Winant who?

But times change, and history changes with the times. Winant looks today like the hero we need once more. His humility, his polite and dogged diplomacy, his candor, and his efforts to lift up the working class are missing in our age of political glibness, griping, and gridlock. His death appears more desperate than cowardly. His accomplishments rise to the level of heroism when taken in context--and that context is only now unfolding. 

We forget, as historian Lynne Olson points out in her bestselling book, Citizens of London, that America and England were not the best of friends as World War II loomed. The United States, fresh from a Depression, wanted to stay out of another European war. The German invasion of Britain, the last holdout against Hitler, seemed inevitable. 

"We were hanging on by our eyelids," Britain's top military leader admitted. 

The isolationist U.S. was scarcely England's friend at the time. John Winant's predecessor as US Ambassador was Joseph P. Kennedy, the millionaire father of a future president and a Nazi apologist. Winant, to the relief of the British, were total opposites. While Kennedy saw the German defeat of Britain as inevitable, Wihant promised to convince his president and his countrymen to support the British cause and win the war. 

"There was one man who was with us, who never believed we would surrender," a Churchill official recalled, "and that was John Gilbert Winant."

Although he was a poor public speaker, he was unbeatable one-on-one. Winant threw himself into the task of giving hope to the beleaguered citizens of Britain. Scores of vintage newspaper photos and newsreels show him mixing, not just with the powerful, but with the working class. In an era when anyone might find himself homeless after a midnight bombing raid, Winant took to the streets to spread his message of hope.  

Winant was dining with Winston Churchill when they received the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. With America suddenly in the war, the ambassador's job was to broker a new relationship between two brilliant, egotistical, and entitled men. Roosevelt and Churchill had not been friendly at that point, and were , in fact, distrustful of one another. Winant helped develop the brief, but world-altering friendship that followed.

An unsung hero

It was Lynne Olson's research in 2008 and her book in 2010, plus the efforts of Rivington Winant and friends, that finally inspired a Winant Memorial. The former Granite State governor had, until then, been forgotten except by scholars, friends, and those whose lives he influenced.  Forgotten here, perhaps, but not in England. That perspective, dramatically told in Olson's book, has been the driving force in resurrecting the Winant legacy.

Although born in New York, John G. Winant made New Hampshire his home after attending the elite St. Paul's prep school in Concord as a boy. He later taught school at St. Paul's and bought a home nearby. But due to his self-inflicted death, his burial on the Episcopalian school grounds was initially denied. His casket was exhumed and moved to St. Paul's two decades later. 

Capturing the essence of a complex character like Winant in a book could be no easy task. Depicting that essence in a bronze sculpture was no less daunting, according to sculptor J. Brett Grill. An associate professor at the University of Missouri,, Grill's earlier assignment was a life-sized image of President Gerald R. Ford, now added to the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC. 

From his studio in  Columbia, Missouri this week, J Brett Grill summed up his experience this way: "I’ve especially enjoyed working on the Gov. Winant project because of all that I’ve learned through the process. I try to study the life of the person as much as possible throughout the creation process so I can embody some of their complexities in the sculpture. This process has taught me what a pivotal figure he was in the state, national, and international history, but moreover how history can conveniently forget people whose stories might make us uncomfortable. The more I’ve learned about Ambassador Winant, the more I’m convinced that he’s the type of figure that politicians – and frankly the rest of us as well – should aspire to be. His story deserves to be told and remembered."

KEY SOURCE: For more information on the John Winant bronze statue see www.WinantMemorial.org

Copyright © 2015 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Robinson’s history column appears in the print version of the Portsmouth Herald every other Monday. He is the author of 12 books.  His latest, Mystery on the Isles of Shoals, closes the controversial Smuttynose ax murder case of 1873. (See SmuttynoseMurders.com) It is available in local stores and in narrated form by Audible.com.