An Inspiration Misunderstood: Australian

Anti-Communists and the Lure of the U.S.,

1917-1935
Eras Journal Fischer, Nick: An Inspiration Misunderstood: Australian AntiCommunists and the Lure of the U.S., 1917 1935
An Inspiration Misunderstood: Australian Anti-Communists and the Lure of the U.S., 1917 1935
Nick Fischer
(Monash University)
http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/eras/an-inspiration-misunderstood-australian-anti-communists-and-the-lureof-the-u-s-1917-1935/

Throughout the twentieth century, communism influenced western societies like no other
political ideology. In the United States, it became a political obsession, the dominant influence
on foreign policy after the Second World War, as well as a primary source of identification for
American citizens. While its significance in Australia was less marked, and its character less
extreme, anti-communism was a major influence on foreign policy and communism was an
anathema to a majority of Australians. Yet, for all its significance, western reactions to
communism remain understudied and misunderstood. While the impact of anti-communism
during the Cold War is widely recognised, its evolution and development before this time is
infrequently discussed.
This article examines one little-known but important facet of early Australian anti-communism:
its debt to its American variant. This relationship is worth exploring for several reasons. In both
nations, the triumph of anti-communism was the result, to a considerable extent, of the efforts of
a surprisingly small number of government officials, intelligence and security professionals, and
special interest groups. The intimate relationship between these officials, spies and special
interests jeopardised democratic government, as anti-communist fervour encouraged a massive,
unprecedented and largely unnoticed transfer of administrative power from more accountable
branches of government to new, permanent bureaucracies: the security and intelligence services.
Anti-communism underpinned and justified political surveillance and other forms of
authoritarian behaviour. It became more than a political ideology, mutating into a force for social
conformity and a central arbiter of the relationship between government and citizens, which was
progressively characterised by governmental mistrust of and antipathy for citizens. Yet, there
were telling differences in the ways that Australian and American anti-communists could and did
respond to the threat of communism. These differences, along with the muted success Australian
anti-communists enjoyed in attempting to introduce American political ideas, throw other
common and particular characteristics of American and Australian socio-political culture into
relief.

It is expedient here to make a few general remarks regarding the scholarship of Australian and
American anti-communism, both to situate this article and explain its particular focus. As noted
above, pre-Cold War anti-communism is a comparatively neglected subject. Moreover, a number
of problematic perceptions about early anti-communism continue to exercise considerable
influence, in spite of the efforts of a few scholars. The most problematic of these perceptions is
that anti-communisms influence dramatically dissipated after the great Red Scare of 1918-19
before resurfacing after the Second World War. Much of the literature on the Red Scare directly
or inadvertently fosters the impression of a hiatus in state repression between world
wars. [1] Australian historians have similarly acknowledged that the rights post-war domination
of Australian nationalism was facilitated, in part, by the Red Scare, but have under-emphasised
the significance of anti-communist practices of the 1920s and 1930s. [2]Another significant
problem with anti-communist historiography is that it has too crudely portrayed the rise of anticommunism as an outgrowth of popular sentiment. [3] It has also paid insufficient attention to
the broader implications of the growing power of conservative and reactionary forces on the fate
of the left. [4] The tendency both to neglect the history of inter-war anti-communism and to
ascribe its fate to mercurial popular will have rested on an under-analysed association of these
events with social mood, made tenable by a failure to examine the structural nature of Australian
and American democracy (and evolving rents within them), as compared with other political
systems.[5] Neither the the American people nor Australians, as is often claimed, perpetrated
the Red Scare. Rather, supporters of anti-communism set out, with varying degrees of
consciousness, to purge their local and national communities of what they took to be a heresy.
This article brings into the historical limelight some pivotal individuals and networks who gave
life to Australian anti-communism, pays proper tribute to their pioneering activity and examines
a peculiar dimension of their political inspiration.
In both Australia and the United States, anti-communism was spawned by prior reactionary
movements, including anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism and anti-labour radicalism. The
legislative machinery with which governments initially combated communism was also inherited
from earlier fights against domestic intransigency and dissent over national commitments to the
Great War. After entering the war in April 1917, the Wilson Administration introduced
anEspionage Act prescribing fines of up to $10,000 and/or twenty years jail for making false
reports or statements concerning government policy or hampering the war effort. The Act
became the executives chief weapon for silencing critics and was used in conjunction with
the Alien Anarchist Law , the Alien Enemies Act and a newImmigration Act to expel alien
radicals, especially those suspected of holding radical beliefs. The Australian government, which
committed Australia to the war on its outbreak, similarly introduced the War Precautions Act in
1914, to facilitate the suppression of all opinion likely to prejudice recruiting or harm the war
effort. The vaguely worded Act gave the government enormous discretion in its application and it
censured and suppressed criticism of its conduct and policies under the guise of patriotism and
military necessity. The Unlawful Associations Acts ( UAA) of 1916 and 1917, formulated by the
new Prime Minister, William Morris Billy Hughes, empowered authorities not only to
imprison individuals obstructing the war but also to summarily proscribe associations doing the
same. Like United States legislation, the Act introduced guilt by association and criminal
penalties for the expression of ideas into the legal system.

