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The Australian Right, the American Right and the Threat of the Left, 1917–35
Nick Fischer*
Historians can learn much about the anxieties, beliefs and activities of early Australian anti-communists and the political Right more generally by situating them in a comparative context. This reveals common motives and activities by conservative and reactionary political elements throughout the western world. Further, comparing the situation of the Australian political Right between 1917 and 1935 with that of its counterpart in the United States provides significant insights into the centrality of historical context and its role in determining why and how events unfold and political movements develop as they do. We can thus see how and why the political and social power of labour, Australia's inherited system of government and other peculiar local conditions made Australia's founding anti-communists and the radical right an only partially effective lobby.
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| Following the failure of military intervention in the Russian Civil War after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in November 1917, western governments turned their attention toward the repression of domestic Bolshevism. In this endeavour they met with greater success. In part, this was because the war on Bolshevism, which many conservatives viewed merely as a war on labour militancy, had been raging for many years. Australian conservatives seldom distinguished between One Big Unionism, syndicalism, anarchism and socialism. Bolshevism came to represent a vague conglomerate of hostile causes. In 1919 the Melbourne Argus articulated the uncertainty and horror Bolshevism provoked when it argued, 'the Bolshevik in Melbourne is pursuing the same policy as the Bolshevik in Central Europe or Ireland'; the paper even described the German Socialist League as 'Sinn Feiners' and Bolsheviks.1 |
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Another reason why western governments enjoyed such success in repressing domestic Bolshevism was that the spectre of communism led to the proclamation of authoritarian security laws, and to the creation and overhaul of powerful and relatively unaccountable branches of government, security and intelligence bureaucracies, to enforce those laws. As anti-Bolshevism (or anti-communism) quickly became more than a political ideology, mutating into a force for social conformity, these new bureaucracies played a pivotal role in making that force central to the relationship between western governments and citizens. |
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Conservative Australian governments, in common with their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom, used political terror, enforced through physical violence, civil ordinance laws, incarceration, sackings and injunctions against strike action to retain their hold on political power during World War I, the 1920s and the 1930s.2 This pressure was crucial to the inter-war success that the Right enjoyed in defining the political character of Australian nationalism.3 |
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Nevertheless, the Australian government was considerably less successful than governments in the United States, for example, in wiping 'Bolshevism' and labour activism more generally from the political scene in Australia. This is demonstrated, most obviously, by the election of a federal Australian Labor Party (ALP) government in 1929. After a sustained attack on labour radicalism throughout the 1920s, the election campaign was virtually a plebiscite on the conservative Bruce government's proposal to abolish the Commonwealth Arbitration Court.4 |
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This lack of success was the result of a range of political, social and psychological factors, all of which impeded the growth and potency of Australian anti-communism. Compared with their United States counterparts, Australia's founding anti-communists are something of an enigma. While passionate and sincere in their beliefs, they nevertheless failed to steer Australia towards the kind of authoritarian and even fascist society for which many aspired. To a significant extent, they failed to accomplish these goals because they lacked determination, political courage and craft. However, the influence of Australian anti-communism was also limited by the political and social power of the labour movement. The Right was further contained by a diverse range of forces. These included relatively ineffective federal law enforcement through Australia's security and intelligence bureaucracy; adherence to Westminster and federalist values, especially the separation of executive and judicial power; the failure of anti-communists to mobilise the support of the business community effectively; anti-communists' lack of a sense of esprit de corps and disdain for collegiate activity; the competing distraction of religious sectarianism; timidity, and the politically stultifying effect of empire loyalty |
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The Australian Legal, Political and Ideological Environment | |
| One of the most important fetters on conservative activism in Australia was the raw social, economic and political power of labour. Australia produced the first national labour government in the world. Although the split of the ALP threw the party out of federal office in 1916, the labour movement remained a vital force. Significantly, labour ideals and political positions could still win enough general community support to defeat two conscription referenda, even if they could not protect the federal Labor government from the ravages of World War I.5 They were also crucial to the defeat of the 1926 referendum called by the Bruce government to bring determination of industrial wages and conditions under the sole jurisdiction of the Commonwealth.6 |
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Intermittently, throughout the inter-war period, labour also clung to political power in important state strongholds, frustrating the ambitions of conservatives. At this early stage in the development of the federal bureaucracy, state governments had larger police forces than did the Commonwealth. Moreover, the Commonwealth could not override the jurisdictional prerogative of state authorities to arrest suspected Bolsheviks and other miscreants. In addition, hostile state administrations occasionally used their power to block what they perceived to be authoritarian anti-labour activity. The Queensland Labor governments of T.J. Ryan (June 1915 — October 1919) and E.G. Theodore (October 1919 — February 1925), for example, refused to enforce some provisions of draconian federal War Precautions and Unlawful Associations Acts, such as the ban on displaying red flags.7 Several years later, during the second government of Premier Jack Lang (November 1930 — May 1932), the NSW police even refused to help the Commonwealth conduct raids on the headquarters of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the homes of its leaders.8 |
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Australia's federal structure and state Labor governments frustrated various right-wing possibilities. At the time of the 1925 seamen's dispute, the Bruce government legislated to change the Immigration Act, empowering the governor-general to deport any persons not born in Australia whose continued presence in the country would be detrimental to peace, order and government. To be effective, the government's plan to resurrect deportation as an administrative procedure for political repression depended on the willingness of state police to conduct raids on radicals' premises. On critical occasions, this was not forthcoming. In January 1925, for example, when petitioned to raid premises used by the CPA, the Inspector General of the NSW police did not refuse to take such action, yet indicated that such raids would be 'ineffective' and would fail to 'add to knowledge' of communists' activities. Further, he made clear his displeasure at being asked to participate in such 'frankly political' operations and stipulated that he would not conduct raids unless he received a written request to do so from the prime minister who would have to accept responsibility for such activity, especially in public.9 |
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It should be noted that the Commonwealth government also hindered the prosecution of communists and other left-wing radicals by so badly designing laws and regulations as to prevent the collection of incriminating evidence. The new Post and Telegraph Regulations of the Bruce government's Crimes Act of 1926, for example, thwarted the gathering of evidence against the (moribund) Industrial Workers of the World, because it cancelled their postal boxes.10 |
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This is not to deny that policing authorities, including those of state governments, were anything other than vigilant in repressing what they perceived to be radical, left-wing elements during the inter-war period, particularly during the fraught depression years of the late 1920s and early-to-mid-1930s.11 However, the relative powerlessness of the Commonwealth security and intelligence bureaucracy, and even the state police forces, meant that conservative attacks on the radical movement were restricted. In Victoria, for example, useful but generic civil ordinance measures such as Traffic Acts were relied upon to limit radicals' capacity to hold street protests.12 |
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Another structural impediment to right-wing plans to shackle Australian labour radicalism was the Westminster system of government. This played a crucial role in truncating the repressive powers that government, especially the federal government, could exercise. In government and public service circles, the commitment of sufficient numbers of officials to established procedures and the rule of law ensured that the institutions and traditions of parliamentary democracy were preserved above the interests of governments of the day. |
