(6 of 9)
Elected to Parliament in 1924 from the tough shipyard and foundry constituency of Stockton-on-Tees, Macmillan was deeply moved by the suffering that the Depression brought to his constituents, established "dole schools" which he personally financed, to teach unemployed workers useful crafts. In Parliament he acidly attacked the inaction of his own Conservative Party, called it a "party dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters." In 1936 he even crossed the aisle to vote with Labor in censuring the government's inaction in depressed areas. The task of his generation, he cried, was "to conquer poverty ... To invent new social devices for the regulation of plenty." In a 1938 book called The Middle Way, he urged government planning to reform the economic order and create welfare services, was promptly labeled a "Conservative New Dealer," and backbenchers dismissed his whole group as Y.M.C.A. boys. Wrote Macmillan: "The dynamic of social change resides in our discontent with things as they are. If that discontent is shared by the comfortable as well as the unfortunate, then these changes can be accomplished by a process of peaceful evolution."
His other major dissent from the Tory leadership was foreign policy. Two years before Eden, he renounced the party whip (roughly equivalent to resignation from the party) in 1936, in protest against the failure to impose economic sanctions against Mussolini's Ethiopian invasion.
When Churchill came to power in 1940, he called Macmillan to serve in the Ministry of Supply. In 1942 Churchill sent him to North Africa as British political representative at the Allied headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower. There, in two years of close cooperation, they became "Mac" and "Ike." Macmillan, who was taught French by his mother before he spoke English, was given a large measure of credit for patching up the truce between the feuding French Generals Giraud and De Gaulle. He moved on to head the Allied Control Commission in Italy, where he conducted the negotiations with Italy's Marshal Badoglio. Late in the war Macmillan was sent to Greece to mediate in the savage civil war; he installed as Regent the bearded Archbishop Damaskinos, who held Greece in an uneasy peace for another year.
At war's end Macmillan returned to London bedecked with honors and praise, only to see the Conservatives go down to defeat. In the debacle he lost his own Stockton seat, but soon returned to Parliament from the safe constituency of Bromley, near London. In opposition, he turned his acid tongue on the Socialists ("The brave new world has turned into nothing but fish and Cripps"), but was gratified to find himself no longer a rebel in his own party—it now agreed with him. Laborites detested his tart, hectoring manner. The Laborite Daily Herald snapped: "He merely gibes and sneers and ogles for cheap laughs like a fifth-rate comedian."