by Sylvia Nasar
A first-time visitor to the Baileys’ tells the friend who has brought him, “ ‘It’s the oddest gathering.’ ”
“ ‘Every one comes here,’ ” says the regular. “ ‘Mostly we hate them like poison—jealousy—and little irritations—Altiora can be a horror at times—but we have to come.’ ”
“ ‘Things are being done?’ ” asks the first man.
“ ‘Oh!—no doubt of it. It’s one of the parts of the British machinery—that doesn’t show.’ ”160
• • •
Winston Churchill was one of those who had to come during the 1903 London season. He had been seated next to Beatrice at a Liberal dinner the previous year. Then the scion of an old aristocratic family, the Spencers, and son of a famous former Tory politician, and now a Tory member of Parliament, Churchill was thought to be at odds with the Conservative government. But he irritated Beatrice by declaring his opposition not just to trade unions but to public elementary school education. Worse, he talked about himself without pause from drinks to dessert, addressing Beatrice only to ask whether she knew someone who could get him statistics. “I never do my own brainwork that anyone else can do for me,” he said breezily. “Egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary,” Beatrice scrawled angrily in her diary that night. There is no record of his reaction to her.161
By the time Churchill reappeared chez Webb, he had defected to the Liberal opposition. The mood of the electorate was changing. After the costly and futile war against the Boers in South Africa, British voters were disillusioned with imperialism abroad and anxious about poverty at home. The Tories, who had been the ruling party for nearly a decade—first under the Marquess of Salisbury, then Arthur Balfour—proposed a protectionist plank but succeeded only in alienating working-class voters who feared higher food prices and lost jobs in export industries; Joseph Chamberlain, who drafted the Tory tariff “reform” program, was making the final speeches of his political career to virtually empty halls. Alfred Marshall, who had come out of retirement to blast Chamberlain and the protectionists, wondered if the distress of becoming entangled in a public controversy had even been necessary. Churchill was quick to sense the Tories’ growing irrelevance and thought that the Liberals were ready to move to the left with the rest of the nation. He took this to mean that they had to address the social question . . . somehow. Without trade union votes, he reasoned, the Liberals had no chance of remaining in power, presuming they could get voted in to begin with.
At dinner, Beatrice sat Churchill to her right. He managed to make almost as bad an impression as the first time. The woman who had just decided to forswear not only alcohol but coffee and tobacco (tea remaining her “one concession to self-indulgence”) came away convinced that “he drinks too much, talks too much, and does no thinking worthy of the name.” She discussed the idea of a guaranteed “national minimum” standard of living with Churchill. He merely trotted out what she called “infant school economics.” Her verdict: “He is completely ignorant of all social questions . . . and does not know it . . . He is evidently unaware to the most elementary objections to unrestricted competition.”162
Near the end of his magisterial history of nineteenth-century England, the French historian Élie Halévy mentions several pieces of legislation of “almost revolutionary importance . . . passed on Churchill’s initiative.”163 Among these measures was the “first attempt to introduce a minimun wage into the Labor code of Great Britain, which formed part of the Webbs’ formula for the ‘National Minimum.’ ”
Although Churchill found Beatrice overbearing—“I refuse to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs. Sidney Webb,” he later said—he was in fact aware of his own ignorance and soon began “living with Blue Books and sleeping with encyclopedias.”164 While he and Beatrice saw little of each other, Churchill plowed through most of the Fabian syllabus, from Booth’s Life and Labours and Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life to Beatrice and Sidney’s History of Trade Unionism and Industrial Democracy. H. G. Wells, whose subject matter was shifting from science fiction to social engineering, became his favorite novelist. “I could pass an examination in them,” Churchill boasted.165 A great fan of Shaw’s, he attended the opening of Major Barbara. At one point, he and his personal secretary, Eddie Marsh, spent hours wandering through some of Manchester’s worst slums, just as Alfred Marshall had a generation earlier. “Fancy living in one of these streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savory—never saying anything clever!” Churchill said to Marsh afterward.166
Such was Churchill’s shock, reports his biographer William Manchester, that before long the former archconservative had become “a thunderer on the left.” His inspirations were numerous, and political calculation played a role, but the specific arguments and remedies were mostly borrowed from Beatrice. By early 1906, when the Liberals won a majority by a landslide, Churchill was preaching what he called the “cause of the left-out millions” and urging “drawing a line” below which “we will not allow persons to live and labor”—precisely the policy that Beatrice had been urging on him.167
That October, Churchill gave a remarkable speech in Glasgow that not only went far beyond what the leaders of the Liberal Party had in mind but, according to the Churchill biographer Peter de Mendelssohn, “contained the nucleus of many essential elements of the programme with which the Labour Party obtained its overwhelming mandate for the ‘silent revolution’ of 1945–50.”168 In one of his most brilliant rhetorical performances, Churchill argued that the “whole tendency of civilization was towards the multiplication of the collective functions of society,” which he believed rightly belonged to the state rather than private enterprise:
I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventuresome experiments. . . . I am of opinion that the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labour. I am very sorry we have not got the railways of this country in our hands . . . and we are all agreed . . . that the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and the aged, and above all, of the children. I look forward to the universal establishment of minimum standards of life and labour, and their progressive elevation as the increasing energies of production may permit . . . I do not want to see impaired the vigor of competition, but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure. . . . We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow free competition downwards. We do not want to pull down the structure of science and civilizations; but to spread a net over the abyss.169