The similar American and Australian dissent-crushing legislative programs were more in the
nature of a symbiotic response to the threat of Prussian militarism, and then Bolshevism, than the
result of any direct borrowing. The distinct influence of the United States on Australian anticommunism was, however, apparent in the Hughes governments heavy reliance on deportation
procedures to fight the incursion of undesirable peoples and doctrines. Deportation orders were
first issued to a dozen foreign-born members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who
were deported for breaches of the UAA and the Hughes government was undoubtedly influenced
in its use of deportation procedures by the United States, which was in the habit of deporting
some of its undesirables to Australia. [6]
The protection of Australias racial integrity was an additional motive for deportation. Several
important officials and businessmens views on race and race protection were influenced by
happenings in the United States. Many American intellectuals and politicians, including Madison
Grant, author of the seminal eugenicist tract The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis
of European History (published in 1916) and future president Herbert Hoover, believed that the
revolutionary convulsions of Europe were caused by particular racial and cultural, rather than
universal, qualities. [7] Thomas Ramsden Ashworth, long-serving president of the Victorian
Employers Federation (VEF, 1920-1924 and 1925-1933) and a confirmed eugenicist, feared that
Australia might not learn from the experience of the United States, which for too long failed to
obstruct mass immigration and consequently suffered a diminution of the average quality of its
citizenry. Ashworth, along with John Greig Latham, Attorney-General in the conservative
governments of Stanley M. Bruce and Joseph Lyons, associated racial with political pedigree and
vigilantly watched for signs of perfidy among Australias foreign-born and non-Anglo Saxon
communities. [8]Whenever industrial trouble struck, Latham habitually instructed intelligence
services to verify whether any persons, particularly Russians, had advocated sabotage in
union meetings, to establish whether there was any evidence of communications between strikers
and Russia, and whether troublesome elements might be removed from Australian shores. [9]
While Australians like Ashworth drew clear lessons from the racial experience of the United
States, some American politicians and businessmen believed they could learn valuable lessons in
race protection from Australia, and this was how a successful lecture tour of the United States by
ex-Prime Minister Hughes was marketed in 1924. In a syndicated opinion piece for the Hearst
newspaper conglomerate, Hughes informed Americans that the National Origins Provision of
Congress new Immigration Act , which ensured that the proportion of ethnic groups vis-a-vis the
total population of the US would remain at 1890 levels, would bring into force immigration
practices that had been operating in Australia for nearly a quarter of a century. [10]
Although Hughes American tour demonstrates a reciprocal flow of information between the two
nations, the relationship was very much weighted toward American influence on Australia,
particularly with regard to the dependence of the Australian government, media and self-styled
loyalists on the United States for news of foreign political developments relating to
communism. With no foreign correspondents of their own, Australian papers and the federal
government relied exclusively on British and American newspapers and embassies. Even after its
tiny foreign affairs department was established, the Australian government was still obliged to
glean most of its knowledge of communism from the British government and the foreign
press. [11] However, the government and other anti-communists gradually learned to shift their

