Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- List of Tables and Graphs
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘If this is to be a jingo, then I am a jingo’ – Labour Patriotism before 1914
- 2 ‘I'd sooner blackleg my union than blackleg my country’ – Labour Patriotism, 1914–18
- 3 ‘Middle-class peace men?’– Labour and the Anti-War Agitation
- 4 ‘Our Platform is Broad Enough and our Movement Big Enough’ – The War and Recruits to Labour
- 5 ‘The experiments are not found wanting’ – Labour and the Wartime State
- 6 ‘The greatest democratic force British politics have known’ – Labour Cohesion and the War
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘I'd sooner blackleg my union than blackleg my country’ – Labour Patriotism, 1914–18
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- List of Tables and Graphs
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘If this is to be a jingo, then I am a jingo’ – Labour Patriotism before 1914
- 2 ‘I'd sooner blackleg my union than blackleg my country’ – Labour Patriotism, 1914–18
- 3 ‘Middle-class peace men?’– Labour and the Anti-War Agitation
- 4 ‘Our Platform is Broad Enough and our Movement Big Enough’ – The War and Recruits to Labour
- 5 ‘The experiments are not found wanting’ – Labour and the Wartime State
- 6 ‘The greatest democratic force British politics have known’ – Labour Cohesion and the War
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘This is not a political war. It is not a war caused inadvertently by the blunders of secret diplomacy. It is not a financiers’ war, a war preventable by soft words or delicate expostulations … It is a vast and frightful racial earthquake. It has shaken civilisation to its foundations … These Huns are not only the enemies of France, of Britain, of Russia, of Belgium; they are the enemies of humanity.’
—Robert Blatchford, The Clarion, April 1915If the Left's position on international conflict was confused before the summer of 1914, it might be assumed that the rapid mobilisation of European militaries and the declarations of hostilities would have further divided and confounded the movement. Yet, on the contrary, the outbreak resulted in near-unanimous support for the war effort from across the labour movement. This chapter will examine events in August 1914, including the Left's acquiescence to the war, and how it managed to co-ordinate its response. It will discuss the principal characters in the ‘patriotic labour’ camp, and survey specific unions and ordinary workers who gave their support – and their lives – to the war effort. The progress of the war inevitably gave rise to anti-German hostility, and the motivations and implications of this will also be analysed. Finally, there will be a survey of ordinary trade unionists and labour activists who distinguished themselves during the conflict. In terms of both elite and subaltern levels, it will be argued that there was a decidedly united response from labour. Although enthusiasm for the war amongst the labour movement was rare, there was a general consensus that, once begun, it had to be seen through. Ultimately, this chapter argues that labour patriotism, rather than anti-war agitation, characterised the Left's response to the war, and that the history of labour patriotism in this period has been unjustly neglected by historians.
August 1914
Most leading individuals on the British Left remained firmly against the war in the days preceding the start of the conflict. The future ultrapatriot Ben Tillett condemned the war as ‘absolutely wanton and brutal in every feature’, while Will Thorne lamented the ‘utterly shattered’ hopes of internationalism. H.M. Hyndman was one of many leading leftists to have addressed a large peace meeting on 2 August, and Labour made plans to form a Peace Emergency Workers’ National Committee to co-ordinate the anti-war effort.
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- For Class and CountryThe Patriotic Left and the First World War, pp. 24 - 55Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017