Background
Arthur Henderson, the second son of a Scottish cotton spinner, David Henderson, was born in Glasgow on September 13, 1863. He grew up in a poor but hardworking family.
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(Also Includes America's Terms Of Settlement; British Labo...)
Also Includes America's Terms Of Settlement; British Labor Party's Address To The Russian People; America's Terms Of Settlement; And British Labor Party's Address To The Russian People. International Conciliation, No. 123, February, 1918.
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Arthur Henderson, the second son of a Scottish cotton spinner, David Henderson, was born in Glasgow on September 13, 1863. He grew up in a poor but hardworking family.
He attended school in Glasgow and in Newcastle upon Tyne in Northumbria. At age 12 he terminated his schooling and began working in a local foundry.
An iron molder at Robert Stephenson’s locomotive works and foundry in Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, Henderson became secretary of the Newcastle local of the Ironfounders’ Union, served as a Liberal Party member of the municipal councils of Newcastle, Darlington, and Durham, and in 1903 was elected mayor of Darlington. Later that year he was sent to the House of Commons as a Labour Party member from Barnard Castle Division, Durham, in what was the first electoral victory of a Labourite over candidates from both the Conservative and Liberal parties. Although never an outstanding orator, he was chief party whip in the Commons in 1914, 1921–23, and 1925–27. In 1908–10 and 1914–17 he was chairman of the Labour Party, and from 1911 to 1934 he held the more demanding office of party secretary.
In August 1914 Henderson, with the majority of the Labour members of the Commons, expressed support for the British effort in World War I. He thereupon took over the party’s parliamentary leadership from Ramsay MacDonald, who then headed the Labourites’ pacifist minority. In H. H. Asquith’s wartime coalition government of May 1915–December 1916, Henderson first was president of the Board of Education and later became paymaster general and governmental adviser on labour matters. When David Lloyd George succeeded Asquith, Henderson, who had lined up Labour behind the new prime minister, became a minister without portfolio in the five-man war cabinet. In the summer of 1917 he visited Russia and accepted the plan of Aleksandr Kerensky’s revolutionary provisional government for an international Socialist conference in Stockholm. At first Lloyd George seemed to favour the idea, but he later changed his mind and Henderson resigned from the cabinet (August 12).
During 1918 Henderson devoted his energies to the party secretaryship. With the Socialist reformer Sidney Webb he largely wrote the party constitution, which made Labour for the first time an avowed Socialist party with effective constituency organizations. Six years later, when Labour held power for the first time (January–November 1924), Henderson served as home secretary under MacDonald.
As foreign secretary in MacDonald’s second Labour ministry, he strongly supported the League of Nations, and in May 1931 he was chosen to head the World Disarmament Conference, which was to meet in Geneva intermittently from February 1932. He resigned as foreign secretary when MacDonald formed a national coalition government in August 1931. By that time he was fully occupied with disarmament work (for which he was to receive the Nobel Prize). His last important service was performed in July 1933, when he visited Paris, Rome, Berlin, Prague, and Munich (where he met Adolf Hitler) to promote an armament limitation plan.
Henderson suffered a heart attack and died on October 20, 1935.
Arthur Henderson was the first Labour cabinet minister, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934 and, uniquely, served three separate terms as Leader of the Labour Party in three different decades. He was popular among his colleagues, who called him "Uncle Arthur" in acknowledgement of his integrity, his devotion to the cause and his imperturbability. He was a transitional figure whose policies were, at first, close to those of the Liberal Party, and the trades unions rejected his emphasis on arbitration and conciliation, and thwarted his goal of unifying the Labour Party and the trade unions.
(Also Includes America's Terms Of Settlement; British Labo...)
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
In his late teens several things happened that profoundly influenced Henderson for the remainder of his life. He happened to hear the famed evangelist Gipsy Smith, who was a captain in the Salvation Army. Henderson was captured by the evangelist's eloquence and joined a local Wesleyan Methodist church.
Henderson entered politics as an admirer of William Gladstone, who was then in the twilight of his long career. He engaged in local politics as a member of the radical wing of the Liberal party, and in 1892 he was elected a member of the Newcastle City Council. It was the first of several local positions that he held. Throughout this period of his life he remained active in trade union activities and rightfully deserves to be considered one of the founders of the emerging Labour party. In 1911 he became secretary of the Labour party and retained this position until 1934. He entered Parliament in 1903 as a member of the Independent Labour party.
Henderson was known in Labour party ranks as "Uncle Arthur" and was recognized internationally as an "Apostle of Peace. " He was respected for his sincere and straightforward ways and throughout his life revealed a great strength of character based upon his strong religious convictions.
Quotations:
"Another essential to a universal and durable peace is social justice. "
"To solve the problem of organizing world peace we must establish world law and order. "
"This is our world, and we must make the best of it. "
"Whatever we do or fail to do will influence the course of history. "
"The drive toward economic nationalism is only part of the general revival of nationalism. "
"The world wants disarmament, the world needs disarmament. We have it in our power to help fashion future history. "
"The forces that are driving mankind toward unity and peace are deep-seated and powerful. They are material and natural, as well as moral and intellectual. "
"In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war. "
"I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise. "
"The world before 1914 was already a world in which the welfare of each individual nation was inextricably bound up with the prosperity of the whole community of nations. "
"One of the first essentials is a policy of unreserved political cooperation with all the nations of the world. "
In 1888 he married Eleanor Watson; they had three sons and one daughter. His family was extremely close and a source of great satisfaction to him.