gazes from Britain to the United States. Australias High Commissioner in London in the late
1920s, R. G. Casey, regularly sent Prime Minister Bruce press reports of anti-communist activity
in America. The wealthy industrialist and conservative political powerbroker, Herbert Brookes,
in his capacity as Commissioner-General for Australia in the United States, sent Prime Minister
Scullin a series of articles published in the New York Herald-Tribune , which set forth the
results of a survey of Communists and their activities in New York City.[12] The New South
Wales anti-communist organisation, the Sane Democracy League, drew Prime Minister Lyons
attention to resolutions of an anti-communist convention in New York, which called for the reestablishment of powers enabling the Bureau of Investigation (BI) to scrutinise and keep under
constant supervision communists, as well as for the exclusion of the Communist and Workers
Parties of America from all right to organise and function as political parties.[13] Garbled
news of the proceedings of the Special Congressional Committee to Investigate Communist
Activities and Propaganda in the United States (convened in 1930) even percolated down to
dozens of municipal councils in Sydney, who urged the federal government to grant itself
authoritarian powers they believed American authorities possessed. [14]
The flow of information between the United States and Australia helped to create among leading
Australian and American anti-communists a common view of the primitive and anti-social
motives of communists. John Latham, who clearly understood little of the psychological and
sociological roots of revolution, divined that communists believed in Russia because Russia is
in favour with trouble makers and is more particularly an enemy of Great Britain and the
Empire. [15] Lathams cynical and misanthropic views about communists bespoke of his
tendency to Other people whose opinions differed from his own and deny their right to
exercise political choice. He believed only in the efficacy of repression as a practical method of
achieving order and regarded his draconian reforms to industrial arbitration and Crimes Acts as
necessary protection for the labour movement from its own leaders and communist agents
provocateur. [16]
In stark contrast with some of his colleagues, Latham was determined to cleanse the nation of the
very notion of radicalism. Stanley Bruce, for example, cared little about the beliefs of radicals
and was probably unperturbed by their presence, so long as their political influence remained
marginal. Although Bruce rattled the anti-communist sabre during union-busting action on the
waterfront and in important public speeches, his anti-communism was incidental (rather than
central) to his broader reform ambitions and was an electoral ploy first, a desirable outcome
second. [17]Latham, however, hoped to enact legislation that would get away altogether from
[specific] association[s], and centre on preventing and suppressing unlawful revolutionary plans
and propaganda [covering] allmeans of prevention and suppression (emphasis in
original). [18] In this respect, it was Latham rather than Bruce who was a kindred spirit of
leading American anti-communists such as BI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Congressman Hamilton
Fish, Jr. (convener of the previously mentioned Special Committee to Investigate Communist
Activities and Propaganda) and the powerful Californian union-busting business organisation,
the Better America Federation. They all believed that authoritarian subversion of democracy was
the only way to save America from itself.
The extent to which Latham may have been influenced by their views is difficult to gauge, but it
beggars belief to suggest that he would have been unaware of the findings and proposed

legislative program of the Fish Committee, given that several municipal councils in Sydney had
some idea of its activities. T. R. Ashworths enthusiasm for American political theories and
initiatives is, however, more easily quantified than Lathams. Outraged by labour militancy on
the wharves and determined to prove that direct political representation of labour was disastrous,
Ashworth found his proof in the writings of the Glasgow-born, British historian, statesman and
diplomat, James Bryce. Bryce, in his celebrated study The American Commonwealth , contended
that the United States was impervious to class strife and revolution because the cleavage
between political parties [was] not horizontal according to social strata, but vertical'. Bryce
also maintained that social peace was contingent on the continued absence of a strong Labor
Party. Neglecting to extrapolate Bryces differentiation of horizontal and vertical class
segregation and to analyse the relevance of this theory to Australia, Ashworth merely cited Bryce
as an authority in his diatribes against the Australian Labor Party, which he chided for giving
political power to the trade union movement, thereby encouraging its leaders to concentrate on
securing parliamentary representation rather than policing their own organisations. This, he
concluded, was why trade unions were being dragged at the heels of communists who had
destroyed discipline in the Queensland Railways, paralysed Australian shipping, subjected
producers to serious loss and made mob rule dominant in Queensland ports and in
Fremantle.[19] Had they been confined to personal acquaintances, Ashworths Americaninfluenced views may have made little or no imprecation on the Australian political landscape.
As it was, he was a leading representative of the business community and, in addition, had
significant tranches of his work syndicated in the Melbourne Age , the BrisbaneCourier , the
Adelaide Advertiser and the Hobart Mercury , not to mention the VEFs own journal. [20]
Although the bulk of printed political matter in Australia was stridently anti-communist and
injurious to the left, anti-communists like Ashworth were convinced that ongoing systematic
propaganda was essential for Australias protection. Accordingly, they strove to create official
and public counter-communist-propaganda agencies based on American models. In part, this was
because reform of industrial relations (particularly the abolition of compulsory arbitration and
the removal of restrictions on federal power imposed by State courts) proved impossible to
secure.[21] For his part, Ashworth found inspiration in the National Civic Federation (NCF), one
of the most powerful, reactionary pressure groups in the United States, whose Board of Directors
around this time included the industrialist T. Coleman DuPont and several Senators, most notably
Archibald Stevenson, the prime mover of the notorious and hugely influential New York joint
legislative committee (popularly known as the Lusk Committee) that investigated seditious
revolutionary activities within and without the United States around 1920. The Federations
Executive Director, Ralph Easley, was a staunch advocate of the use of secret police and military
agencies to assume authority over domestic questions and subversive activities in times of
peace as well as war. [22] He also petitioned other organisations to kick out their Socialist,
I.W.W.ite and Bolshevist operators. The Inter-Church World Movement and the YMCA were
just two organisations he advised and recruited informants in, with the support of the State
Department and Military Intelligence (MI). [23]
Oblivious to this side of the NCFs activities, Ashworth admired its civic educational work,
which he hoped could be brought to bear directly on Australian communists. [24] After travelling
in the United States in 1923, meeting with labour leaders like Samuel Gompers of the American
Federation of Labor and acquainting himself with the philosophy of the industrialist Edward A.

