Category Archives: Conscription 1916, 1917

2016, 210 p.

Today is 20th December, the centenary of the second referendum held in Australia over the question of conscripting men to serve overseas in World War I.   So it is “meet and right” (to quote the Book of Common Prayer) that I should post this review today.

The Conscription Conflict was released last year, in preparation for the centenary of the first of the conscription referendums. As is made clear in both the foreword and conclusion of this collection of essays, the concept of asking the people about conscription is unique to Australia. It was not undertaken in any other country, and when Australia did introduce conscription during WWII and again in the 1960s, it did not make the mistake (as a government intent on introduction might view it) of asking the people again.  Not only was seeking the agreement of the people exceptional, what is even more striking is that the people answered ‘No’, in the midst of wartime emotion and censorship, and against the exhortations to vote ‘Yes’ from the Federal government, the major Protestant Churches, municipal councils, chambers of commerce, nationalist organizations, conservative women’s groups and almost all of the press.

This book is similar in scope and content to the La Trobe Journal I reviewed earlier, with one author and themes in common. This book, too, emerged from an expert workshop held at the University of Melbourne in 2015, sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences. It takes a much more international and philosophical approach than many of the  analyses of the referendums in the past.

Part I of the book starts with an exploration of the concept of liberalism held in Britain, and the changing response to conscription by various political brands of liberalism: the Gladstonian Liberals, ‘New Liberals’ and Liberal Imperialists.  I found this chapter, written by Douglas Newton (who also featured in the first chapter of the La Trobe Journal) rather difficult as I am not particularly knowledgeable about the nuances of British liberalism. Chapter 2 by Robin Archer (the historian, not the actor!) explores the philosophy of liberalism in Australia among Labor anti-conscriptionists at the time (the terminology is confusing because our current opposing political parties are Liberal and Labor- even though the Liberal party is also conservative).  The unions feared that compulsory industrial service would be introduced alongside military conscription, with workers allocated to jobs where pay and conditions would be determined by the military.   Their fears were lent credence by the increasingly authoritarian environment and rhetoric introduced by Prime Minister Hughes. In face of criticisms of their loyalty, Labor anti-conscriptionists emphasized the British liberal tradition, thus taking us back to the argument of Chapter I.

Part II deals with the anti-conscription campaign and results. Frank Bongiorno explores the varied organizations which made up the opposition to the referendum  and their ideological positions. He addresses the two referendums chronologically, and picks up again on the argument in Part I of the book that anti-conscriptionists drew on the idea of liberty and freedom as  fundamental principles. I’ve been studying the conscription referendums as they played out in Heidelberg and Ivanhoe, and Bongiorno’s final paragraph rang true to me when I considered the program of meetings at a local level, both pro- and anti-, which existed alongside those larger Melbourne-based rallies.

The campaigns over conscription were imbued with the grief and anxiety of a society at war, yet they were also colourful and exciting, occasions for marching and singing, for rallies, concerts and torchlight processions, for compelling oratory, for the display of banners, placards and buttons, for the sporting of sandwich boards bearing clever slogans, and, among women were increasingly at the heart of the enterprise…Such occasions could sometimes be a little frightening; yet they contained the pleasures of joining with others in a common cause, and the frisson of facing a little but not too much danger while fighting for freedom and democracy (p. 91)

Chapter 4, by Joy Damousi deals with the pro-conscription side by looking at the contribution of the academics at the University of Melbourne, a staunchly pro-conscription organization.  As she notes, for some of the academics involved, this was the only political question on which they campaigned publicly throughout their career.  In particular she focussed on the prominent law professor, William Harrison Moore, who along with the classics lecturer, Jessie Webb, published a set of arguments in support of conscription. He also toured the suburbs and country areas, preparing leaflets and addressing meetings.  Both went on to work with the League of Nations after the war.

Chapter 5 by Murray Goot re-examines the statistical results of the two referendums, placing them alongside the results of the elections of 1914 and 1917. He emphasizes the importance of the turnout, which in both referendums was larger than a ‘normal’ election, but warns that aggregate data are of little use in weighing the behaviour of the individual voter.

Part III  makes comparisons.  John Connor’s chapter asks ‘Why was it easier to introduce and implement conscription in some English-speaking countries than in others?’ He argues that it was easier to introduce conscription early on in the conflict (as America did soon after entering the war), and that passing legislation was more effective than asking the people. In the case of Australia, the labour movement, both political and industrial, was more powerful than it was in other countries. He takes a chronological approach, tracing through the “conscription conversations” of Britain, New Zealand and Australia in 1916, with its varied outcomes; then the United States, Canada and Australia in 1917 where, again, Australia said ‘no’ when the other countries did not; and finally Newfoundland and Ireland in 1918.

