Adam Carr Intellectuals and Politics in 1930s Melbourne Events leading to the formation of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, 1914-37 4. International parallels and examples The United States The United States did not enter World War I until 1917, but when it did so the country was swept by a wave of public bellicosity even more intense than that in Britain and Australia in 1914. This was partly because opposition to entry into the war had been stronger: from the large German and Irish-American communities, from pacifists and liberals, and from the labour movement, then led by a sizeable Socialist Party. That all these groups had been part of President Woodrow Wilson's support base in the 1916 presidential election, when Wilson had pledged to keep America out of the war, made the division all the more bitter. The result was a fierce legal repression of German-American and anti-war groups, culminating in the imprisonment of the Socialist leader Eugene Debs on trumped-up sedition charges. "World War I was a watershed in American history," observes an American writer. "The wholesale suppression of civil liberties forced the country to confront the meaning of the Bill of Rights."[26] Unlike in Britain or Australia, there was immediate and well- organised opposition to wartime violations of civil liberties. Its organisational base was the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), founded in 1914 to keep the United States out of the war, which went on to oppose conscription once this objective failed. One of the AUAM's leaders, Roger Baldwin (a wealthy Boston Unitarian, Harvard graduate and social worker), founded an anti-conscription group, the Bureau of Conscientious Objectors, in a direct challenge to the Espionage Act, which made it an offence to "wilfully obstruct" the draft. This action, for which Baldwin was imprisoned, led to a split with the more moderate members of AUAM. In October 1917 Baldwin established a new group, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB). The end of the war saw if anything an increase in political conflict and repression in the United States. The government continued to attack the Socialist Party, the IWW, and the militant trade unions. The NCLB focussed its attentions on demands for fair trails for the IWW leaders. Nineteen-nineteen was the year of the Palmer Raids, "one of the most violent [years] in American history, marked by an unprecedented wave of strikes, race riots and terrorist bombings, and even more flagrant violations of civil liberties by the federal government."[27] The politically ambitious Attorney-General, A Mitchell Palmer, organised a series of raids (some of them led by the young J Edgar Hoover) on radical groups and unions, leading to hundreds of arrests. In this heated atmosphere, Baldwin worked to draw the various radical groups together. The result was the establishment of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York on 19 January 1920. It is unlikely that many people in Australia knew much about these events: a search of the Argus index for 1919 and 1920 reveals only a few scattered references to them, and none to the founding of the ACLU. In any case, Australians at this time did not look to the United States for models of political philosophy or action. The ACLU was formed when it was because the government's actions angered the many American constitutionalists (some of them staunch conservatives) who cherished the Bill of Rights and its guarantees of personal liberty and freedom of speech. The American courts eventually upheld their opposition, freeing Debs and the IWW leaders. In Australia, with its ties to British legal and political models and is faith in the traditional rights of "freeborn Englishmen" and the common law, the American model was not an attractive one. Further, in 1920 Australia simply did not have enough liberal or radical lawyers and intellectuals to mount an organised opposition to the government's actions. Britain In Britain, as in Australia and the United States, the wartime and postwar periods saw a steady erosion of civil liberties. David Lloyd George's government, seeking to retain the extraordinary wartime powers the executive had obtained under the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914, introduced a string of repressive acts.[28] In 1927, following the General Strike, Stanley Baldwin's government introduced the Trades Disputes Act, which in effect criminalised trade union activism and the organising of strikes. In the wake of the crisis of 1931, Ramsay MacDonald's Conservative-dominated National Government passed further repressive legislation, most notably the Incitement to Disaffection Act of 1934. This act made it an offence to "seduce members of His Majesty's forces from their duty or allegiance." Like Australia, Britain had no constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and other political rights, but it did have a large and influential liberal intellectual class, which had dominated British public life before World War I. It seems surprising that this class accepted these assaults on civil liberty without organised resistance. The explanation lay in the destruction of the prewar Liberal Party and in postwar middle-class fears about Bolshevism and militant unionism, coming to a head in the General Strike. This climate weakened support for liberal causes and found expression in the "safety first" Toryism of Stanley Baldwin. But by the early '30s many British liberals had had enough, and "upper-class liberalism" began to recover. Extra-parliamentary groups emerged to fill the gap left by the disastrous defeat of the Labour and Liberal parties at the 1931 elections.[29] The catch-all provisions of the Incitement to Disaffection Act proved to be a turning point. An independent MP, Eleanor Rathbone, said of it: "I can imagine no bill which is more likely to be an incitement to disaffection than this,"[30] and this proved a prophetic remark. A wide section of academic, clerical, journalistic and general middle-class opinion revolted against the bill. Their principal organs were the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman. The most notable result of the agitation against the act was the formation of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) in early 1934. The main inspirer and first Secretary of the NCCL was Ronald Kidd, a journalist and bookseller: its first President was E M Forster, and its Vice-Presidents were A P Herbert and Kingsley Martin (editor of the New Statesman). It was an eminently respectable and middle-class organisation, although it drew some support from the labour movement.[31] It was inevitable that the formation of the NCCL would receive more publicity, and thus have more influence, in Australia than had the formation of the ACLU in 1920. In the 1930s Australian newspapers and what passed for the country's cultural and intellectual elites still looked overwhelmingly to Britain for leadership, ideas and models. This is strikingly clear in the outlook of a well-educated Australian like Menzies, who followed political and intellectual life in Britain closely, and who became Commonwealth Attorney- General in 1934.[32] The agitation against the Incitement to Disaffection Act was occasionally reported in the Argus.[33] Australian liberals and radicals could follow the agitation in the New Statesman. In the Melbourne of the early '30s, "the New Statesman was the major source of left opinion and news," recalls Dorothy Fitzpatrick. In any case the political and legal situation in Britain was a more useful model for Australia than was that in the United States, where civil liberties activism was based around a defence of the Bill of Rights. Footnotes [26] Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, New York 1990, 11 [27] Walker, 42 [28] Gerald D Anderson, Fascists, Communists and the National Government: Civil Liberties in Great Britain 1931-1937, Columbia 1983, 9 [29] This section is based on Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War, London 1968, 214; Sylvia Scaffardi, Fire Under the Carpet: Working for Civil Liberties in the 1930s, London 1986; Mark Lilly, The National Council for Civil Liberties: The First Fifty Years, London 1984, chapter 1. [30] Anderson, Fascists, Communists, 74 [31] Scaffardi, 43 [32] A W Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life, Volume I 1894-1943, Melbourne 1993, chapter 7 [33] Argus, Melbourne, 18 April 1934, 30 October 1934, 5 November 1934.