CHURCHILL OUT OF HIBERNATION, WEEK 23

STEP BY STEP is a title for our time. It stands, to this moment, as a warning with echoes that resound profoundly. We peer into it next in our walk through the works of Winston Churchill.

Though he was out of office and out of power in 1937, Winston Churchill never stopped writing. The market for his magazine and newspaper articles was hugely expanded that year by Dr. Emery Revesz (later anglicized to Reves), the Hungarian-born founder of the Co-Operation Press Service for International Understanding — one of Europe’s top journalism syndicators. Comprehending, as few of Churchill’s British political peers did, the avid potential interest beyond England in what Churchill had to say about Hitler and Europe, Reves approached Churchill with an offer to place his writings in a remarkable range of newspaper outlets worldwide in return for 40 percent of the proceeds. Churchill readily accepted. Within six months, Reves had sold Churchill’s work in twenty-six cities, from Prague and Warsaw to Riga and Buenos Aires, bringing Churchill’s ringing alarms against Nazism and German militarism to a much wider readership; at a much-increased revenue rate.

On June 27, 1939, Thornton Butterworth published Step by Step, a chilling anthology of these prescient newspaper pieces warning of the Nazi threat.
“The most splendid stuff,” wrote Churchill’s long-serving, now-retired, private secretary Eddie Marsh after reading the book. “They preserve in an astonishing manner . . . the balance between hope and fear . . . They are all prodigious vindication of your foresight.”

We wish you health and safety now more than ever, as we step by step in our own balance of hope and fear.