Leopold Maxse

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Leopold James Maxse (1864-1932) was a journalist and editor of the conservative British publication, National Review, between August 1893 and his death in January 1932. He was succeeded as editor by his sister, Violet Milner.

He was President of the Cambridge Union Society, in 1886, and a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Maxse was anti-German in the pre-war and argued that the 1918 victory against Germany gave the Allies a fleeting opportunity to destroy German power. He viewed the Treaty of Versailles as ineffectual towards that aim and blamed Allied politicians, Lloyd George especially, for bowing to President Wilson's pressure to make the treaty less harsh.

The League of Nations was vehementally opposed by Maxse and he believed it to have been formed to please Wilson. He claimed Hindenburg and Ludendorff controlled Germany from behind-the-scenes regardless of which politician was in office and that it was unnecessary to appease Germany to stop her from going Bolshevik because Prussian militarism was still the dominant force.

The Allied intervention in Russia to help defeat the Bolsheviks was supported by Maxse not just because he disliked Bolshevism but because he wanted Russia to resume her pre-revolution role of being an anti-German power. Maxse was also pro-French.

In the general election of 1918 Maxse supported the National Party against the Tory leadership, who he regarded as subservient to Lloyd George and would therefore keep him in high office.

[edit] References

Hutcheson, John A. (1989). Leopold Maxse and the National Review, 1893-1914: right-wing politics and journalism in the Edwardian era. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. ISBN 0-8240-7818-7.