Adam Carr Intellectuals and Politics in 1930s Melbourne Events leading to the formation of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, 1914-37 5. Intellectuals and radicals in 1930s Melbourne The weakness of postwar liberalism One searches in vain in the 1920s and early '30s for an Australian equivalent to British and American middle-class liberal opposition to government authoritarianism. Until the mid 1930s there was very little public response to this trend except that coming from the labour movement, which rightly saw itself as the target of most of the repressive legislation of the 1920s and early '30s. It is notable, however, that the ALP leader, Mathew Charlton, did not oppose the "unlawful associations" section of the 1926 bill, and that neither Charlton nor the leading ALP lawyer of the day, Frank Brennan, had anything to say about fundamental principles of political liberty in their speeches.[34] There certainly seems to have been no equivalent of the Manchester Guardian among Australian daily newspapers. In a notorious editorial greeting the 1926 amendments to the Crimes Act, the Melbourne Argus sneered that "It may be confidently anticipated that there will be a great outcry from the Opposition about the supposed infringement of the liberty of the subject, and so forth. Such talk will be as illogical as it is noisy."[35] Less predictably, that bastion of Deakinite liberalism, the Age, confined itself to the bland observation that "The section of the Bill upon which public attention is most likely to be concentrated is that which relates to the protection of the Constitution and of public and other services. The ends sought are entirely praiseworthy; the means proposed will have to be given exhaustive examination, and made the subject of serious debate."[36] The Age's one concession to liberalism was opposition to the deportation of British subjects, and this was motivated solely by Empire loyalty. Australia in the 1920s and '30s had no serious political periodicals such as the New Statesman or the Spectator. The only readily available sources of middle-class or academic opinion are the Round Table (published in London but containing regular Australian contributions of a generally high quality), and the Australian Quarterly, published by the NSW Constitutional Association from 1929. A search of the Round Table yields absolutely nothing on the Crimes Act controversy or civil liberties in general. A search of the Australian Quarterly between 1929 and 1937 produces a similarly meagre crop apart from criticisms of the censorship of books in the mid 1930s.[37] Of prominent Australian intellectuals, few seem to have left much trace in the debates of this period. Walter Murdoch was outspoken about censorship of books and about the Kisch case: later he wrote a satirical essay called "If Christ came back to earth would he be permitted to land in Australia?"[38] In 1951 he was to denounce the Menzies government's attempt to ban the CPA as "a piece of pure Fascism," but his biographer records no comments on the attempts by Latham (an old friend) to achieve the same thing indirectly.[39] Frederic Eggleston, another old Deakinite and in 1926 a minister in the Victorian Nationalist government, was also an old friend of Latham's: if he had any misgivings about Latham's actions, his biographer does not record them.[40] He was later a supporter of the Book Censorship Abolition League, though not the ACCL. One indication of why liberals went missing in action in this period comes from the unlikely source of Sir Norman Cowper, writing on broadcasting. Explaining why in his opinion the newly-established ABC should not have the same political independence as the BBC had, Cowper observes: "There is so much less political and cultural toleration here, that I doubt whether the ABC could be expected to allow even the same degree of free expression as the BBC does. . . We do not have anything like the body of enlightened opinion (which is, moreover, both articulate and influential) that constantly spurs on the BBC to better things."[41] This is an astute observation: it suggests that Australia in the 1920s and '30s simply did not have the "critical mass" of intellectuals to provide a base for sustained opposition to illiberal governments. It is worth noting that in 1936 the vice-presidents of the NCCL included G D H Cole, Havelock Ellis, Victor Gollancz, A P Herbert, Julian Huxley, C E M Joad, Harold Laski, David Low, A A Milne, J B Priestley, Bertrand Russell, R H Tawney, H G Wells and Rebecca West. One blushes to compare this constellation of brilliance with the Australian intelligentsia of the time. Fear of fascism and the lure of communism Dorothy Fitzpatrick, in common with most left-inclined intellectuals of her generation, remembers the 1930s as a time when there was a "sense that the world was going downhill, when the middle class was more afraid of Lang than Hitler," but when intellectuals felt that war and fascism were on the march.