were more in the right than not. The Serbian govt clearly was involved to some extent in he assassination of Franz Ferdinand. What was Austria supposed to do? Send them a love letter?

Once Austria declared on Serbia, Russia declared on Austria...dragging in Germany...and then the UK/France. How on earth can one start at this point and end with the idea that Germany was somehow responsible for the war??

As for WW I being a fight for democracy, Czarist Russia was the least democratic nation of any of the major powers in the war.

The US had absolutely NO vital interest at stake. The reason we entered the war is that several large US banks loaned boatloads of money to France and the UK...and knew that they'd never get paid back if they lost. When the war seemed to be in doubt, the bankers pulled their wires and rigged America's entry into the war.

[Axel Kassel]

Setting to one side the The New York Enquirer's Hearst-pub reputation for shabbiness even before it morphed into The National Enquirer, and overlooking the fact that Griffin and the Enquirer failed to appear in court to press their lawsuit against Churchill for supposedly slandering them, and disregarding Griffin's later federal indictment for attempting to undermine morale in wartime, there are still other good reasons for accepting Churchill's denial that he uttered the words attributed to him by the Enquirer in 1936.

Consider that Churchill was, in the 1930s, trying to raise the alarm about the growing Nazi threat and spur British rearmament. Why would he then choose to tell a small-circulation and ill-regarded New York weekly something that would run counter to his own agenda?

For even more evidence, consider the remarks he was then
reviewing for a new edition of his history of WW I, The World
Crisis (London: Odhams Press, 1938), in which he criticizes
America not for entering the war in 1917, but for not having done it in 1915.

After recounting Woodrow Wilson's long struggle for diplomatic approaches, his fights with pro-British lawmakers and with die-hard isolationists, and the final shocks of Germany's attempt to buy Mexican belligerency against the United States and its unrestricted U-Boat warfare, Churchill writes:

"What he [Wilson] did in April, 1917, could have been done in
May, 1915. And if done then what abridgement of the slaughter; what sparing of the agony; what ruin, what catastrophes would have been prevented; in how many million homes would an empty chair be occupied today; how different would be the the shattered world in which victors and vanquished alike are condemned to live!" (The World Crisis, II, 1126)

The if-only rhetoric exactly parallels the supposed interview
quote printed by the Enquirer, but note that it makes precisely the opposite point. Since Churchill was revising his text for a new edition in 1938, how likely is it that he would simultaneously complain that America had not entered the war sooner, and also that it had entered at all?

Since Churchill knew as well as anyone that America's entry into WWI was the decisive weight in crushing the Central Powers, and since he was already warning in Parliament that another war was looming, it would have been positively bizarre for him to assist the powerful isolationist lobby in America by making comments such as those claimed by the Enquirer. And if he had, why did no reputable papers follow up on this remarkable claim by seeking and publishing an elaboration of his views?

Unless the neo-isolationists who are passing this Enquirer tidbit around the Web can offer some better support than its appearance in a declining tabloid -- one whose owner declined to appear in court tio defend its reporting -- then the only sensible solution is to consider it bogus.