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This commitment prevented authoritarian government action on several occasions. For example, in 1917, the governor of Victoria received a request from the state treasurer to sign a proclamation authorising the military to quell civil disturbances in times of political emergency, a request of which he disapproved. The vice regal representative noted that the process of declaring a state of 'domestic violence' was complicated and time-consuming, requiring the final assent of the governor in council. Further, the governor believed that the rationale for such a declaration, that of 'urgency', was not 'one of great cogency'. In his view, the military had no experience with domestic tumult and was likely to exacerbate trouble. Dismissing the possibility of a state of emergency as 'contingent and remote', the governor argued that nothing was more likely to produce the kind of disturbance feared by Treasurer W.M. McPherson than the decree for which he petitioned.13 In a similar vein, General Sir John Monash counseled at least one Melburnian who advocated retaining the special constabulary enrolled during the 1923 Melbourne police strike as a permanent strike-breaking force that such a force would inevitably resemble a fascist or Ku Klux Klan-type organisation that would disgrace itself and any government that supported it.14 Monash's views were shared by the patrician leaders of the secretive, but powerful, conservative paramilitary society, the Old Guard of NSW.15 |
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The integrity of Australian democracy was more strongly challenged in the early 1930s when a plethora of patriotic and business associations and military figures petitioned Monash, then chair of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, to establish a dictatorship. Monash refused their pleas, arguing that national salvation lay in education programs that would facilitate greater public understanding and participation in the parliamentary process. As a senior public servant, Monash believed that he was 'absolutely precluded from any public action or any public declaration of ... views which could conceivably place [him] in antagonism with any section of public opinion'. As he had been years earlier, he remained convinced that 'anything in the nature of an attempt at action outside of constitutional methods [was] doomed to failure and ignominy'. Significantly, Monash found ready support for his views among friends and colleagues such as Sir Robert Gibson, chairman of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Australian democracy was unlikely to be seriously threatened while many bureaucrats and officials of this standing remained committed to Westminster parliamentary democracy.16 |
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Westminster values also helped dissuade many Australian anti-communists from turning to paramilitary vigilantism as a viable means of crushing undesirable left-wing ideas and social elements. Significant sections of the Australian establishment took such a dim view of the official armed services seizing control of the state that the political prospects of paramilitary adventurers were never favourable. So, although the Old Guard contemplated mobilisation to avoid the prospect of extended rule by Premier Lang, once the hated premier was sacked, the secret army waited for the democratic process to restore order to the state.17 This attitude, combined with the (quelled but unextinguished) political strength of the labour movement, prevented the joining of the state and paramilitary, self-styled 'loyalists'. Consequently, rather than being permitted to forge an alliance with the New Guard of NSW, the Lyons federal government (January 1932 — April 1939) was forced to conduct an inquiry into improper connections between the Defence department and the New Guard.18 |
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It is true that the Scullin (October 1929–December 1931) and Lang Labor governments were deprived of information about the more important conservative paramilitary organisations by the Director of the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB) of the Attorney General's Department, Major Harold Jones, and by NSW Police superintendent W.J. MacKay. Even so, the establishment's adherence to Westminster values and fear, not only of working-class but also of general public disapproval (and worse), deterred many conservatives from seriously contemplating ongoing resort to paramilitary activity.19 |
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This is, in part, why the Old Guard was most anxious to ensure that it remained relatively unknown among the general public and why it prevented parliamentary inquiries into its upstart rival, the New Guard, from proceeding. It was necessary to suppress knowledge of its existence and of the New Guard's connections with the conservative United Australia Party.20 It also explains why, some years earlier, the founders of the Australian Protective League (APL) hoped to combat labour radicalism through a public-private partnership of a citizen auxiliary force that would function under the auspices of the federal bureaucracy. (These founders included the conservative political powerbroker Herbert Brookes, the Commissioner of the Queensland Police F.C. Urquhart, acting Prime Minister W.A. Watt, the director of the federal Counter-Espionage Bureau, George Steward, and the director of Military Intelligence, Major E.L. Piesse.) It was only through such means, the men reasoned, that the League could avoid bringing 'suspicion' on itself, something that 'could not be avoided if the organisation were ... purely voluntary'. The League founders were all too aware that they could not possibly ask the public 'for a secret service vote'; such activity, they knew, would widely be 'regarded with repugnance'.21 |
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Another Westminster convention that was particularly important in circumventing the authoritarian, anti-labour activities of governments and concerned citizens was the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. This separation was critical to the defeat of the Bruce government's plan to restore the use of deportation as an effective administrative procedure for repression. When Bruce's amendment to the Immigration Act was struck down by the High Court, on 11 December 1925, the High Court set a crucial precedent limiting government's capacity to use the courts to prosecute political beliefs and association.22 The Lyons government, it should be noted, did manage to amend the Commonwealth Arbitration Act to give the federal Arbitration Court the power to deregister unions whose leaders advocated the forceful overthrow of Australia's government. It also succeeded in amending the Immigration Act to facilitate the deportation of foreign-born communists. However, it did not succeed in outlawing the CPA itself, or the front organisation, Friends of the Soviet Union.23 Just as the Victorian police had to combat radicals with the Traffic Act, federal authorities were unable to legislate targeted repressive measures directed specifically at the key radical organisations they most wanted to destroy. |
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In summary, the political, legal and social structures and traditions of Australian government hampered the prosecution of anti-communism and other authoritarian right-wing political activity in Australia. The constitutional policing powers of the Commonwealth government were limited and curtailed by the judiciary. Moreover, anti-communists who were anxious to use authoritarian measures to solve the nation's political problems had to be mindful of the political power of the labour movement and of labour ideals, as well as the deeply inculcated traditions of Westminster democracy. These ideological and physical pressures sounded a cautionary note and, frequently, a brake on right-wing ambition. It is difficult to overemphasise the degree to which this political and legal situation differed from that in the United States. |
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The Rise of American Anti-Communism | |
| American anti-communism arose from the 'convergence of two parallel and often complementary traditions', nativism and anti-radicalism. Unlike Australian anticommunism, it had a singular authority and influence that 'reflected the force' of these two 'fused' traditions. Further, it bequeathed its adherents formidable tools for 'dealing with marginal groups in society'.24 |
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Terrorism and perfidy had increasingly been associated with labour organisation and aliens in the United States for at least 50 years prior to the Bolshevik revolution. However, it was the spectre of communism that prompted and allowed vested interests to develop and entrench a mighty arsenal of authoritarian laws and government agencies to enforce them. |
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The powers available to American anti-communists developed steadily from around 1893, when the United States Supreme Court declared that deportation was not a form of criminal punishment but rather an administrative process for expelling undesirable aliens. This ruling had the fateful effect of preventing unnaturalised residents from accessing the Bill of Rights unless, ironically, they had been charged with committing a crime.25 Ten years later, the Alien Anarchist Act empowered federal judges to deny citizenship to aliens deemed anarchists, and to deport them, within three years of their migration to the United States. The Naturalisation Act of 1906 then forced immigrants to swear not to oppose constitutional government and to disavow anarchism. |
