The most famous reading of "If We Must Die" may actually have never happened. The idea of the poem's universal appeal has been a staple of its reception history, and the supreme example cited by most critics is the fact that Winston Churchill read it publicly. The poem's rhetoric indeed sounds like something that may have appealed to Churchill, and he is said to have read the poem to either the House of Commons or the United States Congress, probably without attributing it to McKay. This omission sounds like a classic example of appropriation, not to mention the more basic irony of a black radical poet being taken out of context by a white leader to rouse a white majority. The poets Melvin B. Tolson and Gwendolyn Brooks both comment on this fact, with Tolson in particular mentioning it more than once and claiming that Churchill "snatched Claude McKay's poem, 'If We Must Die,' from the closet of the Harlem Renaissance, and paraded it before the House of Commons, as if it were the talismanic uniform of His Majesty's field marshal." The writer Richard B. Moore further noted that Churchill's appropriation was "in keeping with the mores of the imperial acquisitive society" and "seems consonant with a too common practice of literary lifting without even a gracious 'by your leave.'" Literary critic Isaac Elimimian even remarks that "we can say that Claude McKay, in a way, dictated the tone of World War II since the poem served as a booster to allied forces who had probably come to the end of their tether."
Yet despite the fact that writers and critics to this day continue to comment on Churchill's use of the poem, the scholar Lee M. Jenkins has noted that there is actually no record of Churchill ever reciting McKay's speech. Jenkins has checked with the records of the House of Commons, the Winston Churchill Archive Center, biographers and descendants of Churchill, and others, all of whom are unable to find any evidence of the reported recitation. Jenkins also quotes author Gore Vidal on the unlikelihood that Churchill would have recited the poem "to a Congress whose every important Committee Chair was a Southern racist." Furthermore, while other critics have likewise suggested that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge read McKay's poem into the Congressional Record, there is again no direct evidence of this occurring, and this use of the poem seems somewhat unlikely given that McKay's poem was actually considered seditious. This does not mean, of course, that Churchill and others did not read McKay's poem publicly. Parts of the poem appeared in Time magazine in 1971, and McKay's sonnet has enjoyed a long afterlife, being reproduced in many anthologies and inspiring the titles of a number of other works. But barring any new evidence, it seems that the only thing we can say about the fact of Churchill's famous recitation is that its authenticity is uncertain.