Filene, Ashworth became convinced that the principal factor making social conditions in the
United States superior to those in Australia was the unity and coherence provided by strident
anti-communism. Unlike their Australian counterparts on the waterfront, American labour
leaders had successfully prevented the degradation of the trades unions by banishing the virus
of politics (that is, direct political representation of labour) and, in the process, eliminated the
risk of being white-anted by communist-influenced and inspired careerists. The reward for
American labourers common sense and good will, Ashworth maintained, was access to
industrial ownership through shareholding and investment schemes, and the privilege of living
in a society free from class hatred and conflict. [25]
Ashworth was mindful of the need for the Australian business community to adopt the advanced
thinking of Filene and Henry Ford if the antipodes were to become Bolshevik-free. He chastised
businessmen who failed to apprehend the threat of revolution or ameliorate the plight of the
unfortunate, accepting that social progress depended on improving the purchasing power of the
masses so that they could absorb the supplies of mass production; these notions were quite
consonant with Herbert Brookes advocacy of supplementing employees wages with profitshares as an aid to harmony and enthusiasm.[26] However, it was not enough for Australia to
follow the United States lead in the economic realm. It was essential, also, to educate the people,
to stimulate the development of psychic and physical machinery side by side to secure moral,
along with material progress. The performance of this task of bringing all classes together in a
general political program was what made organisations like the NCF so important. [27] The
fact that this general political program was often indistinguishable from propaganda was an
entirely acceptable social cost. Although Ashworth did concede that employers were obliged to
study economics and politics and, moreover, that they ought to unite more effectively in the
manner he believed American business had, he was convinced that the labouring masses
presented the most urgent and intractable case for social reform and, consequently, the elitism of
the NCFs propaganda struck him as being not problematic but, rather, wholesome. [28]It would
be wonderful, he believed, if Australian workers could also receive instruction programs in
Revolutionary Movements, Industrial Relations and Civics, informed by the teachings of
such illustrious anti-communists (and anti-democrats) as Archibald Stevenson and J. Edgar
Hoover, through affiliated womens clubs, patriotic societies, fraternal insurance lodges, church
and college clubs, teachers associations, and labour, agricultural, commercial and bankers
organisations, like their American brethren. [29]
Although he was thoroughly convinced that anti-communist, pro-establishment propaganda was
inherently ennobling, Ashworth was sensitive to the political risks of propaganda and,
accordingly, he described beneficial propaganda as education and endowed it with a variety of
pedagogical qualities. Unlike another significant and altogether different Australian anticommunist, Eric Campbell, Ashworth believed that some communists could be made virtuous.
And, as much of a communists unreason was due to sheer ignorance, it was imperative to
continually bombard his mind with the sound propaganda of a civic educational organisation,
for:
resent and resist as he may at the start, in the end he will be influenced to some extent. You may
not make of him a normal citizen, but you can assist in developing whatever potentiality for
useful service he may happen to possess.[30]