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With the United States entering World War I in April 1917, the Wilson administration (1913–21) legislated the Espionage, Alien Anarchist, Alien Enemies and Trading with the Enemy Acts. These proved invaluable in silencing political protest. The repressive instrument of choice for big business and for right-wing patriotic associations, however, was the Immigration Act of 1917. Deportation procedures authorised by this Act were simple to expedite and far more threatening to 'radicals' than criminal charges, which necessitated proving guilt in lengthy court procedures.26 Consequently, mass deportation drives against aliens of suspicious political and industrial character became an established and effective tool of government. Moreover, in contrast with the situation in Australia, the punitive legal structures that made this anti-radical and anti-labour activity possible survived the Red Scare of 1918–19.27 |
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Throughout the 1920s, remembered by too many historians as a time of 'normalcy', the political, industrial and social environment in the United States remained strongly repressive.28 Hard-liners consistently attacked organised labour. Careerist politicians capitalised on opportunities to win business support by staging anti-radical raids and breaking strikes, while anti-strike injunctions legitimised the frequent use of federal and state troops, and militia in strike-breaking activity.29 |
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By contrast with Australia, in the United States the executive and the judiciary were of one mind when it came to dealing with perceived radicalism. So, as they had during World War I and the 1919 Red Scare, the courts remained a critical instrument for eradicating civil liberties and safeguarding the machinery of repression. The wartime judicial tradition of conniving in the prosecution of 'radicals' continued as super-patriots and District Attorneys liaised with judges to prosecute strikers for such activities as obstructing scab workers and violating injunctions.30 Taking stock of the state of freedom in 1929, the American Civil Liberties Union calculated that more than 2,500 prosecutions for industrial protest were prosecuted that year, rising sharply from the already considerable number of cases, 418, prosecuted the previous year. The determination of the courts to sustain injunctions and forbid interference with scab contracts continued into the 1930s; such action was justified both to unions and liberal legislatures on the grounds of safeguarding the rights of individuals to make their own employment contracts.31 |
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County and city police squads underpinned and enforced the courts' 'antiradicalism', working hand in glove with business and 'patriotic' paramilitary organisations to crush the enemies of big business. Perhaps the most brutal and partisan of these police units was the 'Red Squad' of the Los Angeles Police Department. This notorious group regularly assumed industrial duties for the Better America Federation, a powerful Californian commercial organisation, and other business interests. During a 1923 waterfront strike in Los Angeles, for example, police authorities arrested hundreds of 'radicals' without warrants and then held them in a stockade in congested and unsanitary conditions, where they were frequently beaten by the 'Red Squad' before facing vagrancy charges.32 In return for such favours, the Better America Federation and a myriad of patriotic associations submitted intelligence they gathered on 'subversives' to police and intelligence authorities, for routine circulation among senior security operatives.33 The relationship between police and business and right-wing 'patriotic' organisations in the United States was, therefore, much closer than that which existed between Australian police organisations, such as the 'Special Squad' of the Victorian police department, that suppressed radicalism, and the beneficiaries of their activities. And while the Victorian police, and other state police forces, brutally assaulted striking workers, unemployed demonstrators and left-wing activists of all stripes, during crises such as the nationwide waterside workers' strike of 1928 and the Brunswick free speech battle of the early 1930s, they did not systematically imprison and bash prisoners waiting to be arraigned.34 Nor were their services so transparently available to powerful commercial lobby groups.35 |
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Another critical factor underpinning the strength of American anti-communism was the success industrial interests experienced in discrediting the very notion of worker organisation. In Australia, by contrast, the legitimacy of labour organisation was more difficult to challenge.36 This meant that Australian anti-communists had far more circumspect aims and, therefore, fewer targets than American anti-communists. Australian anti-communists could not expect to crush trade unionism. Moreover, many did not even want to. Even the New Guard found it expedient to champion the cause of 'better' or 'legitimate' majority elements of labour. Among prominent businessmen, subscription to anti-democratic views did not necessarily entail philosophical objection to the right of labour to organise. |
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In the United States, however, anti-labour forces could dream of driving left-wing ideas and organisations from the continent's shores. There were two major reasons for this. First, the political and business establishment in America experienced great success in making labour synonymous with violence and 'un-Americanism'. During successive periods of economic depression, when mass unemployment encouraged industrial warfare of unprecedented savagery and radicalisation of worker and political organisations, industrial magnates, chambers of commerce, mainstream newspapers and politicians seized upon isolated terrorist incidents to promulgate the notion that foreign-born agitators were corrupting the United States' civic culture. Over a generation, incidents such as the bombing of Chicago's Haymarket Square in 1886, the failed assassination of Henry Clay Frick, the manager of Carnegie Steel's Homestead plant, attempted by the anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1892, and the assassination of President William McKinley, in 1901, by a mentally deranged, Hungarian migrant, helped conservative interests pin responsibility for political extremism on 'radical aliens'. So, when a series of bombing attacks were perpetrated against, among other targets, the Massachusetts legislature and the Washington home of federal Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, on 2 June 1919, conservative interests finally acquired the political capital they needed to unleash an assault on organised labour that would not waver until the New Deal.37 |
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The intimidating effect of the sheer violence wrought on American workers and migrants during and after World War I should not be underestimated. This violence was the second critical factor that encouraged American conservatives to imagine that they could be rid of labour ideals and organisations. After President Wilson formed a Council of National Defence, in August 1917, to help enforce his government's legislative provisions, the federal government led a national assault on worker organisation, justified first by the need to prosecute the war effort and, once the war was won, by the need to protect the United States from European socialists and their pernicious philosophies. The onslaught began with the destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World. Documents seized during national raids in 1917 led to the committal of over 100 'Wobbly' leaders under charges of conspiracy to obstruct the war. The organisation itself was shown to constitute a conspiracy against constitutional government; eventually 96 of 113 defendants were jailed in August 1918 (after jury deliberations totalling less than an hour). This action set the tone for the treatment of alleged 'radicals' for the rest of the war period, as citizen militias, frequently in the pay of industrial concerns, hanged labour militants and even expelled thousands of striking workers, at gunpoint and in rail carts, across state lines.38 |
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Following the conclusion of peace in November 1918, American workers grew impatient for wage relief following extended periods of hardship during the war years. After the Emergency Fleet Corporation of Seattle refused to renegotiate the pay and hours of 35,000 shipyard workers, the United States experienced its first general strike. In February 1919 more than 100 unions walked off the job, responding to the call of the Seattle Central Labor Council. The strike was ruthlessly crushed through means that set the tone for future industrial relations in the United States. With the assistance of the Army, the National Guard, citizen militia and regular police (who patrolled the streets in trucks armed with mounted machine guns), Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson defeated the strikers, despatching 36 alien Wobblies to New York for expulsion abroad. This made him a national cause celebre.39 |
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Hanson's success emboldened other officials. In the wake of the 2 June 1919 bombings, the Federal Bureau of Investigation supervised raids on the Union of Russian Workers and myriad other associations, on the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Nearly 1000 individuals were arrested in the state of New York alone. Charged with holding criminal beliefs and membership of criminal political organisations, they were slated for deportation; 249 of the arrested eventually lost their right to reside in the United States.40 Not content with purging the nation's workforce of 'radicals', conservative forces refused to accept the election of socialist candidates in state and national legislatures; in December 1919, Congress declined to seat the victorious Socialist Senate candidate Victor Berger, while the following month, the New York legislature barred five elected socialists from taking office.41 |
