20 Century

Created 1/24/1997
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Winston Churchill

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. Born 1874. Died 1965. Briefly a soldier and then a war correspondent in the late 1890s. He became a Conservative member of Parliament in 1900. In 1904, however, he switched parties and became a Liberal because of the Conservative wish to raise tariffs. In 1906 he became a junior member of the cabinet (for colonial affairs) in the Liberal government, and then President of the Board of Trade. He completed work on the eight-hour maximum day for coal miners, set up trade borads with the power to fix minimum wages, and instituted state-run labor exchanges. As Home Secretary, he took the lead in the suppression of strikes by the police in 1910.

In 1911 he became First Lord of the Admiralty--the British Empire equivalent of Secretary of the Navy.

In World War I he was an opponent of those who wished for massive offensives against the German trench-line in France. He sought alternative ways of striking where the enemy was weak. His Dardanelles expedition--an attempt to force Turkey out of the war--failed, and he resigned (briefly) from the cabinet in 1915, but then served as Minister of Munitions in 1917-1918, where he managed to accelerate the production and deployment of the tanks that played a vital role in allied offensives.

After the war he served as Secretary of War (where he sought to giave as much aid as he could to the foes of Lenin's Bolsheviks), as head of the Colonial Office, and then (switching back to the Conservative Party) as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Secretary of the Treasury) in the Conservative governments of the post-WWI decade. His tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was disastrous: the return to the gold standard led to half a decade of labor unrest and high unemployment, and Churchill had no constructive policy to offer.

When the Conservatives returned to power in the "National" government provoked by Labor leader Ramsey MacDonald's split of the Labor Party in 1931, Churchill was not offered a cabinet post. His opposition first to the policy of negotiation with the Indian National Congress and eventual decolonization of India and then his support of King Edward in the abdication crisis of 1936 kept him out of the government. Throughout the second half of the 1930s, Churchill warned unceasingly of Hitler, of Hitler's aggressive intentions, of the strength of the German army and air force, and of the necessity of British rearmament.

With the start of World War II, however, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reappointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. After the failure of the British attempt to block the German invasion of Norway, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became Prime Minister, warning members of Parliament that he had "nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat," and that his policy was to wage war until Hitler was destroyed.

Thus throughout World War II Churchill had a single strategy: Hitler was the enemy; anyone--even Stalin--who shared this goal was an acceptable ally; the United States was the indispensable ally that must be cultivated; yet the war must be won without a repetition of the catastrophic slaughter of British soliders of World War I. All else would be sacrificed to these goals: with three weeks of the assumption of power by this lifelong anti-socialist, Parliament placed "persons, their service, and their property at the disposal of the Crown" for the prosecution of the war.

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20 Century

Created 1/24/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page

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