The sound propaganda of civic education organisations thus represented Australias best hope of
surmounting the psychological and political problem of having to attempt to resolve industrial
conflict in adversarial and legal surroundings. [31]
Harold Jones, chief of the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB), the federal secret
intelligence agency that worked directly to the Attorney General, also fervently believed that
Australia needed anti-communist propaganda. The political strength of the labour movement
convinced Jones that anti-communist propaganda could never be successfully delivered by
government and instead he worked to achieve what today would be called a public-private
partnership: the creation of a private anti-communist propaganda organisation that the
government could support by giving it free use of all the information at its disposal. Such a
scheme of counter propaganda would ideally be national in scope and coordination, and derive
its funding, resources and intellectual capital from private elites, industrialists, manufacturers,
and all wealth-owning members of the community, as well as the press, and it would utilise
modern technology, principally the cinema, as the Bolsheviks themselves had. [32]
One private citizen who was willing to lead an anti-communist propaganda scheme was Eric
Campbell, a former Colonel in the Australian Imperial Forces and self-promoting businessman,
who formed the New Guard (NG) in Sydney, in 1931 to rid New South Wales of the Lang Labor
government and Australia of communism. The Guards newspaper Liberty , regularly argued that
propaganda could be a force for social construction and would not sully the anti-communist
cause. Events in both Italy and Russia had shown the Guard:
what a great aid propaganda [could] be to any Government which [had] to mould public opinion
and to ask the people to place the welfare of the State above their own personal interests. [33]
Following the example of the Fascists and Nazis that he so admired, Campbell proposed to give
Australians a common-sense education in political economy. This common-sense education
amounted to support for the political and economic status quo, which the Guard described as the
natural and proper interdependence of all classes in the community. The Guard intended to
forcibly show the people that disrupting the status quo, or resisting just and proper obligations
in a time of adversity [would injure] the national welfare and push the nation toward ruin. The
Guard would awaken [the peoples] conscience [and] appeal to their self-respect and
patriotism, and it would do all this intensely [and] persistently, by dignified psychological
propaganda. [34]
Although Campbell was more inspired by Mussolini and Hitler than by either Herbert or J. Edgar
Hoover, he was nevertheless profoundly influenced by rhetorical and semantic conventions of
the American Right, which he adopted in his own writings and speeches. Campbell identified
strongly with individualism and private enterprise and thought it lamentable that Australians,
members of a virile and proud Nordic race, were forced by government to accept public
charity in the form of the dole. Campbell wanted, instead, to create, through a compulsory land
settlement scheme relocating the urban poor and unemployed, conditions that would restore
individual morale, independence, courage and enterprise. Campbells notion that national
salvation lay in the formation of a landed yeoman citizenry ennobled by self-sufficiency owed
much to American political mythology. His habit of denouncing the bona fides of his left wing

political opponents by using the epithet so-called when referring to their representative
organisations and beliefs was also a custom appropriated directly from American sources.
The use of quotation marks in connection with communist, pacifist, labour and other
objectionable associations was a stock means for American anti-communists to rob lawful
organisations of their probity and legitimacy. It had long been their practice to describe unions
and schools they perceived to be Bolshevik fronts as so-called schools of social reform. They
also habitually derided workers or minority races efforts to engender community pride and
solidarity as the fomenting of so-called class consciousness. The Lusk Committees mistrust of
African-Americans particularly illustrates this tendency. Next to labour unions, the Committee
regarded the nations black population as the most vulnerable to communist contamination.
While conceding that African-Americans had just cause of complaint with the treatment they
received in the United States, the Committee was more concerned that various revolutionary
agencies were exploiting such complaint with thorough skill, and its report lamented the
marked increase of radicalstrying to recruit negro followers [and] stimulate race hatred [and]
so-called class consciousness in their ranks. [35]
The influence of American rhetoric and propaganda styles on Australian anti-communists,
significant as it was, was less important than the commitment of Campbell and several other
more powerful Australian anti-radicals to using American-style militia organisations to shape the
political landscape. Political militia groups had a long history in Australia. Throughout the
nineteenth century wealthy interest groups sporadically raised forces to protect property and
existing order, with government approval. [36] Conservative forces that mobilised in response to
the Bolshevik revolution were following the example of older associations, but the Red Scare
moved conservatives to band together in greater numbers and with greater fervour than during
any previous political crisis. Never before had extra-governmental conservative forces so directly
influenced policing operations. In Queensland, for example, the Queensland Loyalty League and
the National Political Council influenced the recruitment of Australian Federal Police and
submitted secret reports about suspected subversives to authorities. In exchange for these
services, they were granted access to government intelligence. [37] These developments were
soon followed by initiatives to found a national, loyalist, surveillance authority. Herbert Brookes,
who had been instrumental in the formation of Hughes wartime coalition government, led the
charge to create a federal surveillance organisation. His principal colleagues in this venture were
acting Prime Minister W. A. Watt, the Minister for Defence, Senator George Pearce, the chief of
the Counter-Espionage Bureau (CEB) of the Attorney-Generals Department and principal
secretary to the Governor-General, George Steward, the Director of Military Intelligence E. L.
Piesse and the Commissioner of the Queensland Police, F. C. Urquhart. [38]
Brookes and his colleagues dreamed of establishing an agency that would become the countrys
principal anti-radical force. It would be commanded by official appointees (the Minister for
Defence, the head of the CEB and a private citizen who held the respect of self-styled
loyalists) but staffed largely by a citizens auxiliary. Mindful of the hatred secret police forces
had attracted in other lands, Brookes and his colleagues hoped that the open involvement of
the public with the organisation, and its equally open partnership with an acknowledged public
Department would protect it from ignominy and suspicion. Marrying the public and private
sectors in the form of the auxiliary, Brookes noted, would also enable the Government to come