[42] For many, communism seemed to offer an alternative, but the Communist Party in Australia remained small and marginalised in the early '30s.[43] The rise to power of Hitler and the destruction of the German Communist Party which followed caused a shift in international communist strategy, however, and by the end of 1935 the effects of this were being felt even in distant backwaters such as Australia. At the 1935 Congress of the Communist International, the extreme sectarianism and proclamations of imminent revolution which had marked Communist rhetoric since 1929 were abruptly abandoned, and replaced by the language of anti-fascist unity, of the Popular Front of all anti- fascist forces.[44] Although the Popular Front was never a serious political issue in Australia owing to the weakness of the CPA and the hostility of the ALP (and, it must be said, the almost total absence of actual fascists to unite against), the new line did allow the CPA to abandon its rhetorical attacks on ALP "social fascists" and attempt to re-enter the mainstream left. One immediate manifestation of this was the closure of the Melbourne University communist students' magazine Proletariat, whose name and very existence were symptomatic of the old sectarian policy.[45] Henceforth Australian communists would seek to work through broader, united front bodies like the Labour Club. The establishment of the ACCL within a year of the adoption of this new policy by the CPA inevitably raises the question of whether the ACCL was to any extent a Communist "front." It must be said that there is no evidence that CPA members were involved in the initial stages of organising the ACCL. Two of the council's foundation Vice- Presidents had CPA family links: Professor Sandy Gibson's brother Ralph was a party member, and James Hill, principal of Melbourne Boys' High School, was the father of Ted Hill, then a young university communist.[46] It would of course be drawing a long bow to see this as evidence of CPA influence - although Ralph Gibson later played a more prominent role.[47] The council's objectives stated firmly that "The CCL supports no political doctrine. It offers a means of expression to those people in all parties who believe that social progress may be achieved only in the atmosphere of liberty."[48] This was not a statement CPA members would have been very happy with, even during the united front period. The more politically sophisticated members of the ACCL committee were also aware of the intense dislike for the CPA held by most of the mainstream labour movement, with which they were keen to build links. "Clarey doesn't expect that the Trades Hall lot will get any more tolerant of the Communist shows for some time to come," wrote Leeper to Lucas in 1936. "They say, these Communists may be getting democratic in their behaviour but after all they are the same individuals as have attacked us and let us down in the past ten years. Well, can one blame the THC altogether?"[49] On the other hand, Dorothy Fitzpatrick recalls that while "nobody wanted it [the ACCL] to be overtly communist, the impetus behind its founding may have been. The CP wanted a more-or-less respectable organisation to which they could appeal when they were being banned." Neither she nor I have any evidence that this is so, but it is certainly plausible. The CPA was in danger of being banned in 1935, and it may well be that party members in Melbourne suggested to Brian Fitzpatrick, a personal friend of many of them, that such an organisation would be a good idea. And since the day-to-day running of the ACCL soon devolved onto Fitzpatrick,[50] his attitude to communism and his relations with the CPA are more relevant than the council's formal position or the names of its nominal vice- presidents. Fitzpatrick was never a CPA member and never identified himself as a communist, though his economic views were marxist. But like many intellectuals of his generation, he held ambivalent and fluctuating attitudes to the Soviet Union and the CPA over the course of his life. According to Watson, Fitzpatrick moved to the left after leaving the Melbourne Herald and taking up a research fellowship at Melbourne University in 1936.[51] Dorothy Fitzpatrick says that Brian Fitzpatrick's attitude to communism at this time was "hard to describe. He was not sympathetic to all of them, but he certainly was close to some communists, such as Jim Healy."[52] Of Brian Fitzpatrick's attitude to the Soviet Union, Dorothy Fitzpatrick says, "He was interested in a sort of way, but only because everything else seemed to be going to pieces. There was a feeling of economic collapse in the rest of the world."