(iPoster) Churchill-Roosevelt Private Letters: Semantic and Emotional Arcs

• In Event: Poster Session: International Collaboration Section

Abstract

Abstract: The Emotional Arcs and Semantic Evolution of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence (1940–1942). Before ever meeting in person at the Atlantic Conference in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, on August 9, 1941, Great Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill and United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already exchanged private correspondence spanning 15 months. While the two leaders had exchanged sporadic letters before May 10, 1940, they officially began corresponding for the first time as Prime Minister and President the very day Churchill assumed the premiership. This marked the formal establishment of a diplomatic channel that would ultimately secure vital U.S. support for Britain well before America’s official entry into World War II. Against the backdrop of the Fall of France, the London Blitz, and the attack on Pearl Harbor, these two historical giants utilized a secret channel to lay the diplomatic groundwork for American mobilization and the eventual liberation of Europe. Over this timeframe, Churchill and Roosevelt’s private correspondence, blending emotional resonance, logical argumentation, and strategic framing, crafted a narrative that bridged cultural and political differences. Far from a historical inevitability, the Churchill-Roosevelt alliance stands as a compelling case study of the power of effective rhetoric to actively construct critical international partnerships. To reconstruct the semantic architecture of the British-American alliance, this study employs a computational, mixed-methods design grounded in distant reading. Rather than relying solely on the qualitative interpretation of selected letters, this approach utilizes the R statistical computing environment to subject the entire corpus of correspondence to algorithmic scrutiny. The methodology operationalizes Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm by mapping Narrative Coherence through latent topic modeling and semantic network analysis, and Narrative Fidelity through sentiment trajectory and emotional profiling. The primary dataset consists of the complete, unredacted correspondence digitized from Kimball’s authoritative collection, restricted to the critical window of May 1940 through December 1942. To ensure accuracy, the data were processed via tokenization, lowercase conversion, and punctuation removal. A custom stopword lexicon was developed to exclude administrative artifacts unique to the correspondence, such as timestamps, salutations, and code names. Latent Topic Modeling (LDA) was utilized to identify latent themes by treating documents as mixtures of latent topics. The analysis specifies a four-topic model (K=4) to capture primary thematic distinctness, and calculates the probability of topic presence ($gamma$) for each document to map longitudinal strategic shifts. To validate structural density, the study computes pairwise correlations of words within the same message, with high correlations (Phi > 0.25) indicating tightly bound concepts, providing a mathematical proxy for Narrative Coherence. Furthermore, to measure the emotional arc and profiling, Narrative Fidelity is assessed by scoring the text against the NRC Emotion Lexicon to track psychological conditions such as trust and anticipation. Additionally, a longitudinal emotional arc is constructed by calculating sentiment valence for each message using the Bing lexicon. A rolling mean with a window size of k=0.1N followed by a Loess smoothing function is applied to reveal the macro-narrative shape. To disentangle the rhetorical contributions of each leader, a Weighted Log-Odds analysis identified words statistically overrepresented in one leader's writing relative to the other, isolating each man's unique lexical signature. The analysis confirms a rigorous semantic architecture underpinning the alliance between both leaders. Topic modeling validates a shift from transactional diplomacy in 1940, dominated by terms such as bases and destroyers, to shared military strategy by 1942, characterized by terms like invasion and offensive. Churchill’s emotional trajectory closely follows the "Man in a Hole" archetypal shape, bottoming out during the Blitz before a disciplined ascent through 1941 and 1942. These findings challenge the popular historical view of the two leaders as twins of destiny, pointing instead to a functional divergence and rhetorical division of labor. Churchill’s overrepresentation of friction-based words cast him as a disruptor to American complacency, while Roosevelt’s procedural vocabulary cast him as a translator of that agitation into bureaucratic reality. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that Narrative Fidelity was achieved because the leaders' distinct voices interlocked to form a complete persuasive circuit; had both adopted Churchill’s tone, the narrative might have collapsed into hysteria, and had both adopted Roosevelt's caution, it might have stagnated in bureaucracy. The "Special Relationship" was not a byproduct of shared heritage, but a rhetorical artifact engineered through specific narrative strategies.

Author

• Clayton Felts, Berry College