openly to Parliament for funds for investigation purposes and avoid the need to ask for a
secret service vote [which] would probably be regarded with repugnance. [39]
The chief inspiration for Brookes project was the American Protective League (APL), an
important patriotic society formed after the United States entry into the Great War. Displaying a
zeal surpassing that of similar organisations, the APL was recruited by the Wilson Administration
to help enforce federal policy. By early 1918, the League had become a 250,000 member-strong
adjunct of government, liaising with the Department of War and MI, the Attorney-General and
the Department of Justice (DJ) and the BI, the Department of Labor and its Immigration and
Naturalisation Service, and various police departments. The Leagues newsletter, the Spy
Glass instructed its members in law and categorised offences operatives were to punish,
including making false and interfering reports about the armed forces,obstructing Bond sales
and enlistments, curtailing production and making disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
attacks on government or the flag.Spy Glass also compiled lists of aliens and the disloyal who
were to be observed and apprehended; [40] a membership fee of seventy-five cents or one dollar
entitled Leaguers to become State-appointed vigilantes. [41]
The chief task of the APL was to help police the compulsory enlistment of eligible citizens for
military duty. To ensure that no one escaped service, the government resolved to round up those
neglecting their duty and 12 September 1918 was declared a national registration day, during
which all absent draftees were to report for service or be rounded up. The APL helped enforce
this Slacker Drive, which was a resounding success. [42] Tens of thousands of men were
apprehended or questioned by the authorities. [43] Both the director of the BI, A. Bruce Bielaski
and Attorney General Thomas Gregory declared that summary raids would become a cornerstone
of government. The Department of War even envisioned an extensive role for APL personnel in
overseas missions, partnering the Red Cross and YMCA. [44]
Brookes learned of the activities of the League through the reports of Robert D. Elliot, a
Melbourne businessman, newspaper proprietor, Country Party powerbroker and former member
of the Army Intelligence Corps who had been sent to the United States in 1917 as a special
emissary of the Department of Defence. Elliots description of the structure and activities of the
League led Brookes and his colleagues to entirely misinterpret the organisations democratic, or
rather anti-democratic, fides . Elliot mistakenly believed that the League was the Citizen
Section of the United States Secret Service and that it had been formed with the approval of
the Department of Justice, who continued to closely supervise its activities.[45] Yet, there was no
United States government organisation that went by the name the United States Secret Service.
Furthermore, the Leagues affiliation with official authorities was not as clear as Elliot imagined.
While the activities of the League were endorsed by government, there was no question that the
League had been incorporated into the structure of government as Elliot understood them to have
been. They were subcontractors, to whom the Wilson Administration found it convenient to
assign quasi-legal vigilante assignments it could not enforce, due to a lack of manpower.
As Elliot was chaperoned by the APLs founder, Chas Daniel Frey, who promoted the Leagues
high ethical standards and professional management, Elliots inspection of the League halted at
the shop-front window. He had no concerns about the Leagues legal conduct, reassured by the
corps of competent lawyers that allegedly supervised the Leagues use of authority and