In Ch.7 Ross McKibbin compares Britain and Australia in more detail. He concludes that Britain’s political, industrial and military situations favoured the adoption of military conscription, and that because of a trade-off that saw the introduction of a quasi-civil conscription, Britain enjoyed a higher degree of political stability than other conscripting countries in the Empire.  He notes that the Labour Party in Britain emerged strengthened from the war, where as in Australia, the Labor Party was much weakened. Although both countries were sectarian and racist, this took a different form in each; and in Australia the failure to introduce conscription opened up the bitterness between those who volunteered and those who ‘shirked’.

The book finishes with Part 4: Legacies.  I very much enjoyed Sean Scalmer’s chapter that challenges an interpretation by Jeremy Sammut, a critic of Labor mythology,  who has posited that the left and the ALP have developed the  myth that the defeat of conscription saved Australia from a military dictatorship. Scalmer shows that the victors of the conscription battles did celebrate their collective achievements in the years following WWI, but this ‘legend’ was undermined by the actions of later Labor governments. The battle over conscription came to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory that brought about disunity, bitterness and division. Scalmer, however, argues that the conscription campaign was an important episode in the history of Australian democracy, and notes that “[b]y the respect granted to popular opinion, the primacy of the democratic principle was confirmed.” (p. 210)

And so, how did you spend the Reinforcements Referendum Centenary? I spent it outside Brunswick Town Hall, along with the cast of the Serenading Adela street opera. It will be performed on 7th January  to celebrate the centenary of the women’s march to Pentridge prison to ‘serenade’ Adela Pankhurst, who was incarcerated there for her anti-war activities prior to the second referendum.  But more of that anon.

https://www.facebook.com/search/str/serenading+adela/stories-keyword/stories-public

1968 reprint with foreword by Patrick O’Farrell, 1935 original text, 365 p.

Even though I have an ambivalent relationship with the tsunami of commemorative activities related with WWI, there may be a little flurry of book reviews related to the 1916/7 Conscription debates over the next month or so. As part of my work with Heidelberg Historical Society, I write a feature in our newsletter that looks at the Heidelberg-Ivanhoe district a hundred years ago. In December 1917 the second ‘referendum’ about conscription was held, and I’m speaking to our December meeting about how this Australia-wide political event played out at the local level a hundred years ago. Hence, my interest in conscription over the last year or so though historic walks (see here and here), a conference and the books in which I’m immersing myself at the moment.

A year ago I attended the launch of recently-published The Conscription Conflict and the Great War, which I reported here.  I finally started reading it this week (books sit around on my desk for a long time!) In the introduction it was noted that there was little discussion of the conscription conflict as a distinctively Australian experience, and that “there has been no book length treatment of the conflict since Leslie Jauncey’s effort to document some of the key actors, development and sources in 1935″(p.6).  Well, I thought, I don’t know anything of what Jauncey said, so I shut The Conscription Conflict and chased down Jauncey’s book The Story of Conscription in Australia instead. After all, if a book is offering “new interpretations”, perhaps I should know what the old interpretations were first.

Jauncey? Where have I read that name before? Then I remembered that it was a section on the Honest History website, where various authors took on the mantle of blogging as Jauncey.  As well as writing The Story of Conscription, Jauncey also wrote about the Commonwealth Bank, visited Russia, lived in America and was of interest to the FBI as a possible (but unproved) Communist.  What is interesting about this 1935 book is that it was republished with a foreword by Patrick O’Farrell (historian of the Irish and the Catholic Church in Australia) in 1968, during the Vietnam war when conscription was again to become so controversial. This foreword, now itself nearly 50 years old, criticizes the book for its one-sidedness (a very valid criticism) but also for its downplaying of factors in 1916/7 that were seen in 1968 to be far more significant than Jauncey suggested: most particularly, the role of the Catholic Church, farmers concerned about their labour supply and the socialist and industrial movements.

I’m not sure that Jauncey dismissed these factors as much as O’Farrell accused him of doing in 1968, but it is certainly true that Jauncey’s approach privileged the religion-based groups who opposed compulsion, both in relation to conscription and to the Compulsory Military Training scheme which preceded it.  As O’Farrell points out, Jauncey draws heavily on a book published in 1919 by J. F. Hills and John P. Fletcher, members of the Society of Friends (Quakers),  called Conscription Under Camouflage. In this post-war book, Hills and Fletcher had compiled newspaper clippings, pamphlets and official materials relating to compulsory military training, which they and the Australian Freedom League (formed 1912) opposed, even before the commencement of WWI.

