Editing Stanley Baldwin (section)

==Legacy==
[[File:Astley, Worcs, Baldwin memorial 1.jpg|thumb|Memorial to the 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley near his home, [[Astley Hall (Stourport-on-Severn)|Astley Hall]]]]
Upon his retirement in 1937, he had received a great deal of praise, but the onset of [[World War II]] would change his public image for the worse. Baldwin, Chamberlain and MacDonald were held responsible for Great Britain's military unpreparedness on the eve of war in 1939. [[Peter Howard (journalist)|Peter Howard]], writing in the ''Sunday Express'' (3 September 1939), accused Baldwin of deceiving the country of the dangers that faced it in order not to rearm and so win the 1935 general election.<ref>Howard would later have a reconciliation with Baldwin and tried to get him to support [[Moral Re-Armament]]. Middlemas and Barnes, p. 1062.</ref> During the ill-fated [[Battle of France]] in May 1940, Lloyd George in conversation with Churchill and [[General Ironside]] railed against Baldwin and said that "he ought to be hanged".<ref>Colonel Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly (eds.), ''Time Unguarded. The Ironside Diaries. 1937–1940'' (New York: David McKay Company, 1963), p. 311.</ref>

In July 1940, a bestseller ''[[Guilty Men]]'' appeared, which blamed Baldwin for failing to rearm enough. In May 1941, [[Hamilton Fyfe]] wrote an article ("Leadership and Democracy") for ''Nineteenth Century and After'', which also laid those charges against Baldwin. In 1941, [[A. L. Rowse]] criticised Baldwin for lulling the people into a false sense of security and as a practitioner in "the art of taking the people in":

<blockquote>what can this man think in the still watches of the night, when he contemplates the ordeal his country is going through as the result of the years, the locust years, in which he held power?<ref>A. L. Rowse, 'Reflections on Lord Baldwin', ''Political Quarterly'', XII (1941), pp. 305–17. Reprinted in Rowse, ''End of an Epoch'' (1947).</ref></blockquote>

Churchill firmly believed that Baldwin's conciliatory stance toward Hitler gave the impression that in the case of an attack by the German dictator, Britain would not fight. Churchill was known for his magnanimity toward political rivals such as Chamberlain but had none to spare for Baldwin. "I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill," Churchill said in declining to send him 80th birthday greetings in 1947, "but it would have been much better had he never lived." Churchill also believed that Baldwin, rather than Chamberlain, would be most blamed by subsequent generations for the policies that led to "the most unnecessary war in history". An index entry in the first volume of Churchill's "History of the Second World War" (''The Gathering Storm'') records Baldwin "admitting to putting party before country" for his alleged admission that he would not have won the 1935 election if he had pursued a more aggressive policy of rearmament. Churchill selectively quoted a speech in the Commons by Baldwin that gave the false impression that Baldwin was speaking of the general election, instead of the Fulham by-election in 1933, and omitted Baldwin's actual comments about the 1935 election: "We got from the country, a mandate for doing a thing [a substantial rearmament programme] that no one, twelve months before, would have believed possible".<ref>Robert Rhodes James, ''Churchill: A Study in Failure'' (Pelican, 1973), p. 343.</ref> In his speech on Baldwin's death, Churchill paid him a double-edged yet respectful tribute: "He was the most formidable politician I ever encountered in public life".<ref>Middlemas & Barnes 1969, p1072</ref>

In 1948, [[Reginald Bassett]] published an essay disputing the claim that Baldwin "confessed" to putting party before country and claimed that Baldwin was referring to 1933 and 1934 when a general election on rearmament would have been lost.<ref>Reginald Bassett, 'Telling the truth to the people: the myth of the Baldwin 'confession',' ''Cambridge Journal'', II (1948), pp. 84–95.</ref>

In 1952, [[G. M. Young]] published an authorised biography of Baldwin that asserted that Baldwin united the nation and helped moderate the policies of the Labour Party. However, Young accepted the chief criticisms of Baldwin that he failed to rearm early enough and that he put party before country. Young contends that Baldwin should have retired in 1935. Churchill and Beaverbrook deemed several passages in the biography to be defamatory of their own actions and threatened to sue if they were not removed or altered. A settlement was reached to remove the offending sentences, and the publisher [[Rupert Hart-Davis]] had the "hideously expensive" job of removing and replacing seven leaves from 7,580 copies.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hart-Davis |first=Rupert |url=https://archive.org/details/halfwaytoheavenc0000hart/page/38 |title=Halfway to Heaven: Concluding memoirs of a literary life |publisher=Sutton |date=1998 |isbn=978-0-7509-1837-4 |location=Stroud Gloucestershire |page=[https://archive.org/details/halfwaytoheavenc0000hart/page/38 38] |orig-date=First ed. published}}</ref>

