(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)
On 9/11 I was overseas and did not get home for some days thereafter. During that time I didn’t watch TV much, but when I did, what I most often saw on the screen were, of course, images of the smoking ruins at Ground Zero.
Frequently, the TV images were fed from cameras that had been set high up in nearby buildings to the East of Ground Zero. I knew that because in the background, past the smoking debris, I could see the Hudson River and the New Jersey shore beyond.
I also often saw something else in the background: the Statue of Liberty, untouched, its torch held high.
I had those images in mind when I selected for today’s post excerpts from a news article Churchill wrote for the Dec. 9, 1929 edition of The Daily Telegraph. He described what he saw and felt on Sept. 29, 1929, a few days after the Stock Market crashed.
Churchill visited the floor of the stock exchange on the 29th, and then rode in an elevator to one of the Stock Exhange building's highest floors. As he looked out from there toward the Hudson, he would have seen the area where the World Trade Center was later built. He told Telegraph readers:
Below lay the Hudson …dotted with numerous tugs and shipping of all kinds, and traversed by the ocean steamers from all over the world moving in and out of the endless rows of docks.________________________________________
Beyond lay all the cities and workshop of the New Jersey shore, pouring out their clouds of smoke and steam. Around towered the mighty buildings of New York, with here and there glimpses far below of streets swarming with human life.
[No one who] gazed on such a scene could doubt that this financial disaster, huge as it is, cruel as it is to thousands, is only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people who by fierce experiment are hewing new paths for man.
Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America.( pgs. 122-123)
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