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Through a combination of ruthless propaganda and force, American conservatives weakened the moral credibility of labour organisation and extracted a severe physical and psychological toll on American workers. In Australia, by contrast, the Right was obliged to come to a rather different accommodation with labour ideals and organisations. |
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The Australian Anti-Communist Compromise, the American Anti-Communist Conquest | |
| Historians need look no further than the example of T.R. Ashworth, the long-serving president of the Victorian Employers' Federation, to observe that even the most zealous of Australian anti-communists could be opponents of political labour parties yet maintain that labourers needed to organise for their protection. Perhaps more surprising, Ashworth even conceded that some services were more properly created and provided by the state than by commercial interests. This is particularly significant, given that American businessmen and politics influenced Ashworth to an unusual degree. Yet Ashworth's view that rank and file labourers were ardent anti-communists who were misled or misrepresented by rogue leaders was an enduring tenet of Australian anti-communism.42 |
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During his travels through the United States in 1923, Ashworth found sufficient evidence to justify abolishing political labour parties. Meeting with senior American labour leaders, and acquainting himself with the social philosophy of the department store magnate, Edward A. Filene, Ashworth concluded that the prevalence of anti-communism in the United States was responsible for what he took to be the exceptional unity and cohesion of American society. Concluding that the absence of political labour parties in the United States showed that they were not required, Ashworth attributed their absence to the prevention of 'hatred' that arose from conflict so often stimulated by labour parties and militant unions. Failing to appreciate the cowed and bloodied condition of American labour, Ashworth argued that the supposedly uniform American opposition to political labour parties had ensured that American trade unions were not 'run in the interests of politicians', could 'take a strong stand against the Communist' and avoid being white-anted by Red enemies of responsible labour.43 |
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Nevertheless, Ashworth freely conceded a permanent place for 'combinations of workmen' in Australia, recognising that 'individual bargaining' brought economic advantage only to the employer and that 'collective bargaining' was 'the natural remedy for this injustice'. Ashworth also believed that Australian business, taking a cue from magnates like Filene and Henry Ford, could do its part to steer Australia from a chaotic plunge into Bolshevism, by checking (in the words of Filene) the 'blind satisfaction with the status quo felt by [capitalists] who are indifferent to everything save their own comfort' and ameliorating the 'legitimate ... moral discontent of the oppressed ... upon whom the status quo rests heavily'.44 |
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While Ashworth's call to Australian business perhaps fell on few ears, Prime Minister S.M. Bruce embraced the notion that Australia's working-class sympathies were not with militant union leaders during his 1925 dispute with waterside workers and sailors. It was then that Bruce claimed that a renegade faction of the British Seamen's Union and their Australian confrères were violating 'the most sacred principles of unionism', assuming the authority of the Union's elected leadership and taking unsanctioned strike action. Although Bruce attacked the febrile structure of the union movement, he blamed labour leaders for the chaos and invited legitimate union leaders to 'protect trade unionism from betrayal by its own'. Certainly, there was an element of political brinkmanship in this tactic. Bruce argued that unionists had shown themselves incapable of self-regulation. In his estimation they lacked the necessary 'courage' to fight those 'determinedly setting themselves to betray' their organisations and 'the people of Australia'. Further, Bruce used this crisis to justify his attempt to sanction the use of deportation procedures to expel politically undesirable elements.45 Notwithstanding this, the very fact that Bruce refrained from attacking the right of workers to organise collectively demonstrates the strength the principle of labour organisation had in the antipodes. |
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This is not to deny that there were elements of the Right in Australia who wanted to do away with workers' rights to organise. The New Guard leader, Eric Campbell, for example, was convinced that unions were a parasitic cancer on the body politic. In Colonel Campbell's view, the unions had engineered a political settlement, in the form of the welfare state, which guaranteed their rapacious growth at the expense of the interests of upright citizens. Nevertheless, even Campbell's New Guard sold its message by claiming that its rank and file principally comprised unionists, or 'the better class workers', alienated by labour leaders in the pay of Moscow. Indeed, the New Guard posed as the champion of workers who were being used, coerced and misled by an upstart, 'loudmouthed' junta.46 |
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Many Australian anti-communists, like Campbell, preached and yearned for an anti-democratic settlement. They never managed to reconcile the tension inherent in trying to establish 'Sane and Honourable Representative Government', while suppressing 'Disloyal and Immoral Elements in Government, Industrial and Social Circles'.47 The anti-democratic impulse was generally denied by anti-communists. T.R. Ashworth, for example, persuaded himself that anti-communist propaganda was ennobling by giving it a less ideologically loaded name: 'education'. The Australian Protective League similarly overcame ethical concerns about propaganda by theorising that a campaign of 'persuasion, not abuse' would enjoy public success.48 |
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This inability to own up to the authoritarian nature of their creed is just one psychological factor or attitude that tempered the political power of Australian anti-communists. Another damaging attitude manifested by Australian anti-communists was a habitual professional jealousy that impeded the sharing of information and resources. Few anti-communists did greater damage to their cause, in this respect, than CIB director Harold Jones. During his long tenure as CIB chief, Jones became increasingly secretive and wary of his colleagues, persistently refusing to answer even elementary queries from Scotland Yard about radical activities in Australia.49 Although his anti-radical sympathies are beyond doubt (he protected the identity of Old Guard and League of National Security leaders, obfuscating their illegal links with standing military officers and their possession of arms)50, Jones nevertheless refused to make classified information available to citizen anti-communists. Any material that citizen informants could furnish was gratefully accepted, but Jones neither solicited nor encouraged such informants and there was no question that such outsiders would be given access to classified information. This is demonstrated by correspondence between Jones and the long-serving, conservative federal Attorney General, John Latham, regarding a naturalised immigrant from Moscow who offered the CIB a list of communist operatives in Australia. While Jones acknowledged the efforts of the informant, requested further information and offered him the Department's gratitude, he was 'unable to suggest' that the man 'be placed [directly] in touch with any' branch of the government and argued that it was 'not desirable that [the informant] should know where the [state's] interest in these matters' lay.51 |
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This sense of professional jealousy and suspicion was by no means particular to anti-communists in the employ of government. Paramilitary anti-communist societies similarly refused even to reveal their existence to one another, let alone collaborate. For example, in October 1931, when a delegate from the New Guard met with a member of a kindred Victorian organisation, the League of National Security, he had great difficulty learning much about the League, forming an impression that the secrecy of the association made its members 'very reluctant to discuss any matters of policy'; the delegate expressed a forlorn hope that the League 'would be very much more open in their conversation' with the Guard's 'higher officials'.52 Further, the Old Guard not only refused to deal with its fractious down-market counterpart but even strove to strangle the New Guard. In rural areas, Old Guardsmen attended New Guard meetings and dissuaded people from joining what they warned was 'an illegal organisation', while their financial contacts starved the New Guard of funds.53 This anti-collegiate practice could not have differed more from the principles and practices of American anti-communists, who eagerly shared information and correspondence, and placed great importance on cultivating alliances. |
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Australian anti-communists' disdain for collegiate activity extended to a critical failure to mobilise business support. Although many senior businessmen formed and joined anti-communist societies, they did so essentially as private citizens, neglecting to bring professional resources to the cause. In addition, Australian business and its supporters were most inclined to try to counter labour militancy through propaganda rather than through fisticuffs or more lethal means. Industrial violence in Australia never approached American levels. Just one striking worker lost his life to industrial conflict in the 1920s and no Australian firm had the nerve to engage a company police force to break strikes or workers' skulls.54 |
