Review

General Books

In the 1920s Neville Chamberlain was regarded as an uncharismatic but highly efficient administrator and a diligent social reformer. In the general election of 1935 his opponents in the Labour Party castigated him as a scaremonger who preferred to spend money on unnecessary armaments rather than on domestic social services. In 1938 he was hailed as the Christ-like British statesman who, at the Munich Conference, had single-handedly saved his nation and his generation from the scourge of another war. In 1940, the year of his death, he was condemned as the chief of the Guilty Men whose criminal negligence and failure to heed his wiser colleagues had left his county isolated, humiliated, and defenseless in the face of an all-powerful Nazi Germany.	1
Although David Dutton has written biographies of two other major interwar figures, Austen Chamberlain (Neville's elder half-brother) and John Simon, it is not his purpose in this volume to provide a full-scale life of the Prime Minister who remains permanently identified with "appeasement," "Munich," a rolled-up umbrella, and a hollow "Peace for our time." Rather, as befits a volume in a series entitled Reputations, Dutton provides a seven part historiographical overview, accompanied by a valuable chronology and an annotated bibliography. A chapter on the manner in which Neville Chamberlain was viewed by contemporaries is followed by a detailed elucidation of the indictment in Guilty Men (1940), which was that his gross mismanagement of Britain's foreign relations had rewarded rather than deterred Fascist aggression. In another chapter, "The Churchill Factor," Dutton reminds us that Winston Churchill had cooperated with Chamberlain as First Lord of the Admiralty (1939–40) and that Chamberlain served as a loyal member of Churchill's initial war cabinet in 1940. Yet Churchill's subsequent elevation to the status of heroic "bull dog," his role as Conservative party leader (1940–1955), and his influence as best-selling historian made it impossible for a significant revisionist movement to get under way until the latter 1960's, when hitherto secret cabinet and state papers were first made available to historians.	2
Once these sources became available, numerous historians—among them William Rock, Paul Kennedy, Brian Bond, and Michael Howard—did indeed find it possible to explicate the severe constraints, international, domestic, and economic, within which Chamberlain felt compelled to steer his ship of state. In the light of the harrowing memories of World War I, "appeasement" was a policy both in tune with popular sentiment and in keeping with the advice furnished by most of Chamberlain's Foreign Office and British Intelligence advisers. If the Prime Minister had, in September 1938, used Hitler's annexation of the predominantly German-speaking portion of Czechoslova-kia as an occasion for war, then (Chamberlain was warned) German bombers would, within just a few weeks, not only destroy the city of London but also bring death to half a million civilians. (In the event, 60,000 British civilians were to die during World War II, and Chamberlain's rearmament program furnished the very fighter planes and pilots that, by a narrow margin, prevailed in "the Battle of Britain.") During a post-Keynesian era, the economic record of the National Government that steered Britain out of the Great Depression of the 1930s has also come to be viewed in a far more favorable light than was the case a generation ago, and—among most academic historians—Chamberlain's stock both as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as Prime Minister has risen accordingly.	3
Dutton makes no attempt to transform Chamberlain into a flawless hero, and he acknowledges that several critical post-revisionists such as R.A.C. Parker and Sidney Aster have succeeded the historical revisionists. Yet his own verdict remains moderately and persuasively revisionist. What obvious alternatives were open to Chamberlain, he asks, and did not his valiant if vain efforts to avoid war paradoxically result in a correspondingly higher spirit of national unity when the war did come? Dutton has thus provided a thought-provoking and clearly written historiographical overview of a poignant era in British and European history. Yet most teachers of relevant survey courses may conclude that ill-prepared American undergraduate students are more likely to feel overwhelmed than enlightened if assigned this book. Advanced graduate students and teachers of twentieth-century British and European history, however, are likely to find the volume a gold mine.	4
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Walter L. Arnstein

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