For Class and Country: The Patriotic Left and the First World War by David Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: For Class and Country: The Patriotic Left and the First World War by David Smith Jonathan Weier David Smith, For Class and Country: The Patriotic Left and the First World War ( Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2017) With the election of Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour government in the United Kingdom in 1924, the British political system experienced a fundamental realignment, the Labour Party replacing the Liberals as the alternative to the Conservatives. Since then Britain has experienced a two-party system of alternating Labour and Conservative governments. Because of this realignment and the fundamental changes it made to British political life, scholars began almost immediately to examine the causes that led to this transformation. David Smith's For Class and Country: The Patriotic Left and the First World War is the latest contribution to this already long historical di scussion. Smith, in fact, details and describes much of this literature in his introduction, providing a useful synopsis of this scholarship for historians not already familiar with it. Where Smith differs from much of this scholarship and where his greatest contribution lies, is in his examination of how Labour's experience of World War I contributed intimately to this transformation of British politics. Though he does not necessarily discount the other factors previously examined by scholars of the British left, Smith argues, fundamentally, that the embrace of a patriotic position and Labour's involvement in supporting the British war effort created a common purpose and established and strengthened relationships with the British working class. He points out, as others have, that until the war the majority of British workers had been remarkably resistant to the political program of the Labour Party. As Smith notes, historians of the British working class too often operate under the "presumption that holding 'left-wing' views is inimical to patriotism," yet most of the members of the working class who participated in the war effort "did not agonize over whether their loyalties lay with their country or their politics." (2) By embracing this labour patriotism, the Labour Party was able to connect with the working class in ways it had been unable to before. Smith follows this argument through six thematic and somewhat chronologically oriented chapters. Chapter 1, "'If this is to be a jingo, then I am a jingo' -Labour Patriotism before 1914" explores Smith's contention that too much of the scholarship around the left and the early 20th century is overly focused on the anti-war stance of Labour's intellectual and elected leadership. In fact, Smith argues, Labour in the early 20th century was also home to a solid bloc of nationalist members who easily reconciled "left-wing and nationalist sentiment." (23) In Chapter 2, "'I'd sooner blackleg my union than blackleg my country' - Labour Patriotism 1914-18," Smith, though discussing the pacifism that informed some of Labour's early opinion on the rightness of World War I at its outbreak, argues that the majority of Labour members and the unions and other affiliated groups which made up the Party's support, were quick to rally to the colours and found justifications for their involvement and support of the British war effort in their political and social principles. Though as Smith notes, "enthusiasm for the war amongst the labour movement was rare, there was a general consensus that, once begun, it had to be seen through." (24) There was also widespread hope that, once the war was over and the emergency met, the world in which this World War was possible would be transformed. While focusing on the role of labour patriotism in his first two chapters, in Chapter 3, "'Middle-class peace men?' [End Page 286] - Labour and the Anti-War Agitation," Smith addresses the issue of anti-war sentiment within Labour directly. While Smith is careful to recognize that "agitation against conscription, shop floor strikes and the anti-war movement … were an important part of left-wing wartime experience," (80) he does question the way in which the historiography of the British left and World War I privileges this viewpoint. After setting out his general arguments and some of the historiographical debates, it's in the...