There are many biographies of Joseph Chamberlain, and good ones, too: “shortish” ones by Michael Balfour, Peter Fraser, Richard Jay, Denis Judd, and Enoch Powell, as well as the enormous multivolume life by the Chamberlainites, J. L. Garvin and L. S. Amery (and completed by Amery’s son, Julian). For fifteen years the field has rightly belonged to the magisterial volume by Peter T. Marsh. Travis L. Crosby’s brief study of the colossus of Brummagem takes its place with the more compact books. The reason we should be pleased to have it is that the more we learn about his time, the more clear it is that “Radical Joe,” even in his ultimate failures, was an innovator and major player on the late Victorian and Edwardian stage. It is also true that, unlike most of its predecessors, this critical book is a powerfully argued case for the prosecution.
I have for years been captivated by the observation (by the historian José Harris) that to many in his time, Joe sounded like a liar and looked like a cad. The sting in the aphorism is in its accuracy—everything about him was on such a great scale—his lofty rhetoric and his dandyish appearance most of all, were perfectly geared to impress some audiences and infuriate others. Admirers for many years consisted of the reform-minded among the middle classes—generally parvenus like himself—but also those of the working classes who could only aspire to the more comfortable life he promised. Then, later in his career he stepped to one side from his radical agenda of old-age pensions, state insurance, and public education and took up broader questions of nationalism, of patriotism, and of empire. Put briefly, he sought to become a world statesman.
Chamberlain is often taxed as the man who broke two parties, and Crosby is disinclined to defend him against that charge. Chamberlain was a key player in the fracture of the Liberal Party over Home Rule—but it took two to tango in this case, and Gladstone and his crowd fought their corner with energy when they hoisted the flag of Home Rule among the Liberals. As for breaking up the Conservative and Unionist Party, that never happened. Chamberlain, true to form, developed his grandiose tariff plan and set off a nasty debate within the party. Yet Balfour, with a dwindling number of political cards in his hand, allowed all sides to brutalize one another in their debate at great cost to his reputation as party leader, but no splinter party was spun off from the whole. A believer (without Joe’s guidance) in a moderate tariff, with his 1906 “Valentine” letters, Balfour let the Chamberlainites believe that he was conquered by full-bore Tariff Reform. When soon thereafter Joe’s health collapsed, Balfour remained and kept the squabbling party more or less under one banner—and the Liberals’ renewed call for Home Rule a few years later made that easier for him to do. Even after an exhausted Balfour resigned the leadership in 1911, it was his no-tariffs-without-two-elections policy that his successors Bonar Law and eventually Baldwin embraced. Ironically, in 1911, that same Bonar Law benignly absorbed Joe’s son Austen and the Liberal Unionists into the Unionist (read Tory) Party, and the splinter group that Joe inspired years before ceased to be.
Crosby is straightforward in presenting his case: it is not “Radical Joe” or “Good Old Joe” who is most vivid within these pages but “Pushful Joe,” as his critics called him. And “pushful” he was. Crosby pays proper attention to Chamberlain’s roles as civic reformer and parliamentary politician, as well as warrior for the Union and the Empire. But the thread that runs through it all deals with ambition. As impatient as he was innovative and as controlling in private as in public life, Chamberlain’s will to power was remarkable. In a sort of psychohistorical turn, Crosby’s view is that anything or anyone that Chamberlain cared about he also wished to control. A hard charger in his business career, a generally benevolent domestic tyrant on the home front, a dictator among his political allies, and a wrecker of adversaries in national politics, the man was positively driven to dominate. In the argot of modern times, Chamberlain was a control freak.
The picture drawn for us here is crystal clear and effective. Power hungry and an arch-manipulator, Joe played the political game hard and by rough rules. And so did most of the other parliamentary adversaries he faced. But like Gladstone or Lord Randolph Churchill or Lloyd George, Chamberlain’s power was largely in his mouth—he was a magnificent motivator on the platform. Like these other masters of the platform, he loved it, and like them, his enemies hated him for it.
This book has a few minor gaffes—Lord Frederick Cavendish’s fellow victim murdered at Phoenix Park in 1882 was not his parliamentary undersecretary, and the journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley was not a newspaper magnate—but these are bagatelles that detract little or not at all from a good essay. The prose is straightforward and does not strive to be especially artful. Sadly, this short volume might be attractive for university classroom use (certainly to me), but the bold asking price makes that unlikely. Crosby’s Chamberlain was egotistical and ruthless, but he was also deeply patriotic and quite sincere when he took up the cudgels for the powerless. But with his gifts for administration and organization, with his vision and his appetite for big answers to big questions, he was also truly the first twentieth-century British statesman. Bonar Law once said that all great men are humbugs—and Joe was something of a great man, too, poor chap.