No one has a greater claim to the invention of the idea of a government safety net—indeed, the modern welfare state—than Beatrice Webb. Looking back shortly before her death in 1943, she noted with satisfaction, “We saw that to the Government alone could be entrusted the provision for future generations . . . In short, we were led to the recognition of a new form of state, and one which may be called the ‘house-keeping state,’ as distinguished from the ‘police state.’”170
The germ of the idea grew out of her and Sidney’s study of trade unions. In their 1897 book Industrial Democracy, they had proposed sweeping national health and safety standards. A “national minimum” would shelter the entire workforce except for farm laborers and domestic servants. The most radical component was a national minimum wage. Arguing that “in the absence of regulation, the competition between trades tends to the creation and persistence in certain occupations of conditions of employment injurious to the nation as a whole,” they insisted that a government-imposed floor under pay and working conditions was not, as Marx and Mill had assumed, inherently incompatible with the unimpeded productivity growth on which gains in real wages and living standards depended.171 Indeed, they claimed, the cost to business of the regulations would be more than offset by fewer industrial accidents and a better-nourished, more alert workforce. Still, they admitted that the huge expansion of government power over private enterprise went far beyond anything that the t
rade union leaders, who mainly wanted a free hand to fight for higher pay and better working conditions, had in mind.
But the more ambitious idea of “a new form of state” didn’t seize Beatrice until nearly a decade later. At the end of 1905, in the last days of the Tory Balfour government, she was appointed to a royal commission to reform the Poor Laws. The commission continued for three years under the new Liberal government. From the beginning, Webb clashed with the other commissioners. Seizing on Alfred Marshall’s suggestion that “the cause of poverty is poverty,” she defined the problem in absolute rather than relative terms. Inequality, and therefore poverty in the sense of having less than others, is inevitable, she reasoned, but destitution, “the condition of being without one or other of the necessaries of life, in such a way that health and strength, and even vitality, is so impaired as to eventually imperil life itself,” is not.172 Eliminating destitution would prevent the poverty of one generation from passing automatically to the next.
From her East End days, she could speak authoritatively about families in which “now in one and now in another of its members, sores, indigestion, headaches, rheumatism, bronchitis and bodily pains alternate almost ceaseless, to be periodically broken into by serious disease, and cut short by premature death”; or families where the father is out of work, “meaning as it does lack of food, clothing, firing, and decent housing conditions”; or about those who could not work: widows with little children, the aged, or the lunatic.173
Webb dismissed the notion that destitution could always be traced to a moral defect. Instead she listed five causes that corresponded to the main groups of destitute individuals and families: the sick, widows with young children, the aged, and people suffering from a variety of mental afflictions, from low intelligence to lunacy. The most troubling group were the able-bodied destitute. Their destitution, Beatrice argued, was the result of unemployment and chronic underemployment.
She made it clear that the urgent need to eliminate destitution didn’t arise “from any sense that things are getting worse, but because our standards are, in all matters of social organization, becoming steadily higher,” by which she meant both that the working classes now had the vote and that Britain’s main international competitor, Germany, had adopted a variety of social welfare measures.174
The problem of Britain’s existing policy was that it offered relief only to those desperate enough to seek it and did nothing to prevent destitution and dependency in the first place. As Beatrice put it, “all these activities of the Poor Law Authority in relieving the destitution of the sweated worker, did nothing to prevent sweating” or “saving men and women from being thrown out of work or in warding off the oncoming of illness . . . [stopping] the unnecessary killing and maiming of the workers by industrial accidents, or the wanton destruction of their health by insanitary housing and preventable industrial diseases.”175
She wanted the government as much as possible to get out of the business of dispensing welfare and into the business of eliminating poverty’s causes. “The very essence of the Policy of Prevention that what has to be supplied in every case is not relief but always treatment and the treatment appropriate to the need.”176 She never questioned whether the government or its experts knew how to treat the “disease of modern life” or worried about its cost. Inevitably, her ambitious vision of a “housekeeping state” that prevented rather than merely relieved poverty clashed with the more limited aims of the other commission members. As she had planned all along, she refused to sign the commission’s report. Instead, she and Sidney spent the first nine months of 1908 pouring her vision into a document called The Minority Report, which she convinced three other commissioners to sign. Their “great collectivist document,” as she called it,177 envisioned a cradle-to-grave system designed to “secure a national minimum of civilized life . . . open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and a modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged.”178
Webb conceded that the idea would be regarded as utopian by other reformers and amounted to a repudiation of traditional, limited government. In contrast to the Socialist state, she believed, the household state was perfectly compatible with free markets and democracy. Indeed, she presented the welfare state as merely the next stage in the natural evolution of the liberal state. Yet the notion that the basic welfare of citizens was the responsibility of the state and that the government was obliged to guarantee a minimum standard of living to every citizen who could not provide it for himself was not only a departure from Spencer’s ideal of a minimal state. Beatrice’s idea broke with the whole tradition of Gladstonian liberalism that promised equality of opportunity but left results up to the individual and the market and went far beyond anything being discussed at the time by anyone except the Socialist fringe.