evidence, and prepared briefs for the BI. The police section of the League, Elliot similarly found,
comprised men especially qualified by experience and ability to conduct important
investigations and willing to give all their time if necessary, to the Public Service. The
Leagues Intelligence Bureau, Elliot reported, enlisted only the most responsible persons from
financial, business or industrial sectors, whose sworn duty was to promptly reportany and
every case of disloyalty, industrial disturbance or other matter likely to injure or embarrass the
Government of the United States; reassuringly, they always did this through the proper channel
only. Elliot was also comforted by the Leagues stringent, internal security measures. The
Bureau of Membership, he was assured, stringently evaluated the suitability of each potential
member before they were enrolled; if there was the slightest doubt about the suitability or
loyalty of any applicant, they were not recruited. All members swore oaths of allegiance to the
nation and proudly wore their badge of authority when on duty. In the event that a member was
accused of unseemly conduct, the Bureau conducted a formal investigation which, if evidence of
improper behaviour was confirmed, would result in the resignation of the disgraced brother. [46]
Elliots glowing assessment of the League had little basis in fact. There is scant evidence that
legal expertise determined the Leagues operations. Yet, the appearance of legal probity was
crucial to Elliots and Brookes admiration of the League, respectful as they were of hierarchy
and elite leadership. Moreover, the Public Service Elliot imagined that the League served did
not resemble the independent bureaucracy to which an Australian Protective League would be
devoted; the protection of government bureaucracy could not have been further from the minds
of most APL operatives. The relationship of official police agencies and the APL was also neither
as proper nor direct as Elliot believed. In practice, the League frequently declined to defer to the
authority of the state, which was unable (and unwilling) to closely direct its activities. Worse,
having quickly swelled to enormous size, the League could not even cursorily monitor the
character of its members. Further, the inherent corrupting effects of supra-legal status on League
members were entirely discounted by Australian loyalists, who were warming to the notion of
invading the confidential banking and industrial records of radical organisations and trade
unions. [47]
Brookes, Elliot and their colleagues readily attributed an official character to the APL because
they projected their own juridical norms and ethics onto a culture they failed to understand.
Wanting to protect law and order, they were excited by any organisation seemingly devoted to
good government, propriety and civic values. The example of the APL appeared to show that
citizens working in the professions, real estate, finance, insurance, transport, industry and even in
hospitality could make a substantive contribution to law and order. This inspired Brookes to
nominate five men, solicitors, aldermen, academics and businessmen, as potential Australian
Protective League members; a Defence Ministry functionary simultaneously drew up a list of the
men who, under proper safeguards, would observe enemy activities. [48] Unhappily for
Brookes and his colleagues, however, the impetus to found an Australian Protective League
petered out. Personality clashes undermined the prospective League, but other factors proved
more crucial. [49] Most important, the loyalist conspirators could not agree on the degree to
which the League ought to be voluntary. While Watt and Elliot believed that the logistical burden
of organisation necessitated a strong private involvement (and Watt was no doubt eager to
apportion responsibility for the League beyond the government), G. R. Finchen, Manager of the
National Bank, was concerned to confine knowledge of intelligence and propaganda within a

narrower sphere of interest and he argued against mass mobilisation. [50] In the end, although
they were united in their perception of a need for action, these conservative elites were unwilling
to act decisively, because they were conscious that the law was against them and because they
were hamstrung by their commitment to British constitutional traditions and the appearance of
law and order.
The fate of the Australian Protective League was prophetic for future Australian patriotic
organisations. Uncertain of their legal security and uneasy with extra-legal vigilantism, the
League and succeeding fraternities never quite felt able to conduct their campaigns without
regard for the authority of government. Their strong commitment to inherited social and legal
hierarchies, along with an awareness of the political strength of labour, encouraged them to
regard themselves as necessary adjuncts of government. Unlike the APL, the American Legion or
the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), they neither sought to, nor could force the
arm of governments. For the most part they worked directly with constitutional authorities and
the majority of groups, including the aborted Australian Protective League and the dominant
Victorian patriotic society of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the League of National Security
(LNS), in fact did little else but petition official action. Even the practical ambition of the most
militant loyalist organisation, the New Guard, extended no further than the desire to hospitalise
extremists from the labour movement and a more fanciful wish to force the removal of the
New South Wales Labor government.
In spite of their desire that it not be so, two great gulfs separated Australian anti-communist
fraternities from their American brethren: the abysses separating their real and perceived levels
of empowerment. Compared with American anti-communists, Australian anti-communists had a
modest record of achievement and an even more modest sense of power. The comparative
success of Australian and American citizen-based anti-communist fraternities reveal stark
contrasts in political fortune. Even the most powerful and protected loyalist organisation, the Old
Guard (OG), which made preparations with federal authorities and the New South Wales Police
to overthrow the Lang government, did not precipitate Langs fall and promptly disbanded after
his removal. Moreover, it actively suppressed the NG, fearing that its inflammatory
demagoguery was more likely to imperil civic order than Lang himself. [51] The OG also
refused to collaborate, let alone reveal itself, to other organisations such as the LNS, which
meekly abandoned its practice of crushing public assemblies after the Victorian government
legislated to permit street meetings that did not obstruct traffic in 1933. [52]
Australian anti-communists wariness of each other and of law-breaking could not have
distinguished them more from the mentality and behaviour of American anti-communists. Anticommunism in the United States thrived on the sharing of information. Patriotic associations
regularly gathered en masse to swap notes and tactics and keep one another abreast of
communist intrigues across the nation. One such patriotic gathering was the Womens Patriotic
Conference on National Defence, an annual event that attracted hundreds of anti-communist
associations of varying size and power, including the hugely-influential DAR and the muchsmaller but not insignificant Westchester Security League (WSL). [53]
Concern for the education of Americas youth prompted the WSL to contact high schools
experiencing difficulties with Young Pioneers and form student discussion groups and new clubs