It is this approach based on document-collection that Jauncey takes up in The Story of Conscription in Australia. As Jauncey writes near the end of the book:

Those people in Australia who have during the past twenty-five years collected valuable data on militarism and suppression should pool their priceless information so that it might be available at a minute’s notice. To-day [i.e in 1935] this material lies scattered all over Australia, being in cellars, lofts, sheds, and other places. Every year some of it is lost. If this data is not soon gathered and catalogued, it will be lost for ever. (p.348)

It’s perhaps no surprise that, as O’Farrell points out, Jauncey’s book could easily be called ‘Selected Documents of the Anti-Conscription Movement’ (p. ix). Many of these pamphlets and letters are reproduced in full, and there is an emphasis on the manifestos and motions passed during meetings of anti-conscription and pacifist groups. There is, as O’Farrell points out, no ‘behind the scenes’ material, and “one is left with a host of questions about motivations and feelings and atmosphere”.(p. xi)

Nonetheless, even if this book is, as O’Farrell says, “a chronology of what happened rather than a detailed analysis of why”(p.xi), then it has to be said that it does the ‘what happened’ well. It is organized chronologically, taking its starting point from the introduction of Compulsory Military Training and the Defence Acts of 1903-1912. Pacifist groups opposed the compulsory nature of this training from the start, but their critique was muted in the early days of World War I, when there was almost unanimous support for the war. During the early days of publicity for the first conscription ‘referendum’ (a technically incorrect term, but in general usage), the ‘yes’ side was ascendant, but Hughes’ decision to issue a ‘call to the colours’ for all men of fighting age just prior to the actual vote shifted the sentiment, leading to a narrow over-all ‘no’ result.  Because of the closeness of the result, and  the pro-conscription Hughes’ election victory soon after the referendum, it was not surprising that a second referendum was foisted on the people in December 1917. In explaining the increased ‘no’ vote in this second referendum, Jauncey emphasizes the influence of the pacifist groups and their publicity of the plight of conscientious objectors in Britain and New Zealand under their conscription schemes. His treatment of the second referendum is relatively brief, comprising the final third of the book.

His closing pages, written in 1935, are interesting, knowing as we do what happened just four years later.  He celebrates the Peace Ballot, held in England in 1934-5 where supporters went door-to-door, polling 11.6 million people, 38% of the adult population, and half the number who voted in a general election five months later.

The results of the peace vote in England in June 1935 was a ray of hope in a European sky overcast with the threatening clouds of war and oppression. Over ten million people asked for continued affiliation with the League of Nations… By six to one voters in the peace ballot favoured the abolition of the manufacture and sale of armaments for private profit…Over 92 per cent of the ballots favoured economic and non-military measures against an aggressive nation, while the vote for military action against an aggressor was under three to one. (p. 351)

He noted the increasing expenditure on armaments, and the moves towards increasing the periods of compulsory military training in Switzerland and France, and English moves towards compulsory air-raid drills.  He predicted:

In general the peace movement today like all reform groups is waiting for something to happen that can be used to its advantage.  It is likely that actions of the militarists during the next few years will bring together large sections of the peace movement, resulting in an active organisation that will go further than ever before in the direction of removing the causes of war. (p. 355)

I wish he’d been right.

He ends his book with an affirmation in the faith of the ‘ordinary man’.

The anti-conscription movement in Australia showed that very little faith should be placed in the over-whelming majority of leaders as bulwarks against militarism. Archbishop Mannix of the Roman Catholic Church was the only authority in the Commonwealth who vigorously opposed conscription. Six out of seven of the Australian governments, together with almost all political, economic, and religious leaders, demanded compulsion. Yet against all this power and against the suppression and censorship of the time the will of the people prevailed against conscription. A determined people won. The “No” votes were those of the ordinary man and woman and of the ordinary soldier in the trenches.  The peace movement must concentrate on the ordinary citizen. After all, it is he who has to put up with most of the hardship of wars. A well-developed and organized public opinion against war and conscription can prevail. (p.353)

But it was not just Jauncey’s book that was overtaken by other events. In O’Farrell’s foreword, written in 1968, he notes that “…in 1943 or 1964, the conscription question did not become again a matter of such deeply divisive national passion” (p.xiv).  Although perhaps true for the introduction of conscription in 1964, the Moratorium marches of 1970 and 1971 eventually gave the lie to that statement, and perhaps vindicated for just a while, Jauncey’s more optimistic view of the power of mass political protests. Not for long though, when millions of protesters world wide were impotent to stop the Iraq war in 2003.  In the face of increasing expenditure on weaponry, and the sabre-rattling of ‘Little Rocket Man’ and ‘the Dotard’, I suspect and fear that we’re just as impotent today.