MacDonald, Henderson, and the Outbreak of War, 1914

Abstract

The mutual antipathy which arose between Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson during the First World War is often acknowledged to the point of exaggeration. Historians have however done little more than to note its presence and attempt to minimize its importance to the party's development; they have rarely sought to investigate its causes. During the war the strains in their relationship lay not in any long-standing personal mistrust and cannot be explained by Henderson's acceptance of office in the Asquith and Lloyd George coalitions or MacDonald's unremitting opposition to government policy. They lay in the fact that both men believed the other to have abandoned the Labour party in its hour of crisis. That crisis occurred between August and October 1914 in the first instance and this article will argue that the debate over the future of the Labour party and of the trade union movement which occurred during that period, rather than concern for the fate of the nation, determined the decisions taken by MacDonald and Henderson, by the parliamentary Labour party (P.L.P.), and by the wider Labour movement in the first months of war.