[53] This was a common attitude in the late 1930s, at least for those not aware of what was actually happening in the Soviet Union. But Fitzpatrick went further than a passive sympathy for the Soviet Union as being "at least better than the fascists." In December 1936 he engaged in an exchange of letters in the Argus with William Murchison of the Empire Honour League over the nature of the new Soviet constitution (the "Stalin Constitution"). Murchison had written that "No intelligent person would be deceived by a constitution that pretends to formulate a democratic franchise when article 141 would prevent the possibility of any candidate being nominated other than an avowed atheistic communist."[54] Fitzpatrick's reply began with an observation that "Practice under the just-accepted USSR Constitution may be no more democratic than it is under other 'democratic' Constitutions of other democratic peoples." He then sought to refute Murchison's claims by pointing out that organisations such as "trade unions, co-operatives, youth organisations and cultural societies" could put forward candidates. "The trade unions, &c, are not Communist organisations," Fitzpatrick concluded.[55] This statement displays, at best, a high degree of naivety about the realities of Stalin's regime at a time when the yezhovschina was at its height and the first of the great show trials had taken place.[56] As another veteran of the 1930s, with a different perspective, recalls, "The Soviet Union was the intellectual vogue of this period. . . The vogue conditioned the entire climate of intellectual opinion, with the left-liberal climax at the time of the Abyssinian War."[57] It seems fair to describe Fitzpatrick at this time as a "fellow traveller" of the CPA.[58] In practical terms the question of the ACCL's attitude to the CPA and the Soviet Union did not become acute until 1939, when the Soviet-German non-aggression pact drove a wedge between the CPA and the rest of the left and forced the ACCL to take sides on the CPA's opposition to Australia's involvement in World War II. This dispute led to the resignation of the ACCL's first president, Herbert Burton, and did considerable damage to the council's standing in the period 1939-41. In the period 1935-39, however, the issue was mainly one of how far the ACCL was willing to risk public criticism by defending the civil liberties of communists. This was a problem it shared with other civil liberties organisations. The ACLU, for example, faced a "constant dilemma" in defending communists, a stand which alienated the leaders of the American Federation of Labor and the United Mine Workers. But the ACLU leaders, and particularly Roger Baldwin, were emphatic anti-communists. "What distinguishes the ACLU from the left has been its running war with Marxists over their habit of denying that their opponents (Fascists, racists and such) are entitled to the same freedoms they claim for themselves," says the ACLU's historian.[59] In the 1930s, "the American communist leaders were happy to be defended by ACLU lawyers but denounced them as liberals," and Baldwin was attacked in the Communist Party press for defending political prisoners in the Soviet Union.[60] Intellectuals and politics in Melbourne The ACCL was the work of a group of Melbourne people, mostly intellectuals of one kind or another, the majority of them with some affiliation with Melbourne University. No-one at the time seems to have thought this remarkable. Although Melbourne had been Australia's largest city in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the seat of the Commonwealth government until 1927, by the 1930s it was neither. Yet it seemed natural to all concerned that an organisation like the ACCL should be founded in Melbourne, that its Sydney branch should be small and late in formation, and in need of constant reinforcement from Melbourne,[61] and that the ACCL should have been essentially the work of university people. Today it seems much less natural that this should have been so, and a matter worth some investigation. The nature and origins of the political and cultural differences between Sydney and Melbourne have been much debated. In 1962 Manning Clark identified what he called a "Melbourne intellectual tradition," whose origins he attributed to the fact that "Melbourne was the child of a clean different historical situation from Sydney." Intellectual life in Melbourne, he said, "developed during the golden age of the bourgeoisie in Australia - the period from 1861 to 1883." This, he said, led to Melbourne having a tradition of secular, humanist, scientific intellectuals, engaged with the world and its issues. He asserted, though, that the Melbourne University was not the seat of this tradition: one of the "deplorable results of the secularisation of education," he said, was "the silence of the universities on the great issues of the day." This did not change, he said, until the advent of Max Crawford as Professor of History in 1937.