Norman Angell

British journalist and editor

• Born: December 26, 1872
• Birthplace: Holbeach, Lincolnshire, England
• Died: October 7, 1967
• Place of death: Croydon, Surrey, England

Angell fashioned complex ideas of international relations into simple, catchy depictions that enabled him to lead British peace movements before and after World War I. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933.

Early Life

Norman Angell (AYN-jehl) was born into a middle-class Victorian family. Later, his mother’s family name, Angell, was added to his own. He was the last of six children, and his precocious eccentricities were indulged by his parents. He was sent to a lycée in St. Omer, France, for his basic schooling (1884-1887), where he began the habit of independent thinking that characterized his entire career.

Unlike his peers, Angell chose not to continue his education at one of the English universities. Instead, he attended business school in London, becoming accomplished in shorthand. He went to Geneva for two more years of schooling at the university there (1888-1889). While in Geneva, he engaged in debates with revolutionaries over the great issues of the day. He earned his living as an editor of the Geneva Telegraph a small English-language newspaper. He was quite in the forefront of advanced European opinion, although the vacationers’ newspaper that he edited was hardly a suitable forum. He returned to England an even greater iconoclast, especially with respect to religion. Before long, in 1890, Angell resumed his newspaper work as a reporter for a provincial publication in Ipswich. The radical contentiousness with which he put forward his arguments in print, however, was not conducive to increasing the newspaper’s circulation. He was shortly relieved of his responsibilities and was without a job.

Angell was nineteen when he decided to emigrate to the United States. He headed for the Far West. He put his roots down as a homesteader and wrangler near Bakersfield, California. While he adapted to the rude surroundings, he had difficulties with the strident American jingoism of the 1890’s. The form that American chauvinism took was doubly obnoxious because it was frequently anti-British. The status of his U.S. citizenship, which he claimed, remains unclear, but ultimately, Angell lost his property in Southern California because of the anti-British bias there.

Angell went north to San Francisco to find work as a reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle. Finding other newspaper opportunities more attractive, he worked his way across the United States. After working on newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans, Angell left the United States in the late fall of 1897 to return to England.

His next job, however, turned up in France. In Paris, in 1898, he landed a job as editor of a failing English-language newspaper, the Daily Messenger. He kept the publication afloat for seven years. On the demise of the Daily Messenger, its place among the Paris dailies was quickly filled by an experiment of London newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth). Angell was asked by Northcliffe to head the operation of his new English-language daily called the Continental Daily Mail. Immediately the paper was an enormous success, and Angell was well paid and well within the good graces of Northcliffe.

Two years earlier, in 1903, Angell had written and published his first book, titled Patriotism Under Three Flags . The book lambasted the type of narrowminded nationalism that he had encountered in England, France, and especially the United States. His future boss in England, Northcliffe, was, in fact, among the chief offending jingoists he cited. Yet the decisively different nationalist views of Northcliffe and the emerging internationalist views of Angell did not impair their relationship. Angell carved a considerable niche in Northcliffe’s publishing empire. He was not satisfied, however, with being a “kept” editor. What he wanted to say could not be expressed within the confines of a newspaper column.

Life’s Work

Using his two middle names “Norman Angell” for the first time, Angell consolidated his views on European international relations in a small pamphlet titled Europe’s Optical Illusion (1909), in which he expressed the ideas that he would then expand into his seminal work the next year as The Great Illusion (1910, revised 1933) the new title suggested by Northcliffe. The Great Illusion became a huge hit with Edwardian England and with the leading opinion-makers on the Continent as well. In his work, Angell drew heavily on his contemporary Jacques Novicow, and on the nineteenth century liberal internationalism of Richard Cobden, to show that war between industrialized nations would yield no permanent advantage. Nations were too greatly interdependent to reap any real lasting benefit from war. To think an advantage could be gained from war was the “Great Illusion.”

Angell’s was an argument made amid the naval and weapons races between England, Germany, and the other great powers. Consequently, it was one very ripe for its time. Even Conservative British leaders with ties to the Crown and imperial defense circles embraced Angell’s thesis. Under the aegis of Lord Esher and former prime minister Lord Balfour, a Norman Angell peace movement was instituted in 1912. Angell quit his position with Northcliffe and took to the lecture circuit. He converted people to his cause everywhere. He was especially successful gathering young recruits from study groups held at Cambridge and Oxford; scores of Englishmen, such as future Nobel laureate Philip John Noel-Baker, testified to the almost evangelical impact of Angell’s message at this time.

