Background
MacDonald was born in Lossiemouth, Scotland, on 12 October 1866, the illegitimate son of Anne Ramsay and, possibly, John MacDonald, a plowman.
politician prime minister statesman
MacDonald was born in Lossiemouth, Scotland, on 12 October 1866, the illegitimate son of Anne Ramsay and, possibly, John MacDonald, a plowman.
He was educated at a local school and was expected to become a teacher, but in the 1880s he took up a series of clerical posts in Bristol and in London.
MacDonald acquired wide political experience between 1885 and 1892. He joined the Social Democratic Federation, a quasi-Marxist organization, while in Bristol; he was employed by Thomas Lough, a Liberal Radical M.P.; and he moved in socialist circles. He had ambitions of becoming a Liberal M.P., but his candidature for Southampton was thwarted in 1894 and he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the first major socialist party to be committed to electoral politics, in July 1894. He campaigned as ILP and Labour Electoral Association candidate in Southampton in 1894, and was thoroughly trounced in the 1895 general election.
The Labour Representation Committee was formed in February 1900 and formally changed its name to the Labour Party at the beginning of 1906. MacDonald was its secretary from 1900 to 1912, its treasurer in 1911 and 1912, and chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) from 1911 to 1914. From the start, he was committed to winning trade union support for the embryonic organization and was helped in this respect by the attack on trade union funds represented by the Taff Vale Judgment of 1901. Yet support from the unions was slow in coming. With the party having only four M.P.s in 1903, MacDonald embarked on a series of eight secret meetings with Jesse Herbert, confidential secretary to Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal chief whip, to arrange the “Lib-Lab” pact of 1903. This agreement allowed the Labour Party candidates a straight run against the Conservatives in about thirty parliamentary seats, in return for a similar arrangement for the Liberals. In the 1906 general election, only five of the twenty-nine successful LRC candidates faced Liberal opposition; the arrangement had clearly worked for Labour.
The general election result was a personal triumph for MacDonald, who ran a party that now had strong parliamentary representation, initially led by James Keir Hardie. MacDonald also helped move the party in a gradualist, socialist direction by creating a Socialist Library, a monograph series run by the party, to which he contributed several works that he had authored himself.
From 1906 to 1918, MacDonald was M.P. for Leicester, intermittently secretary of the Labour Party, and for nearly four years, chairman of the PLP. He was strongly criticized for helping lead the Labour Party and the PLP into alliance with the Liberal Party. His reputation for radicalism was restored, briefly (long enough to allow him to win the post of Labour leader in 1922), by his opposition to Britain’s involvement in World War I. This attitude evoked venomous attacks on him in the press. The most notable instance of this was the occasion when Horatio Bottomley, editor of John Bull, published MacDonald’s birth certificate, which revealed that he was illegitimate and that he had been named James MacDonald Ramsay, after his father. Bottomley asserted that MacDonald was both an impostor and a traitor and that he should be taken to the Tower of London and shot at dawn. Hostility toward MacDonald’s wartime position led to the loss of his parliamentary seat at Leicester in the 1918 general election and to his defeat in a by-election contest for a Labour seat in 1921.
In the immediate postwar years, having no parliamentary duties, MacDonald concentrated on building up the Labour Party. He was returned to Parliament as M.P. for Aberavon in 1922, and shortly afterward became leader of the PLP, largely as a result of the support of Independent Labour Party (a socialist party that had helped to form the Labour Representation Committee/Labour Party in 1900) M.P.s (who, influenced by the dominant ILP group of M.P.s from Clydeside, voted almost to a man for MacDonald). After Stanley Baldwin failed to win support for his protectionist measures in the 1923 general election, MacDonald was invited to form the first Labour government at the beginning of 1924. It was a minority government and lasted little more than ten months, but because it was the first Labour government, it was an important landmark in the rise of Labour. Within this government, MacDonald was also foreign secretary—the first prime minister to assume that role since Robert Cecil, the third Marquess of Salisbury—and had performed the same joint roles on three occasions in the late nineteenth century. The defeat of the first Labour government in the general election of 1924 occurred in the inhospitable climate created by the publication of the infamous “Zinoviev letter,” which suggested that the Soviet Union was intending to use the Labour Party toward its own revolutionary objectives. Whether this letter was real or a fake seems to have made little difference to the electoral performance of the party; it seemed certain to be, and it was, defeated.