[62] In 1965 Ian Turner, then a recently lapsed communist, brought some marxist rigour to this question. Intellectuals in prewar Australia were a small and generally irrelevant group, lacking a secure social base, he said. In the 1920s and '30s they reacted to their irrelevance in two ways. The instinct of Sydney intellectuals was to "retire into the isolation of a self-sustaining cultural elite, living its life outside the conventional norms." This is obviously a reference to Professor John Anderson and the Sydney "push," and to Sydney's self-consciously "bohemian" artistic and literary life. In Melbourne, Turner says, "the note was a guilt-ridden attempt to transform a society which combined injustice to the many with disregard for the intellectual minority." Turner appears to reject Clark's view that this difference was "merely one of tradition." In Melbourne, he says, "the sources of power seemed at the same time more evident and more accessible," and reforming intellectuals believed they could have some effect on the course of events.[63] In a city and at a time where a socialist intellectual could walk to work with a conservative Attorney-General (see next section), there is something to be said for this view. In 1967 John Docker devoted an entire book to this question, although his focus on narrow literary coteries such as the Meanjin circle weakens his book's usefulness for my purposes. But he does develop Clark's theory that it has been the two cities' different philosophical traditions which has made the difference. "Very broadly," he says, "there is a Sydney pessimism versus a Melbourne social optimism."[64] Sydney intellectuals, he says, pursued freedom from society for themselves: Docker calls this desire "elite pluralism." In Melbourne intellectuals saw themselves as a "clerisy," a central educated elite which stands as a model for the rest of society, and which believed that it could and should transform society through its own actions and example. In practical terms, Docker seems to be saying (although he does not really develop this point) the result has been that in Sydney intellectuals have abstained from politics while in Melbourne the politically- active intellectual has been the norm. The archetypal Sydney intellectual is thus John Anderson, freethinker and libertarian, but politically sceptical, while a typical Melbourne intellectual would be a figure like William Boyce Gibson or Max Crawford: less personally radical but more under a sense of social and political obligation.[65] There were also some more obvious political differences between Melbourne and Sydney in the 1930s. Although Canberra was the seat of government from 1927, much of the apparatus of government remained in Melbourne, and the links between the Commonwealth government and Melbourne University were longstanding. Most of the country's conservative political leaders (Deakin, Latham, Bruce, Menzies) were Melbourne men, and the Argus and the Age were the country's best and most politically informed newspapers.[66] Melbourne in the 1930s was thus still seen, and saw itself, as the centre of things in a political and intellectual sense, and the tradition of its intellectuals being active either in government or opposition was still strong. "Melbourne intellectuals," wrote Docker in 1980, "characteristically feel that they are, or should be, at the centre of Australian society: what is good for Melbourne intellectuals is good for Australia."[67] At a state level, Victoria was governed by a very mediocre Country Party government led by Albert Dunstan, and the Victorian ALP was apparently doomed to perpetual opposition. Melbourne intellectuals my well have felt that their critical engagement in public issues was a duty no-one else was capable of fulfilling. Despite Manning Clark's strictures, Melbourne University was the base for most of Melbourne's small radical intellectual circles in the mid 1930s. Carolyn Rasmussen, historian of both the left in the 1930s and of Melbourne University, says that "there is no doubt that Melbourne was home to the largest group of dissident intellectual and cultural leaders." Vance and Nettie Palmer were the centre of an older group of radicals, but, she says, "at the University of Melbourne there was an articulate minority of liberal or left- leaning academics whose concerns led them to varying degrees of involvement," and she identifies Crawford, Ball, Burton, Bayne, Woodruff and Leeper, all associated with the ACCL at its foundation or soon after (Crawford did not become involved until 1937) as among its leaders.[68] Among students, too, radicalism spread in the 1930s. In earlier years, student political activism had been curtailed by the university authorities, concerned with the university's reputation with governments and with corporate benefactors. "The right to discuss current affairs in public was not conceded willingly," says the university's historian. "When the Public Questions Society was formed in 1918 the professorial board immediately intervened by demanding the right to nominate two members to the general committee and to sanction the subjects of study in all discussion groups." Although the Labour Club was founded in 1925 with the university's blessing, "seditious" statements by students were frowned on. "The council retained a firm control of the students; after the publication of 'vulgar' articles in the Melbourne University Magazine. . . the names of editors of magazines had to be approved by the professorial board."