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This lack of imagination and willpower was a defining characteristic of Australian anti-communism. Australian anti-communists were unwilling to initiate and support extreme, forceful action against labour. Whereas American business and patriotic societies exerted enormous influence on industrial law and order and the circulation of political ideas in government, most Australian anti-communists and conservative 'loyalists' did little but urge officials to take action on their behalf. The Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League of Australia (RSL), for example, confined its anti-communist activity in the inter-war period to resolutions, sometimes forwarded to prime ministers, denouncing 'communist propaganda' and its effects on the nation.55 The Advance Australia League and the Graziers' Vigilance Committee, together with the Liberal Federation of South Australia, the South Australian Labor Party, the Country Party Association of South Australia, the Australian Natives' Association, the Navy League, the Citizens' League and the Glenelg Optimists Association, similarly, merely urged authorities to proscribe the Communist Party.56 Only a few industry groups, notably the insurers Australian Mutual Provident and National Mutual, invested any effort in combating undesirable political forces. They publicised and encouraged employees to join the All for Australia League, which spawned the United Australia Party that seized power from Labor in the 1931 federal election.57 |
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Australian political and industrial associations generally shirked confronting or defying government. The conduct of the Victorian Commissioner of Police, Major-General Thomas Blamey, who moonlighted as commander of the League of National Security, illustrates this point. Blamey had been in the habit of crushing objectionable public meetings under the cloak of archaic regulations banning unauthorised street meetings of even fairly limited size. However, when the Chief Secretary of the Victorian government amended legislation governing public assemblies in order to permit street meetings not obstructing traffic, in April 1932, Blamey abandoned his crusade, failing even to pursue radicals covertly.58 The New Guard was similarly reticent when it came to law-breaking. Although it deployed its 'intelligence division' to spy on powerless and unsuspecting associations and individuals, such as a dangerous group of 'Red' chess players and the communist den of Ossies Fruit Shop in Paddington, for all its bluster the New Guard baulked at crossing government.59 |
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Uncertain of their standing with the authorities, some New Guardsmen felt restricted in their vigilantism. R.E. Lane, editor of the New Guard's journal Liberty, demonstrated the hesitancy of sections of the movement's leadership in correspondence with Attorney General Latham, in 1932. Lane stated that he had recently attended a function at what he called 'Soviet Hall', 'The Workers' Dramatic Club', anxious to catch activists breaching the revised Crimes Act. Although 'disappointed' to find that 'on this occasion nothing seditious was said', Lane promised to make a 'round tour' of half a dozen halls in the city, with witnesses, noting 'seditious utterances'.60 Clearly unwilling to stray beyond the boundaries of the law and prevent, disrupt or destroy 'communist' meetings, Lane meekly protested the unfairness of regulations which prevented 'a private individual or ... organisation ... which [desired] to uphold law and order ... from initiating a prosecution without the consent of the Attorney-General'; revealingly, the New Guard did not try to force governments to change this policy.61 This reticence was attributable, in part, to the surveillance, arrests and even beatings to which Guard members were subjected, much to their chagrin, by the state police, an important circumstance which further illustrates how different the political environment confronting Australian anti-communists was from that of their American confrères.62 |
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Some important anti-communists also undermined their cause by falling prey to the distraction of sectarianism. For Herbert Brookes, the co-founder of the Australian Protective League, anti-communism was a minor concern in comparison with anti-Catholicism. Brookes' sense of collective identity centred not so much on his economic status and beliefs as on his racial and cultural identity as a Briton. He was animated by the belief that the Sinn Fein was subverting Australia.63 So, through the Victorian Protestant Federation, he devoted himself to the production of anti-Catholic propaganda and the compilation of electoral rolls for Victoria that identified all the state's Roman Catholics.64 It was, however, difficult to translate anti-Catholic prejudice into concrete forms of repression. Catholicism was a far more entrenched force in Australian society than socialism. Anti-Catholicism, therefore, remained an additional simmering cause for civic dissent that could only drain precious resources from the fight against communism. |
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The near-total cultural identification of conservatives with Britain also had profound ramifications for the anti-communist movement in Australia. It caused a lack of empowerment, reflecting a loyalty to Australia that was always secondary to loyalty to the British Empire, and a conception of political identity that was rooted not in the notion of republicanism but of Empire. Once melded, these ideas and feelings dictated that Australian anti-communists would express their plans for political reform through a relatively conventional paradigm. |
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Most Australian anti-communist organisations' avowed purpose was to fortify the British Empire. This conception of being British and a constituent part of the British Empire constrained their ability to act. They were hamstrung by narrow political objectives and a defensive, psychological timidity. Whereas American anti-communists drew on a national self-image of revolutionary empowerment, Australian anti-communists believed that their mission was to safeguard the presence of a superior culture, of which they were only a small part, in the world's furthest reaches. Members of the Australian Protective League, for example, although sworn to protect the Australian Constitution, were also reminded that they owed the British Empire the same loyalty.65 Even the less priggish and elitist New Guard, 15 years later, still proclaimed its 'Unswerving Loyalty to the Throne' in its recruitment form as a principal raison d'être.66 |
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The conventional nature and mission of Australian anti-communist organisations was reflected not only in their ethos but also in their structure. This, too, restricted their activity and political potential. Structurally, Australian anti-communist organisations, like their American counterparts, were formal, hierarchical and disciplinarian. Yet, Australian organisations were arguably more hierarchical than American groups and this affected both their external and internal relations. In the public field of battle, apart from the New Guard, they abjured (or retreated from) vigilante action, mainly deferred to constituted forces of law and order (or crumbled before them) and did not flout the law. As political organisations and clubs, they required a strong deference to authority (including their own leadership) and lacked the stomach for fascist reform. |
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The very act of joining the Australian Protective League was conceived as an act of supplication rather than empowerment. Its application form required members to promise to 'execute' the commands of their superiors, respect internal rules of conduct, report 'any and all violations thereof' and refrain from exhibiting or disclosing their membership except to 'duly authorised' government or League officials. 67 Another document endorsed by the League, the 'Australian Decalogue', further illustrates the stiff, conventional character of Australian anti-communist loyalism. Expressly Biblical in its semantic structure and expression, the Decalogue is rigidly hierarchical and demands a fealty suggestive of the Ten Commandments for the nation's elected officials. The ninth 'Commandment' of the Decalogue even reminds League members not to rise above their station, intoning: 'Thou shalt not bear false witness nor suffer false witness to be borne against any of thy country's public men', while the tenth adds:
Thou shalt not covet any position for which thou art not fit, nor any office of which thou art not worthy, nor any wealth for which thou wilt not work, but shalt dedicate and devote thy life and thy labour to the well-being of the whole community, doing unto others as ye would that others should do to you, that love may be the fulfilling of the law.68
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These documents (and others relating to the Old Guard and the New Guard) point to a distinct quality of Australian anti-communist associations.69 While leading American anti-communists expected the public to respect their authority, the members of a majority of anti-communist organisations met as equals and concerned citizens. Although they pledged allegiance to higher powers such as God and the United States Constitution, they did not humble themselves before the state as did members of the Australian Protective League. Acculturated to prize the liberties of an individual above the interests of a government, American anti-communists would have found their Australian confrères' personal subjection to the collective mystifying, if not abhorrent. Although members of American right-wing paramilitary and propaganda associations were frequently required to declare that they would uphold and defend the United States Constitution and report hostile intentions toward the national government, they were not obliged to 'beg leave' of anyone to join any such organisation or act to defend the interests of the state as they saw them.70 Whatever the official policies governing the conduct of the American Protective League, its members were known to use their membership to gain free entry to theatres, subways and parking lots, embezzle funds, bootleg liquor and even pocket sizeable bounties for apprehending 'slackers' (draft dodgers).71 Similarly, the degree to which leaders of the American Legion spoke for and controlled its members was compromised by distance and political sympathies. For although the Legion's official, inter-war Americanism program was 'in part a public relations move to ... distance the organisation from its rowdy image', vigilantism by Legionnaires was common. Local police anti-Red squads were known to don Legionnaires' caps when they helped break strikes.72 |
