The supporters of the Nazi party prior to 1933 can be divided into two groups. Much the larger of these were the millions of voters who, beginning in the summer of 1930, cast their ballots for Hitler and his party. The second group, whose adherence to the Nazi movement included but also went beyond voting for its candidates in elections, were the formal members of the NSDAP. Between February 1930 and May 1932, they increased in number from approximately 170–180,000 to some 850–900,000.

Although identified above all with the French Confédération Général du Travail prior to the First World War, revolutionary syndicalism had become an international movement by 1914, when various labour organizations in Europe, North and South America, and Australasia espoused its doctrines or the kindred doctrines of industrial unionism. The desire to establish durable international bonds between these revolutionary organizations had grown steadily, especially in Europe, where by 1912 organized syndicalist bodies existed in France, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, Belgium, Spain and Italy. The congress held in London in the autumn of 1913 represented the first effort to create a vehicle of syndicalist internationalism. But the congress and the debate surrounding it demonstrated not only that syndicalists were not in accord on international tactics, nor on national tactics, but also that the deepest cleavage on the question of international strategy was that dividing the CGT from most syndicalist organizations in other countries.

Arthur Henderson was the only member of the industrial working classes to lead a British political party. He was the only trade unionist to lead the Labour Party, and, as well, one of only two active Christians to do so. In the history of the Labour Party's first thirty years he seems to have a centrality shared by no other man. But what constitutes his centrality is a genuine problem, and both his contemporaries and his colleagues were aware of it. J. R. Clynes once wrote: “I would not class Mr. Henderson as a type, but as one quite unlike any other of his colleagues.” In this article I would like to test this judgement, to examine both Henderson's “typicality” as a historical figure in the labour movement, and the significance of his career as a labour leader.

The Independent Labour Party was formed early in 1893, at a time when its founders hoped that reformist, undogmatic Socialism would soon attract the support of large numbers of working men. This was a hope shared by others committed to a more rigorous Socialist ideology. Even Friedrich Engels, convinced that the formation of a political party sustained by the working class was the task of greatest importance, hailed the ILP as the body desired by the old members of the International of the 1860's. But the early hopes were short-lived. Everyone of its twenty-eight candidates was defeated at the General Election of 1895, even Keir Hardie, the party's leader, who had been elected at West Ham without Liberal opposition in 1892. Many of the candidates polled well, but the overall result was a deep disappointment. In four subsequent by-elections between May 1896 and October 1897, ILP candidates of proven ability, while finding considerable support among the electorate, finished last on each occasion, and the trend of election results grew worse rather than better. The ILP polled thousands of votes rather than the few hundreds of the Marxist body, the Social Democratic Federation, but this was small consolation. In terms of membership and general party activity the years after 1895 also marked a regression. Gradually Hardie and his colleages became convinced that winning the workers to Socialism by means of the ILP alone was not a feasible strategy. There was no way, in the short term, to further the cause of independent labour without the adhesion of the non-Socialist trade unions. This inevitably meant the soft-pedalling of Socialism. Defeated as a separate force, the ILP was forced to accept the idea of an alliance with the trade unions, in the hope that any form of labour party would first become independent of the Liberals and eventually Socialist. The first assumption proved correct, the second on the whole incorrect, but it is difficult to see what other course could have been pursued at the time. Thus the years between 1895 and 1900, the vital pre-history of the Labour Party, were years which were to stamp it at its birth in 1900 as a party of practical trade unionists, fighting for limited aims, with a smattering of Socialists whose influence failed to dominate the party programme or strategy.