[69] When Priestly arrived in 1935, he found a small and generally apathetic student body: "I am not conscious that any university I have known has a student body less politically and socially conscious than Melbourne," he wrote.[70] But after 1935 this situation changed rapidly, as the impact of events such as the Abyssinian crisis and the Spanish Civil War was felt. This latter issue aroused student feelings as no other had done before. In all the western democracies, "this conflict instantly mobilised the sympathies of both Left and Right. . . and notably of the Western world's intellectuals," says a recent writer,[71] and Australia was (for perhaps the first time) no exception. By early 1937 B A Santamaria and Vance Palmer were debating Spain at the university before audiences of over a thousand people.[72] "By Australian standards the 1930s were a time of unusually passionate public commitment among University staff and students, though only a minority was much engaged," a recent university history says. "Students argued about national health insurance, cultural values, and equality of the sexes, but it was their attitude to international affairs which caught most public attention in a conservative society, accustomed to rowdyism but not radicalism among students."[73] By 1936 there was a branch of Movement Against War and Fascism, and the "Peace Ballot" received prominent and sympathetic coverage in Farrago.[74] The appointment of Raymond Priestley as the university's first fulltime Vice-Chancellor in 1935 was a crucial step in legitimising academic radicalism. An English liberal, Priestley broke the control of the University Council, dominated by Melbourne's business elite, over university political life (in 1930 and again in 1934 left-wing Farrago editors had been sacked by the university[75]). He wrote that it is "the responsibility of [the university's] educated staff to act as leaders of progressive thought. If its students are to be mentally alive and alert, as they should be, they will also be thinking hard about the social organisation of their world. And much of this thought is bound to conflict with the established order of things. . . I believe that the best and most lasting reform comes from the Right and is brought about by sustained and strong pressure from the Left."[76] This was a novel idea in Australian universities, which had hitherto valued conformity and respectability. It was a far cry from the days when Professor Arnold Wood had almost been deprived of his chair for criticising Australia's participation in the South African War.[77] Footnotes [34] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates 112, 829. The labour movement and ALP at this time were committed to an ill-defined notion of "socialism" and were rather contemptuous of middle-class liberals and their concerns. [35] The Argus, Melbourne, 29 January 1926. It does not seem to have occurred to the Argus leader-writer to ask why the liberty of the subject needed to be defended against a government supposedly devoted to the principles of British justice. [36] The Age, Melbourne, 29 January 1926. [37] F R Beasley, "The censorship and the exclusion of ideas," Australian Quarterly, No 24, December 1934, 20; W Macmahon Ball, "The Australian censorship," Australian Quarterly, No 26, June 1935, 9 [38] Walter Murdoch, Answers, Melbourne 1953, 133 [39] J A La Nauze, Walter Murdoch: A Biographical Memoir, Melbourne 1977, 121 (on Kisch), 149 (on the Communist Party bill). He reacted to the exclusion of Kisch by saying (in the Argus) that "Australia has disgraced herself by excluding an author of international repute who was coming here as an anti-militarist." [40] Warren Osmond, Frederic Eggleston: An Intellectual in Australian Politics, Sydney 1985. Eggleston was a contributor to the New Statesman but seems to have been uninfluenced by its campaigning on civil liberties. He shared the view of most contemporaries that Latham suffered from an "exuberant and redundant" legalism (Osmond, 149). Like Murdoch, he opposed Menzies in 1951. [41] Norman Cowper, "The control of broadcasting," Australian Quarterly, No 30, June 1936, 52 [42] Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview [43] Even leftwing historians have harsh words for the CPA in this period. "The venom and self-righteousness with which many Australian communists denounced members of the Labor Party turned temporary suspicions into bitter and lasting hatreds. As a result, the party remained on the margin of Australian politics at a time when it might otherwise have expected to command growing support." Peter Love, "From Convicts to Communists", in Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee, Staining the Wattle: A People's History of Australia Since 1788, Melbourne 1988, 160 [44] Robert V Daniels, A Documentary History of Communism, Hanover 1984, Vol 