Arthur Henderson

Arthur Henderson (born September 13, 1863, Glasgow, Scotland—died October 20, 1935, London, England) was one of the chief organizers of the British Labour Party. He was Britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs from June 1929 to August 1931 and won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1934.

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).

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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.