Angell’s physical appearance was deceptive. He was well below average height; his slight physique, encased in a frail frame, was topped by an enormous head. He was mild-mannered almost to the point of shyness, and genuinely modest in personal conversation. Once behind the podium, however, he continually astonished listeners by booming forth in a forceful, deep voice that was bolstered by a spirited assertiveness. A Scottish observer characterized Angell as having a teacher’s face with a voice that left little doubt as to the presiding genius of the classroom. Others testified to his pedagogical qualities as well. Further testimony to his effectiveness as a speaker is seen in the vast amount of correspondence that he received from the public, especially students and schoolteachers who had heard him lecture and wanted to know more about his writings.

Norman Angellism took two continents by storm. Within a matter of months groups banded together at meeting halls and schools in England, France, Germany, and the United States with The Great Illusion as the basis for discussion and affiliation. For two years the scurry continued, and Angell’s word reached high into the middle-class and ruling-class circles of England and other countries. In the summer of 1914, however, with the crisis leading to World War I, Angell’s movement collapsed as quickly as it had risen. Angell tried to isolate and cauterize the damage by creating a Neutrality League to pledge nonparticipation in the war, but his efforts were useless. With the declaration of war by Great Britain, Angell’s support evaporated. The “Great Illusion” became itself an illusion of human rationalism in August, 1914.

Angell searched for an alternative to the war hysteria. Early into the war, he began a radical association with E. D. Morel, Bertrand Russell, future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, and others. They formed the Union of Democratic Control (UDC). The group was quickly ostracized for allegedly unpatriotic, seditious, pro-German activities. Although Angell’s role with the UDC was actually very limited, he was tarred with the same brush, despite his efforts (in conjunction with the American publication The New Republic and Walter Lippmann) to bring the United States into the war on Great Britain’s side. Angell’s passport was revoked; he was further attacked in print as a pacifist fool, as the one who said that war could not occur, as the one who said that war could not pay. These were charges that he spent his life fruitlessly trying to rebut.

During the war, Angell also shifted politically to the left with an overt attachment to the young Labour Party. At war’s end, he was sent as an observer to Paris to monitor the negotiations at Versailles. He emerged from France very critical of the Versailles settlement and wrote about it widely. The subsequent debts debacle emanating from the Versailles peace treaty tended to underscore Angell’s ideas about the interconnectedness of national economies, although the lesson was apparently lost on the English at the time. Angell was voted down badly in two attempts at Parliament on a Labour ticket in 1922 and 1923. He became increasingly disillusioned with the possibilities of changing ideas and reordering society and bought an island off the Essex coast and retired to rustic simplicity.

After several years of inertia, Angell had had enough of rusticity. In 1928, he was offered the editorship of Foreign Affairs the journal of his old associate, Morel, of the UDC. Angell used this forum to push the Labour Party leadership toward adopting a pro-League of Nations foreign policy.

Angell returned more directly to the center of politics in 1929 when he won a Labour seat in Parliament for the Yorkshire working-class constituency of North Bradford. While engaged in many nuts-and-bolts issues of economic dislocation, Angell’s chief influence remained in foreign affairs. He was involved with several policy formulation committees of the parliamentary Labour Party. Prime Minister MacDonald retained him as a confidant through two years of the Labour government.

When the political crisis of 1931 caused a break between MacDonald and his Labour Party council, Angell chose to retire from Parliament to pursue work on behalf of the peace movement in England. He had earlier in the year accepted a knighthood from MacDonald and was now styled on his speaker notices as Sir Norman Angell. The title lent him a degree of respectability that put more people in his audiences, more money in his pocket, and more confidence in his achievement within the measure of English society.

In September of 1931, however, at the very time that Angell chose to work for peace, the British peace movement began to unravel. The question of the use of sanctions against Japan for its invasion of Manchuria caused a split between the essentially internationalist supporters of a strong League of Nations backed by force, and the basically absolutist pacifists who decried the use of sanctions as simply a disguised instrument of war.

Angell was caught in the middle with ties to both groups. In the beginning, he tried to harmonize the pacifists and internationalists of the National Peace Council, the No More War movement, the War Resisters’ International, and the League of Nations Union. Yet at heart, Angell was a fervent internationalist, very much in favor of a strong League of Nations. Consequently, throughout much of the mid-1930’s he was engaged in a Sisyphean campaign in print and on the podium to bring pacifists around to accepting the collective security principles of the League of Nations. He worked diligently on behalf of the Peace Ballot campaign of 1934-1935, which reflected his conception of a buoyed League of Nations.

In reality, Angell conducted a two-front war during these years. He was officially the principal publicity adviser for the League of Nations Union in Great Britain. When he was not trying to achieve harmony in the peace movement, he was defending the League of Nations against the clever nationalist press attack against it by Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere. Sometimes, this defense involved personal confrontations between Angell and Beaverbrook. The fact that Angell was chosen as the journalist best qualified for this task (because of his work experience with Northcliffe) reveals the great weight attached to his opinions.

