Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican member of the United States Senate from Massachusetts, has been cited by scholars including Eleonore van Notten as reading the poem to the United States Congress in 1919. Lodge allegedly intended the poem to serve as an example of "black radicalism". However, the scholar Lee M. Jenkins found no such reference. Winston Churchill allegedly read the poem without attribution to the US Congress and later during The Blitz in World War II. Melvin B. Tolson wrote in a review of McKay's anthologized poetry that "[d]uring the last world war, Sir Winston 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". Jenkins considers it unlikely Churchill actually read the poem to Congress and found no evidence he ever quoted it. Prisoners during the 1971 Attica Prison riot allegedly passed the poem's text around.