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Two leading contextual factors also shaped these major differences between Australian and American right-wing anti-communism. First, there was the matter of organisational size and related political clout they were able to exercise. Many American anti-communist and pro-business associations were gargantuan organisations powerful enough, as in the case of the American Legion, to elicit gestures of support from governments. Repressing both communism and liberal reformism as much through 'legitimate' sponsorship of anti-radical associations as through vigilantism, the Legion orchestrated the dismissal of teachers alleged to have unacceptable political or social views from state schools throughout the 1920s, while continuing to receive the felicitations of the nation's political elite.73 Other organisations, such as the American Protective League, were recruited to enforce government policy, helping to round up draft dodgers, apprehend alleged spies and socialists, and summarily confiscated the property of alleged hostile aliens; a membership fee of 75 cents or $1 entitled Leaguers to become state-appointed vigilantes.74 |
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With such strong government, business and community support, activists from the American Right could ignore laws forbidding or curtailing their authoritarian behaviour. Although government security and intelligence agencies endured some lean times between. 1924 and 1934, operating largely free from encumbrance or supervision, senior officials abused their powers and the spirit of the law. The Bureau of Immigration's Secret Service, for example, remained determined to arrest and deport alien members of proscribed associations. The Service also acted as a strike-breaking agency, turned a blind eye to threats by employers to use the Service to deport workers and monitored the trials of radical strikers with a view to deportation. One rail worker was even committed by the Service to an insane asylum for his political views. The Service also found the fingerprint technology of the Bureau of Investigation useful and routinely took prints of aliens, regardless of proof or history of legal transgression.75 |
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This freedom undoubtedly helped the American Right develop a much stronger sense of esprit de corps than their Australian counterparts, another factor that proved critical to their political effectiveness. The Bureau of Investigation and Military Intelligence regularly received and distributed information about 'radicals' with anti-radical citizens. An influential 'study on subversives' by Major Richard Charles, an Intelligence reserve officer serving with the office of Assistant Chief of Staff, was derived principally from information provided by the American Defense Society, the National Security League, the Key Men of America, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Better America Federation.76 Intelligence agencies were so keen to cultivate relationships with business and patriotic associations that they were prepared to wear occasional public criticism of their links with such organisations. The Department of War, for example, was unperturbed that the American Civil Liberties Union had little difficulty tracing the source of the Department's anti-free speech propaganda to patriotic societies. It was similarly unconcerned by complaints from the National Council for Prevention of War about Military Intelligence referring citizens seeking information about it and other anti-war associations to the Daughters of the American Revolution.77 |
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Organisational size and clout was a similarly important influence on Australian inter-war conservatism. However, in the final resort, the great majority of Australian conservatives were comfortable with the local political settlement, or comfortable enough to find Fascist, let alone Nazi political models unpalatable. In many respects, most Australian right-wing and anti-communist organisations were very traditional socio-political clubs. Even the New Guard conducted activities of a polite, bourgeois character, establishing libraries, card, games and reading rooms, organising educational classes and publishing book reviews. The New Guard did not force radical right-wing agit-prop on its members; instead, its political science classes provided classical education, schooling pupils in the works of Plato and Aristotle, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and more modern texts such as A.V. Dicey's Law of the Constitution. And at street level, attending inter-denominational church services was the most radical paradigm shift the New Guard contemplated. Outside Eric Campbell's inner circle, sympathy for conventional values and perhaps an indigenous antipathy toward extremism was the norm. |
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One of the New Guard's literary reviewers, P.H. Coates, demonstrated this in his discussion of the relative merits of the works of the contemporary German philosopher Oswald Spengler and Sir Arthur Salter, an English economist, in which he advised fellow New Guardsmen:
[Spengler's] chord of pessimism and despair comes like the wail of the banshee or the howl of the bunyip from desolate swamps. One is thankful to close the book and to take one up such as ... 'Recovery', by that typical Englishman, Sir Arthur Salter [who] strikes a note of optimism in showing that the hope — indeed the assurance — of ultimate success ... in solving the [economic problems] facing us, is in its nature capable of human solution.78
It is apparent, then, that the Australian Right essentially sought not to abolish democracy but rather to be reassured of its 'sensible' survival. Provided governments respected social and political norms, they would receive their support. This is why organisations such as the League of National Security saw no need to oust the Victorian Labor government of E.J. Hogan in the early 1930s, for, unlike the government of Jack Lang, it comprised 'a pretty decent crowd'.79 We can thus see how and why the right-wing ambitions of Australia's founding anti-communists, an enigmatic and only partially effective lobby, were to remain unfulfilled. |
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Endnotes
*. The author would like to acknowledge the editorial assistance of Associate Professor Andrew Moore of the University of Western Sydney, and the journal's anonymous referees in the preparation of this article. The author would also like to acknowledge the ongoing support he has received from Associate Professor Mark Peel of Monash University's School of Historical Studies.
1. Argus, 7 June 1919.
2. The reaction of the British Government, the mainstream press and business interests to the Bolshevik Revolution and the threat of domestic communism closely mirrored that which occurred in Australia and the United States. A useful general reference work is David Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage, Jonathon Cape, London, 1970. K. Jeffrey and P. Hennessy, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1983, examines such important anti-communist events in the UK as formation, under the auspices of Cabinet, of the Supply Transport Organisation, which proved so useful in crushing strikes from l919, into the 1920s. A. Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in New South Wales, 1930–32, NSW University Press, Kensington, 1989, pp. 34–6 and 62–4 also discusses the Supply Transport Organisation and its links to Australian anti-communists.
3. See, for example, V. Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The I.W.W. in Australia, Cambridge University Press (CUP), Melbourne, 1995, for a description of how conservative administrations in federal and State governments destroyed the Industrial Workers of the World as a viable industrial and political force in Australia.
4. S. Macintyre, 'Arbitration in Action' in J. Isaac and S. Macintyre (eds), The New Province for Law and Order: 100 Years of Australian Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration, CUP, Melbourne, 2004, p. 77.
5. As Burgmann demonstrates, the role of the IWW in the defeat of the conscription referenda was particularly notable; it was, arguably, the organisation's greatest political success. (See Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, pp. 192–202.)
6. S. Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume IV: 1901–1942, Oxford University Press (OUP), Melbourne, 1986, p. 235.
7. F. Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance, 1916–1932: Reactions to Radicalism during and after the First World War, PhD Thesis, Monash University, 1979, p. 32.
8. Letter from H. Jones to J.G. Latham, 24 February 1932, Series A467, Item Bundle 94/SF42/64 286, National Archives of Australia , ACT (hereafter NAA, ACT).
9. Report of Sydney Office Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB) to Melbourne HQ, 14 January 1925, Series A8911/1, Item 154 Part 1, NAA, ACT.
10. Minute Paper from Director CIB to Solicitor General, 22 March 1926, Series A467, Item Bundle 94/SF42/64 286, NAA ACT.