In response to Young's biography, [[D. C. Somervell]] published ''Stanley Baldwin: An examination of some features of Mr. G. M. Young's biography'' in 1953 with a foreword by [[Ernest Brown (MP)|Ernest Brown]]. This attempted to defend Baldwin against the charges made by Young. Both Young and Somervell were criticised by [[C. L. Mowat]] in 1955, who claimed that they both failed to rehabilitate Baldwin's reputation.<ref>[[C. L. Mowat]], 'Baldwin Restored?', ''The Journal of Modern History'', Vol. 27, No. 2. (June 1955), pp. 169–174.</ref>

{{conservatism sidebar|politicians}}

In 1956, Baldwin's son [[Arthur Baldwin, 3rd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley|A. W. Baldwin]] published a biography entitled ''My Father: The True Story''. It has been written that his son "evidently could not decide whether he was answering the charge of inanition and deceit which grew out of the war, or the radical 'dissenters' of the early 1930s who thought the Conservatives were warmongers and denounced them for rearming at all".<ref>Barbara C. Malament, 'Baldwin Re-restored?', ''The Journal of Modern History'', Vol. 44, No. 1 (Mar. 1972), p. 88.</ref>

In an article written to commemorate the centenary of Baldwin's birth, in ''[[The Spectator]]'' ("Don't Let's Be Beastly to Baldwin", 14 July 1967), [[Rab Butler]] defended Baldwin's moderate policies and claimed that it helped heal social divisions. In 1969 the first major biography of Baldwin appeared, of over 1,000 pages, written by [[Keith Middlemas]] and John Barnes, both Conservatives who wished to defend Baldwin.

In 1998, historian [[Andrew Thorpe]] wrote that apart from the questions of war and peace, Baldwin had a mixed reputation. He was moved by social deprivation but not to the point of legislation and systematically avoided intervention in the economy and social system. He had a ruthless style that included insincerity. His advisors were second rank figures like Davidson and Bridgeman. Thorpe wrote, "Essentially, Baldwin was a much more neurotic and insecure character than his public persona would have suggested", as shown by his nervous breakdown in 1936 that kept him out of action for three months. On the other hand, Thorpe says that Baldwin was a good co-ordinator of his coalition who did not block colleagues who proposed various small reforms.{{citation needed|date=July 2022}}

Thorpe argued that Baldwin's handling of the 1926 general strike was "firm and uncompromising" but disliked the harsh Trade Disputes Act that followed because it was too far to the right of Baldwin's preferred moderation. Thorpe praised Baldwin's handling of the Abdication Crisis in 1936, which allowed Baldwin to leave office in a blaze of glory. Thorpe said that Baldwin often lacked drive and was too easily depressed, too pessimistic and too neglectful of foreign affairs. On the other hand, he achieved his primary goals of preserving capitalism, maintaining the parliamentary system and strengthening the Conservative Party as a leading opponent of socialism.<ref>Andrew Thorpe, "Stanley Baldwin, first Earl Baldwin of Bewdley." in ''Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers'' (1998) pp 278–79.</ref>

In 1999, [[Philip Williamson (historian)|Philip Williamson]] published a collection of essays on Baldwin that attempted to explain his beliefs and defended his policies as prime minister. Baldwin's defenders argued that with pacifist appeasement the dominant political view in Britain, France and the United States, he felt he could not start a programme of rearmament without a national consensus on the matter. Williamson argued that Baldwin had helped create "a moral basis for rearmament in the mid 1930s" that contributed greatly to "the national spirit of defiance after Munich".<ref>Philip Williamson, ''Stanley Baldwin. Conservative Leadership and National Values'' (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 361.</ref>

Williamson admitted that there was a clear postwar consensus that repudiated and denigrated all interwar governments: Baldwin was targeted with the accusation that he had failed to rearm Britain in the 1930s, despite Hitler's threat. Williamson said that the negative reputation was chiefly the product of partisan politics, the bandwagon of praise for Churchill, selective recollections, and the need for scapegoats to blame for Britain's very close call in 1940. Only during the 1960s would political distance and then the opening of government records lead to more balanced historical assessments, but the myth had become so central to larger myths about the 1930s and 1940s that it persists as conventional wisdom about the period.<ref>Philip Williamson, "Baldwin's Reputation: Politics and History, 1937–1967," ''Historical Journal'' (Mar 2004) 47#1 pp 127–168</ref>

By 2004, Ball could report, "The pendulum has swung almost completely towards a positive view." Ball noted, "Baldwin is now seen as having done more than most and perhaps as much as was possible in the context, but the fact remains that it was not enough to deter the aggressors or ensure their defeat. Less equivocal was his rediscovery as a moderate and inclusive Conservative for the modern age, part of a '[[One nation conservatism|one nation tradition]]'."<ref name="Stuart_Ball"/>