Angell was not alone in his efforts on behalf of the League of Nations Union. He was joined by Lord Cecil, Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray, Arthur Henderson, Noel-Baker, and others. Ultimately, all except Murray would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their work during these years; Angell was awarded his Nobel Peace Prize in 1933.

The controversy over sanctions reached a climax with the invasion of Ethiopia by Benito Mussolini in 1935. The failure of Great Britain and France to support effective sanctions by the League of Nations spelled death for that institution as an alternative source of deterrence. With it went the collective security principle for which Angell had so long argued. Angell and his colleagues of the League of Nations Union had to face the reality of the demise of internationalism. In the last half of the 1930’s, Angell moved over to a more conventional view of international relations.

As appeasement began to emerge as the policy of the British government, Angell moved toward a balance-of-power position. In this, he was very close to Winston Churchill’s stance, and Angell and his colleagues met with Churchill to seek points of cooperation. In the ensuing swing of opinion against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Angell became an ardent critic of appeasement.

With the coming of World War II, Angell spent his time in the same fashion he had spent the previous war. He came to the United States in 1940 and wrote and spoke in an effort to gain the United States’ entry into the war. After the United States became involved in the war, Angell remained to lecture on behalf of Anglo-American unity. Much of his time was occupied with speeches explaining Labour socialism and Great Britain’s role in India and the Empire in general. Toward the end of the war, he became a strong exponent of an Anglo-American special relationship as a bulwark against Soviet aggression.

After the war, Angell remained in the United States, mainly in were chosen, for six more years. He was an early supporter of the United Nations, although he never saw the United Nations in the same way that he had viewed the League of Nations. Actually, Angell had abandoned most of his internationalist ideas in the middle of the 1930’s. Ironically, he became very chauvinistic, even racist, very defensive of Anglo-Saxon achievement, and very much a defender of British imperialism. All these aspects can be found in his writings, including the early ones. Yet they can just as easily be ignored because he had the noble goal of international harmony as his object.

Angell returned to England for good in 1951 after more than eleven years in the United States. He wrote and published his autobiography, After All , the same year. His general sense of failure pervaded the entire set of recollections. He took up residence in a spartan cottage in Haslemere, Surrey. When he ran out of money in 1960, he sold his books and papers to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 1966, he visited Ball State to receive an honorary doctorate degree. Although nearly ninety-four years old, Angell remained a formidable lecturer. He died in Croydon, on October 7, 1967.

Significance

Angell struck a chord for peace that existed deeply within Edwardian society. The widespread desire for peace was manifest in the universality of enthusiasm with which his book and his movement were greeted in the five years before World War I. The horrors of World War I made Angell’s proposed alternative to war that much more appealing.

Much of Angell and his work was ephemeral and elusive. He wrote haphazardly and expediently, occasionally merely for pelf. As someone uncharitably said, he wrote the same book forty-four times. Yet despite the truth of these charges, Angell clearly played a significant role in the international peace movement. Whenever liberal internationalism is studied, whenever the League of Nations is studied, whenever popular peace movements are studied, whenever peace leaders are studied, and whenever lists of the most influential books are compiled, then Angell and The Great Illusion have to be considered as an enduring reality of history.

Bibliography

Angell, Norman. After All: The Autobiography of Norman Angell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951. Angell’s very impressionistic autobiography. At times misleading.

Ashworth, Lucian M. Creating International Studies: Angell, Mitrany, and the Liberal Tradition. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. Examines the writings of Angell and David Mitrany to describe how liberal internationalism laid the foundation for the study of international relations as an academic discipline.

Birn, Donald. The League of Nations Union, 1918-1945. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1981. A thorough look at the organization to which Angell devoted so much time during the 1930’s.

Bisceglia, Louis. Norman Angell and Liberal Internationalism in Britain, 1931-35. New York: Garland, 1982. Multifaceted study of Angell as a lecturer, journalist, author, politician, economist, disarmament campaigner, peace advocate, and internationalist.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Norman Angell and the ’Pacifist’ Muddle.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 45 (May, 1972): 104-121. Shows the weakness of Angell’s internationalist reason when placed against a religious belief of pacifism.

Ceadel, Martin. Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1980. Places “Angellism” within the overall peace movement in Great Britain.

Marrin, Albert. Sir Norman Angell. Boston: Twayne, 1979. A biographical study of Angell. A good place to start research.

Miller, J. D. B. Norman Angell and the Futility of War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. A detailed study of the international relations theory of the interwar era.

Swartz, Marvin. The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971. A critical assessment of Angell and his colleagues.

Weinroth, Howard. “Norman Angell and The Great Illusion: An Episode in Pre-1914 Pacifism.” Historical Journal 17 (September, 1974): 551-574. The author relates Angell to the intricacies of pacifist ideology in the Edwardian era.