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 19th 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 '30s created
a force in India to which the British government had to bow. Laborite Ramsay
MacDonald 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 pessimistic and sullen.
Churchill loves freedom partly because he has got so much fun out of it. As
Lord Birkenhead once said: "Mr. Churchill is easily satisfied with the best."