“It may make as great a difference in sociology and political science as Darwin’s Origin of Species did in philosophy and natural history,” her friend George Bernard Shaw predicted in his review of The Minority Report. “It is big and revolutionary and sensible and practical at the same time, which is just what is wanted to inspire and attract the new generation.” He went on: “His right to live and the right of the community to his maintenance in health and efficiency are seen to be quite independent of his commercial profit for any private employer.” That is, the objectives went far beyond Marshall’s notion of increasing productivity and pay. “He is a cell of the social organism, and must be kept in health if the organism is to be kept in health.”179
Ideas such as the minimum wage or minimum standards for leisure, safety, and health for all workplaces, the safety net, employment offices, fighting cyclical unemployment by shifting the timing of large government projects—basically, the whole notion that not only are the conditions that produce chronic poverty, or the more acute condition Webb called destitution, preventable, but it is the government’s job to prevent them, and in order to prevent them the government must acquire new capabilities—have multiple authors. But nobody expressed these ideas so clearly, so systematically, or so often directly to the “mendicants of practicable proposals.” And no one else found a phrase that made revolutionary changes seem evolutionary, even inevitable.
Making radical change seem evolutionary was Beatrice’s genius. Even she, however, was surprised at how quickly ideas she and Sidney had thought were utopian in the 1890s seemed practical, or at least politically relevant, a decade later. Looking back at Industrial Democracy years later, she remarked with some measure of satisfaction, “What, in fact has characterized the social history of the present century has been the unavowed and often perfunctory adoption, in administration as well as in legislation of the policy of the National Minimum, formulated in this book.”180
• • •
The year 1908 was a pivotal one for the new Liberal government. With unemployment and trade union militancy on the rise, an overwhelming Liberal majority in Parliament, and the “social problem” at the top of the political agenda, there was a general “scramble for new constructive ideas,” Beatrice reported in her diary. The Webb’s stock was soaring. “We happen just now to have a good many [ideas] to give away, hence the eagerness for our company,” Beatrice continued happily. “Every politician one meets wants to be ‘coached.’ It is really quite comic. It seems to be quite irrelevant whether they are Conservatives, Liberals or Labor Party men—all alike have become mendicants for practicable proposals.”181 This justified a splurge, she decided, and ordered a new evening gown.
“Winston has mastered the Webb scheme,” Beatrice crowed in October 1908 and remarked that they had “renewed our acquaintance.” Having risen to her challenge, Churchill could now be classified as “brilliantly able—more than a phrase monger” in Beatrice’s diary.182
For the first two years of the Liberal government led by Herbert Henry Asquith, Churchill’s reforms had amounted to littl
e more than rhetoric. Despite their electoral landslide in 1906, the Liberals had managed to push through very little of their program beyond restoring certain protections to trade unions. The logjam was broken in April 1908 when the thirty-three-year-old Churchill succeeded Lloyd George as president of the Board of Trade, a cabinet-level appointment. Beatrice found the cabinet shuffle “exciting.”183 The position, which combined many of the duties of the U.S. Departments of Labor and Commerce, entailed a grab bag of responsibilities: patent registration, company regulation, merchant shipping, railways, labor arbitration, and advising the foreign office on trade matters. Ultimately, Lloyd George’s biographer points out that the president’s responsibilities boiled down to ensuring “the smooth, orderly working of capitalism.”184 But Churchill proceeded to use the post to introduce radical social reforms. Remarked one of his friends at the time: “He is full of the poor whom he has just discovered. He thinks he is called by Providence to do something for them. ‘Why have I always been kept safe within a hair’s breadth of death,’ he asked, ‘except to do something for them?’ ”185
For the next two years, Churchill and Lloyd George, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, formed a partnership that ended, once and for all, “the old Gladstonian tradition of concentrating on libertarian political issues and leaving ‘the condition of the people’ to look after itself.”186 The new president of the Board of Trade did not wait to be sworn in before sitting up an entire night and writing the prime minister a long letter outlining his personal policy wish list. After the briefest of rhetorical flourishes—“Dimly across gulfs of ignorance I see the outline of a policy which I call the Minimum Standard”187—Churchill defined his minimum in terms of five elements and listed them as his legislative priorities: unemployment insurance, disability insurance, compulsory education to age seventeen, public works jobs in road building or state afforestation in lieu of poor relief, and nationalization of the railways.