During the next five years MacDonald led a Labour Party to which, according to Philip Snowden, MacDonald was becoming a stranger. Yet in the May 1929 general election, MacDonald was returned for the parliamentary seat of Seaham. At the head of what was now the largest parliamentary party, he formed his second, minority, Labour government in June 1929. Unfortunately, six months later, the markets crashed on Wall Street, and as a result of the ensuing world recession, unemployment rose from about one million to three million in less than two years. The Labour government grossly overspent its budget, precipitating a financial crisis in August 1931. The cabinet attempted to make the spending cuts demanded by the opposition parties but split over the decision to cut the unemployment benefit by 10 percent. Mac-Donald offered the resignation of his government to King George V but returned with a commission to form a National government that would include both the Conservative and the Liberal parties as well as any “National Labour” support he could muster.
These actions led L. MacNeill Weir to suggest that MacDonald was never a socialist but instead was an opportunist who from the start had schemed to ditch the Labour government one day, and that he was guilty of betrayal. However, David Marquand has suggested that such accusations are, at best, half-truths. Indeed, he argues that MacDonald was probably as good a socialist as any other leading figure in the Labour Party and that he was a principled opportunist (he gave up the Labour leadership to oppose World War I) who did not scheme to replace the Labour government with a coalition, although he may have been guilty of betraying his former Labour supporters.
From 1931 to 1935, MacDonald served as prime minister of a National government that was formed after a landslide victory in the 1931 general election in response to the national economic crisis. MacDonalds power depended on the Conservative Party, which encouraged him to move toward protectionism. During this period, MacDonald indulged his passion for foreign policy by participating in two conferences that took place in 1932—the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the Lausanne Conference, which was concerned with German reparations.
His fortunes then plummeted, as he was attacked both by former colleagues such as Philip Snowden and by new political friends. He went into physical and mental decline and was forced to resign as prime minister on 7 June 1935. Subsequently, he lost his seat at the 1935 general election to Emmanuel Shinwell, who had nominated him as PLP leader in 1922. He was found another seat, for the Scottish Universities, but thereafter played a diminishing role in the activities of the National government. MacDonald died of heart failure on 9 November 1937, while cruising in the Caribbean on the Reina del Pacifico. His body was returned to Britain and cremated on 26 November 1937. His ashes were interred in the Spynie graveyard, near Lossiemouth, next to those of his wife.
The dominating theme of his work was that a form of social Darwinism ensured that private organizations would get bigger, that the state would have to intervene, and that socialism would emerge from the success, not the failure, of capitalism. Because of the influence of MacDonald and the Webbs during World War I, these essentially Fabian views became the defining influence in the Labour Party after 1918.
During the early 1880s, MacDonald was introduced to Sidney Webb and joined the Fabian Society, a body of largely middle-class socialists committed to gradual social change through parliamentary and municipal politics. He acted as a Fabian lecturer in 1892, touring South Wales, the Midlands, and the Northeast. In 1896 and 1897 he was also a member of the Rainbow Circle, which first met in the Rainbow Tavern on Fleet Street in London, and which brought together a number of collectivist Liberals (e.g., Herbert Samuel) who believed that the old Liberal Party was about to disintegrate. The group published papers and, briefly, the Progressive Review, in the hope of encouraging the formation of a new center party in British politics. MacDonald’s own hope was that a center party with (ethical) socialist ideas would emerge. This desire, as well as his interest in foreign policy, were the two abiding passions that he pursued throughout his political career.
MacDonald’s career began to blossom in the 1890s. He joined the executive committee of the Fabian Society in 1894, and became a member of the national administrative committee of the ILP in 1896. He remained a prominent member of the ILP until World War I, often acting as chairman or secretary. Thereafter, he drifted away from the ILP, although he did not formally resign until May 1930. His contribution to the ILP was significant; but his real claim to fame arose from the fact that he was largely responsible for the early development of the Labour Party.
Marriage to Margaret Gladstone in November 1896 provided MacDonald with the financial security he needed to develop his political career, since his wife brought with her a settlement of up to £300 per year. The couple moved to 3 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, which later became a base for the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), an alliance of socialists and trade unionists that eventually became the Labour Party. The couple had six children. Margaret died on 8 September 1911.