Nigel Hamilton Quotes
I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice.
Hamilton, Nigel. American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Yale University Press, 2010.
This was praise indeed as Wellman was generally very conservative.
This is a fascinating historical quotation about labor disputes and strikes. The conservatives at the beginning of the 20th century were horrified at the idea of a strike of any kind. Their idea of a labor dispute with picketing would allow one or two protesters with signs stating their case to stand outside the factory. Or one person visiting a worker and suggesting that the worker not work during the strike. However, when the degree of passion was expressed by many people picketing they were opposed. At the time, the working class and the unions had no other resources other than the bodies of their workers. They could not advertise, publish newspapers, hire lobbyists to explain their point of view to Parliament. The conservatives then were then very undemocratic and believed that the monarchy with a responsible aristocracy of the upper class should run the nation for all. They WERE actually intimidated by a large number of people doing anything that was not endorsed by or approved by the ruling class. Women in large protest marches for the right to vote were intimidating also. The threat was, as they saw it, “Do as we demand or we will bring down the world as you know it.” In a sense that is what happened. There is no conservative in England who would today deny a union the right to picket with many people.
Nigel Hamilton is a British-born biographer, academic, and broadcaster, whose works have been translated into sixteen languages. In the United States, he is known primarily for his best-selling work on the young John F. Kennedy, JFK: Reckless Youth, which was made into an ABC miniseries. In the United Kingdom, he is known for Monty, a three-volume official life of Field Marshal The 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, a senior military commander in World War II, which won both the 1981 Whitbread Award and the Templer Medal for Military History.