2, 103 [45] Don Watson, "The thirties: an intellectual 'Proletariat,'" Arena, 35, 1974, 40 [46] Gibson and Hill were elected ACCL Vice-Presidents at the council's first public meeting in May 1936. ACCL Minute Book, Fitzpatrick papers NLA 4965/1/19894 [47] Sandy Gibson resigned from the ACCL in 1940 in opposition to what he saw as the council's support for the CPA's position on the war, so clearly he was not a party sympathiser at that time. [48] ACCL flyer, March 1936. Fitzpatrick papers, NLA 4965/1/16 [49] Geoffrey Leeper to Theo Lucas, 23 November 1936. Letter in Fitzpatrick papers, NLA 4965/1/179. Percy Clarey was President of the Trades Hall Council and later of the ACTU, and a state and federal ALP MP. [50] Dorothy Fitzpatrick recalls that he "took a year or so to become the most important person" in the ACCL. Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview [51] Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, 73 [52] Healy was leader of the Waterside Workers Federation and the most prominent communist union leader of the 1930s. [53] Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview [54] Argus, Melbourne, 19 December 1936 [55] Argus, Melbourne, 26 December 1936. This exchange is not referred to in Watson's biography. [56] Vigorously defended by Ralph Gibson, with whom Fitzpatrick was on "Dear Ralph" terms, in Farrago, 29 June 1937. [57] B A Santamaria, Against the Tide, Melbourne 1981, 12 [58] David Caute defines a fellow traveller (in the 1930s) as one who was not a communist but who accepted that the Soviet Union represented a superior form of social organisation, "the hope of the future," and who retained "a partial faith in the possibilities progress under the parliamentary system" in his/her own country. "He appreciates that the prevailing liberties, however imperfect and however distorted, are nevertheless valuable." This seems to be a fair summation of Fitzpatrick's views in the later 1930s. (David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, New Haven 1973, 5) [59] Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 5 [60] Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 63 [61] One of those involved in establishing the Sydney branch was a young lawyer called John Kerr. [62] Clark, "Melbourne: an intellectual tradition." Chris Wallace- Crabbe broadly agrees with this view, adding a suggestion that Melbourne's heavily Scottish inheritance contributed to the city's intellectual radicalism. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Melbourne or the Bush: Essays on Australian Literature, Melbourne 1974, 77. [63] Ian Turner, "Intellectuals in Australian life," Overland, 33, December 1965, 30 [64] John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites, Sydney 1974, ix [65] In 1980 Arena devoted an issue to discussion, and a fair amount of criticism, of Docker's views, mainly focussing on his rather arbitrary choice of writers to represent Sydney and Melbourne traditions (Vincent Buckley, "Unequal twins: a discontinuous analysis," Arena, vol 40, no 1, April 1980, 3). For reasons of both space and relevance I won't pursue this debate further, since I don't think this criticism offers weakens Docker's essential point. [66] Dorothy Fitzpatrick says that the Argus was the best newspaper in Australia in the 1930s, though very conservative, while the Age had less news but more liberal commentary. Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview. [67] John Docker, "Sydney versus Melbourne revisited," Arena, vol 40, no 1, April 1980, 16. This confidence has taken a severe battering since 1980. [68] Carolyn Rasmussen, The Lesser Evil? Opposition to War and Fascism in Australia, Melbourne 1994, 61. Rasmussen also makes it clear (65) that there was plenty of political activism at Sydney University at this time. [69] Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne, Melbourne 1957, 171 [70] Raymond Priestley, quoted in John Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen, A Place Apart: The University of Melbourne: Decades of Challenge, Melbourne 1996, 27 [71] Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London 1994, 156 [72] Farrago, 5 April 1937 [73] Poynter and Rasmussen, 27 [74] Farrago, 20 May 1936. The page 1 heading was "Are you for peace or war? Vote yes or no" The "Peace Ballot" was a rather tendentious exercise in which the public was asked to answer loosely-phrased questions about war and peace. Nevertheless, 55% of Melbourne University students took part (E M Andrews, Isolationism and Appeasement, Canberra 1970, 64) [75] Alan Nicholls, "Student life: the thirties," Melbourne University Magazine, Spring 1961, 19. Nicholls was one of the dismissed editors on both occasions. He was Secretary of the Labour Club in 1934. [76] R E Priestley, "The place of the university in a democratic community," Australian Quarterly, Vol XI No 3, September 1937, 22 [77] R M Crawford, A Bit of a Rebel: The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood, Sydney 1975, 151-223