11. For an extensive discussion of police repression of striking and itinerant unemployed workers, evicted tenants and radical left-wing activists in Melbourne during the Great Depression, see C. Fox, Fighting Back: The Politics of the Unemployed in Victoria in the Great Depression, Melbourne University Press (MUP), Melbourne, 2000, pp. 88, 103, 155 and 223–240.
12. Ibid., pp. 236–38.
13. Memorandum from Governor of Victoria to the Premier, c 23 December 1917, File 1172, Item 8, Public Records Office, Victoria.
14. Geoffrey Serle, John Monash: A Biography, MUP, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 468–9.
15. The bulletin of the Old Guard once stated 'In English-speaking communities it is almost impossible to establish, or maintain, a Government by force in opposition to the wishes of the majority ... It would cause very bitter strife for years to come, and the ruin of many people, if any body of men attempted to impose their particular creed of politics by force'. See Moore, The Secret Army, p. 91.
16. Papers of General Sir John Monash, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA) MS 1884. For quotes, see letter of Monash to Stewart, 31 July 1930 Box 100, folder 741; letter of Monash to Barclay Smith, 3 December 1930 and letter of Monash to Robert Knox, 12 November 1930, Box 101, folder 748. Various petitions and letters to Monash are contained in Box 45, Series 1A, Folder 417, Box 47, folders 431, 432, 433. Serle notes that Monash had refused similar calls to become dictator in 1927 and describes, at length, the correspondence Monash received in 1930 from private citizens and powerful businessmen alike, again prevailing on him to establish a dictatorship. See Serle, John Monash, pp. 517–21.
17. Moore, The Secret Army, pp. 209–24 and 234.
18. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 31 August 1932, p. 54. The unwelcome consequences of association with the New Guard were apparent, too, to the Old Guard, which worked to prevent the convening of a Royal Commission on the dismissal of the Lang government, in 1932, for fear that disclosure of the ties between the New Guard and the United Australia Party would have produced a great public backlash. See Moore, The Secret Army, p. 225.
19. The anti-radical character of the Old Guard extended to a distaste for vigilantism. The aims of the Guard were not radical and its 'ruling class philanthropy was influenced by a mixture of fear and genuine concern for the unfortunate', so that among its senior members it counted the president of the Royal Benevolent Society (in 1931), William Thompson. Further, several of its members believed that the antics of the New Guard were radicalising Jack Lang. They regarded the New Guard leader Eric Campbell as 'a fanatic and swell headed ... more dangerous to the peace of this state than all the communists in Australia'. See Moore, The Secret Army, pp. 103 and 154.
20. Ibid., pp. 134–5 and 235–7.
21. Ibid., pp. 22–5 and letter from H. Brookes to Senator Pearce, 29 November 1918, papers of Herbert Brookes, NLA MS 1924/17/2.
22. C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia: Vol. VI: 'The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green', 1916–1935, MUP, Melbourne, 1987, p. 242.
23. Fox, Fighting Back, pp. 222–23.
24. W. Preston, Jr, Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966, p. 7.
25. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
26. Ibid., pp. 99–100.
27. Preston, Jr, Aliens and Dissenters, pp. 205 and 59–65 and 205; American Civil Liberties Union (hereafter ACLU), Free Speech 1926, The Fight for Civil Liberty 1927–1928, 'Sweet Land of Liberty', Liberty Under the New Deal: The Record for 1933–34. NB: Annual reports of the ACLU, at this time, did not carry precise publication dates. Each report was published in the year following the year being reported on, or thereabouts.
28. See for example, P. Buckingham, America Sees Red: Anti-Communism in America, 1870's to 1980's: A Guide to Issues and References, Regina Books, Claremont, 1988; S.A. Coben, Mitchell Palmer: Politician, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963 and R.K. Murray, The Red Scare, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1953.
29. See, for example, ACLU, A Year's Fight for Free Speech, September 1921 — January 1923. In 1922, federal Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty won an injunction against rail workers. Following the repeal of the Sedition Act in 1921, States had been rebuilding their National Guard units to substitute for federal forces compelled to retreat from anti-strike activity.
30. Correspondence of United States District Court Judge Martin J. Wade and American Protective League founder Charles Daniel Frey, 27 March 1918, 2 April 1918 and 23 April 1918, BI — MSS, Records of the American Protective League, Box 1 A1, Entry 14, 15, 16, United States National Archives and Record Centre (hereafter BI-MSS); and Appendix to the Annual Report of the Attorney-General of the United States for the fiscal year 1922.
31. ACLU, 'Sweet Land of Liberty', 1931–32; Civil Liberty: 1929–30; and Land of the Pilgrim's Pride: 1932–33.
32. ACLU, The Record of the Fight for Free Speech in 1923: The Work of the A.C.L.U. January to December 1923; and Free Speech in 1924.
33. See, for example, United States Military Intelligence Reports, Surveillance of Radicals in the United States 1917–19 41, MI — MSS, Reel 23, File No. 10110-2601, United States Library of Congress (hereafter MI-MSS).
34. Macintyre, Oxford History of Australia, pp. 244–5 and Fox, Fighting Back, pp. 225–40.
35. According to Moore, the NSW Police Criminal Investigation Branch superintendent, W.J. MacKay, did enter a clandestine alliance with the Old Guard, relying on the promise of paramilitary support in the event of emergency, in exchange for protection from public exposure. Moore also avers that the League of National Security in Victoria recruited from among men such as the State Crown Solicitor, Frank Menzies, a former member of the Melbourne University Rifle regiment. However, and this is particularly significant given the upper-crust character of the Old Guard leadership, leading Australian anti-communist fraternities did not undertake activity for the express benefit of commercial lobby groups like the Better America Federation, and they shunned publicity. (See Moore, The Secret Army, pp. 132–5.)
36. This is not to say that conservative Australian politicians and business interests did not want to reduce, and in some cases drastically reduce, the power of labour. Prime Minister Bruce, for example, attempted to reduce the power of labour through statutes, a referendum and public support garnered through electoral victory. However, although he found raising the spectre of Bolshevism a successful electoral and industrial relations ploy in the lead up to the 1925 general election, as the decade wore on, the tactic became less effective and Bruce lost office in 1929 in ignominious rejection of his industrial relations policy. See footnote 6 and Macintyre, Oxford History of Australia, p. 228.
37. Preston, Jr, Aliens and Dissenters, pp. 24–5 and 30–31 and Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, Atheneum, New York, 1973; Murray, The Red Scare; G.C. Fite and H.C. Peterson, Opponents of War, 1917–1918, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1957.
38. Fite and Peterson, Opponents of War, pp. 53–60, 63 and 240. There was similar, if rather less savage and widespread, repression of Wobblies in Australia, particularly during World War I, when IWW members were run out of jobs and towns, imprisoned on spurious grounds and 12 leaders of the organisation were tried in Sydney in 1916 for arson and treason. See Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, pp. 207–14 and 240–1, and Cain, Origins of Political Surveillance, pp. 272–5.
39. O. Hanson, Americanism versus Bolshevism, Doubleday Page and Company, New York, 1920.
40. See, for example, Coben, Mitchell Palmer and Murray, Red Scare.
41. Preston, Jr, Aliens and Dissenters, pp. 196–236.
42. T.R. Ashworth, 'Pamphlets for the People No.1, Communism in Australia: The Lesson of the British Seamen's Strike and Other Papers', John G. Latham papers, NLA MS 1009, Item 27/118.
