Baldwin, Stanley

Baldwin, Stanley (1867–1947) prime minister who presided over British disarmament between the wars A Conservative, Baldwin served three terms as prime minister between 1923 and 1937 and was important in the years preceding World War II as a leading opponent of Winston Churchill (at the time, a member of Parliament) on the subject of British rearmament and war preparation. The son of industrialist and railway baron Alfred Baldwin, Stanley Baldwin was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. After graduation, he became an executive in some of his father's industrial enterprises and was elected to the House of Commons in 1908, beginning a long political career that ended in 1937. During World War I, Baldwin was parliamentary private secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Andrew Bonar Law in the cabinet of David Lloyd George, then served as financial secretary of the treasury from 1917 to 1921, when he became president of the Board of Trade. In October 1922, Baldwin became chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government of Bonar Law. In this capacity, he negotiated the British World War I debt to the United States, reaching a settlement in 1923 that many Britons viewed unfavorably. Despite this controversy, King George V asked Baldwin on May 22, 1923, to form a government when Bonar Law fell ill. This first ministry ended on January 22, 1924, but, later that year, on November 4, Baldwin was returned to office after the downfall of the first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Baldwin resigned as prime minister following a Conservative electoral defeat on June 4, 1929. He returned to the government in 1931 as lord president of the council in the national coalition government of Ramsay MacDonald. It was during this period, in 1933, in response to the elevation of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, that many in Britain first saw Nazism as an international threat. Resisting calls from some quarters for a program of British rearmament, Baldwin refused to take any position with regard to the situation in Germany. If anything, this complacency pleased most of the British public, beleaguered by the worldwide economic depression and wary of somehow instigating another war. Therefore, from June 7, 1935, to May 28, 1937, Baldwin once again served as prime minister. The mounting evidence of fascist and Nazi aggression, including the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and German- Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War, finally moved Baldwin to direct some efforts to strengthening the British military establishment. Yet, in contrast to Churchill, who repeatedly and eloquently sounded warning of the gathering storm, Baldwin deliberately demonstrated outward unconcern. Despite Baldwin's attempts to maintain the status quo, the British public rose in outrage over the December 1935 agreement between British foreignsecretary Sir Samuel Hoare and French premier Pierre Laval to refrain from interfering in Italy's brutal conquest of Ethiopia. Yet even this crisis failed to move the mass of British public opinion in favor of war preparedness, and, indeed, the public's attention was soon far more absorbed in the romance between the new king, Edward VIII, and the American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. The prospect of marriage threatened the monarchy and prompted Baldwin to engineer Edward's abdication on December 10, 1936, a domestic diplomatic triumph that distracted the public from a failure to address the worsening international situation. On May 28, 1937, Baldwin, in poor health, resigned the ministry in favor of Neville Chamberlain, was created earl, and spent the rest of his life in retirement.