43. Ibid., p. 14.
44. Ibid., pp. 15 and 46.
45. 'Bolshevism in Australia', speech by S.M. Bruce, 9 September 1925, published by the National Publicity Bureau, Latham papers, NLA MS 1009, Item 27.
46. Liberty, 17 September 1932, p. 4, Series A432/86, Item 1933/152, NAA, ACT.
47. Recruitment form of the New Guard, NLA.MS 250, Folio 1.
48. Ashworth, 'Communism in Australia', pp. 21–2 and Meeting Notes for Australian Protective League, 29 May 1918, file reference C 571/1/374, Series B197/0, Item 1851/2/43, NAA, ACT.
49. Communique from R.G. Casey to Attorney-General J.G. Latham, 26 March 1929, NLA MS 1009, Item 41/6/217-18.
50. M. Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia's Secret Army Intrigue of 1931, Mc Phee Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1988, p. 61.
51. Letter from Jones to Latham, 22 January 1932, Series A467, Item Bundle 94/SF42/64 286, NAA, ACT.
52. Report of New Guard operative's liaison with Melbourne elite secret force, 19 October 1931, Francis De Groot papers, Series 4951 & 4952, [CY] Reel 2579, Mitchell Library, NSW (hereafter ML). Cathcart also emphasises the obsession of some Australian counter-subversives with keeping the existence of their organisations secret, noting that some 'White Army' or LNS volunteers in the country did not know the name of the organisation to which they had pledged allegiance. See Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop, p. 46.
53. Moore, The Secret Army, p. 155.
54. S. Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia, from Origins to Illegality, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p. 156.
55. The RSL forwarded such a petition to Prime Minister Lyons after its Eighteenth Congress, in 1933. See Letter from RSL to Prime Minister Lyons, 29 November 1933, Series A467, Item Bundle 20/SF7/40, NAA , ACT.
56. Letter from Advance Australia League to Acting Prime Minister, 18 December 1930 and Letter from Graziers' Vigilance Committee to Prime Minister Scullin, 28 May 1931, Series A1606/1, Item B5 Part 1, NAA, ACT.
57. Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop, p. 47.
58. Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 215–6. Fox examines Blamey's activities and attitudes in considerable detail. From March to July 1933, Blamey attempted to stamp out street demonstrations, concentrating particularly on Phoenix Street in Brunswick, a site for weekly Friday-night protest meetings. Yet, after taking advantage of ambiguities in provisions of the Traffic Act distinguishing actual and potential obstruction of street traffic, Blamey ceased to harass protestors at Phoenix Street following the passage of the Street Meetings Act, in August 1933. Thereafter, his police protected strikebreakers and continued to break up occasional meetings and marches they disliked. However, Blamey lost his 'battle of wits' with radicals and unemployed activists and his action was widely seen to have become 'fatuous'. (See Fox, Fighting Back, pp. 235–40.)
59. Items 179 and 27, De Groot papers, ML, Series 4951 & 4952, [CY] Reel 2579
60. Letter from R.E. Lane to Latham, 30 November 1932, Series A432/86, Item 1933/1471, NAA, ACT.
61. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol. 137, 22 November 1932, p. 2610.
62. Series A432/86, Item 1933/152, NAA, ACT; Moore, The Secret Army, p. 151 and A. Moore, 'Policing Enemies of the State: the New South Wales Police and the New Guard, 1931–32', in M. Finnane (ed.), Policing in Australia: Historical Perspectives, NSW University Press, Kensington, 1987, pp. 114 –42.
63. 'The Empire and the Imperial Issue', Address before Royal Empire Society by H. Brookes, issued by the Victorian Protestant Federation, c 1932, p. 13, Brookes papers, NLA MS 1924, Items 20/165 206.
64. The Vigilant, vol. IX, 5, 14 December 1931, and IX, 7, 15 February 1932, Brookes papers, NLA MS 1924.
65. Brookes papers, NLA MS 1924, Items 17/16 and 17/65.
66. New Guard Recruitment Form, NLA MS 250, Item 1.
67. Application for Enrolment as a Volunteer in the APL, Brookes papers, NLA MS 1924, Item 17/16, 'The Australian's Creed', NLA MS 1924, Item 17/65.
68. 'The Australian Decalogue', Brookes papers, NLA MS 1924, Item 17/66.
69. The New Guard was a deeply hierarchical organisation, modeled on the armed services. A total of six tiers of authority existed, descending from the 'Chief Commander' to his second in command, and then to an 'Inspector General', 'Mobile Brigade Commander', a 'Chief Director', several Department Chiefs, a 'Mobile Battalion Commander', an 'Inspector General' of mobile forces and an 'Inspector General' of civil forces. Below all these sat the fourth-tier divisional and mobile company commanders and fifth-tier locality commanders and then the rank and file members, who, while dimly aware of their leader Campbell, were probably uncertain of the identity of most of the New Guard's various commanders. The Old Guard, similarly, comprised five main organisational units — companies, sections, branches, groups, divisions — and its members knew the identity of only their immediate superiors. This was hardly surprising; the Old Guard embraced 'the cream of the AIF [was] broadly representative of Sydney's hegemonic class fraction, the colonial-pastoral banking alliance'. See Moore, The Secret Army, pp. 25, 88 and 90.
70. The American Protective League required these duties of its members. See membership form of the League, BI — MSS, Records of the APL, Box 1, Entry 14, 15, 16. The membership application form of the Australian Protective League, by contrast read: 'Dear Sir, I beg to make application for enrolment as a Volunteer in the Australian Protective League'. See Application for Enrolment as a Volunteer in the APL, Brookes papers, NLA MS 1924, Item 17/16.
71. Moore, The Secret Army, p. 23.
72. E. Schrecker, Many Are the Crime: McCarthyism in America, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1998, pp. 52 and 62–3.
73. For example, on the occasion of its fifteenth annual convention in 1933, President Roosevelt, the Mayor of Chicago, the Governor of Illinois, the Governor of Indiana (himself an ex-National Commander of the Legion), the President of the National Pressman's Union (a Tennessee Legionnaire, who also passed on 'the good wishes of the organized labor movement of America' on behalf of the ever-eager American Federation of Labor) and representatives of the frightened African-American community, all praised the work and values of the Legion and wished it every future success. See Summary of Proceedings Fifteenth Annual Convention of The American Legion, Chicago, Illinois, 2 — 5 October 1933, National Republic — MSS, Box 32, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University.
74. Fite and Peterson, Opponents of War, pp. 19 and 286; Spy Glass (APL newsletter), vol. 1, no's 1 and 7–12, BI — MSS, Records of the APL, Box 1, Entry 14, 15, 16.
75. ACLU, Sweet Land of Liberty 1931–1932 and Liberty Under the New Deal: The Record for 1933–1934.
76. File No. 10110-2601, Reel 23, MI — MSS. Readers interested in the links between the U.S. Department of Justice (BI), the U.S. Army (MI) and the 'patriotic' front of right-wing political and paramilitary societies are advised to consult Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, pp. 42–5, 62–3 and 68 and R. Gid Powers, Not Without Honour: The History of American Anticommunism, The Free Press, New York, 1995, pp. 74–6, 80–2, 87–91.
77. File 10110-1935, Reel 19, MI — MSS.
78. Liberty, 15 November 1932, pp. 14 and 16, and 17 September 1932, pp. 3 and 5.
79. De Groot papers, ML, Series 4951 & 4952, [CY] Reel 2579.
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