for Jr. American Citizens. [54] This venture proved so successful that the DAR soon took
over the enterprise and established, with the Sons of the American Revolution, a national
scheme to monitor un-American textbooks and supply schools with approved
materials. [55]The WSL became an important source of information not just for interested
citizens and affiliated associations, but also for government and judicial authorities. In the mid
1930s, both the Dickstein Committee investigating subversive activities and Congressman
Tinkham, who was sponsoring a bill to revoke Soviet recognition, utilised the Leagues
resources, as did the Arizona State legislature when conducting an investigation of disloyal
activities. The League also furnished material to an Arizona judge then trying some alleged
communists and cultivated support from MI, the War Department and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce. [56]
Information sharing between American patriots and governments was not a one-way process. For
example, a chart depicting the integral involvement of the Socialist-Pacifist movement in
international socialist networks devised by a librarian at the Chemical Warfare Service in
Washington, D. C., was obtained by J. Edgar Hoover, copied and passed on to the American
Defence Society, in 1923; [57] the chart remained in demand among patriotic and intelligence
circles for several years, notwithstanding the chief of the Chemical Warfare Services eventual
disavowal of the chart and its inaccuracies. [58] Organisations such as the DAR were also
mailed information about suspected Bolshevik front organisations like the National Council for
Prevention of War, by the Department of War.[59] Australian authorities, by contrast, neither
solicited nor encouraged non-official anti-communist activity with comparable enthusiasm.
Information supplied by civilian informants was gratefully accepted and taken seriously, but
there was never any question that outsiders would be made privy to classified information. [60]
Australian anti-communists were also unwilling to utilise the expertise of foreign-born, nonAnglo-Saxon anti-communists in the fight against Bolshevism. In the United States, loyal, multilingual migrants became powerful intelligence agents and muscle for union-busting corporations.
The Ukrainian Jacob Spolansky, for example, worked for MI, the BI, Botany Consolidated Mills
in Passaic, New Jersey, the Chrysler Corporation in Detroit, Michigan and local police
departments, including the State Troopers in Michigan. He was also a key witness at the Fish
Committee hearings. [61] In Australia, no migrant with such a background could find
employment in the intelligence or police corps and while a certain J. Toman, a multi-lingual
Czech, was instrumental in establishing a branch of the NG in Goulbourn, he was barred from
holding executive office in the Guard on account of his ethnicity. [62]
When accounting for these significant operational differences between Australian and American
anti-communists a number of factors need to be considered. It must be acknowledged that
Australian anti-communists operated in a far less favourable political and cultural environment
than American anti-communists. Labour was more politically powerful in Australia than in the
United States. The separation of powers between arms and spheres of government were protected
in Australia by such institutions as the High Court in its ruling on the Walsh-Johannsen
deportation case of 1925, which denied the federal government the power to deport any persons
not born in Australia whose continued presence was found by the executive to be detrimental to
peace, order and government. Australian anti-communists were also hamstrung by the
opprobrium such events as the 1916 show-trial of the IWW Twelve in Sydney and the violent

vigilantism of the NG threatened to bring onto conservative authorities. Opportunities to co-opt

paramilitary organisations in the manner of the United States DJ, while hankered for by some,
were politically untenable. [63] Official counter-subversive agencies were further hamstrung by
their subordinate position within the network of British imperial operations. [64] Moreover,
while anti-communism directly fostered the development in the United States of State
Department agencies and other organisations to augment the BI and MI, Australia was very slow
to develop a foreign affairs executive and policy infrastructure with whom the CIB could share
and develop its programs. [65]
Nevertheless, factors other than juridical and administrative practices and political imperatives
hampered the growth of anti-communism in the antipodes. Peculiar and self-imposed
psychological and political commitments also constrained Australian anti-communists.
Australian loyalists overarching commitment to British Imperial power complicated and even
crippled their hopes of revolutionising government. Compared with their American brethren,
Australian anti-communists humbled themselves before the state. They perceived their proper
place within an imperial, parliamentary structure that bound them to the glory of Britain, perched
at the pinnacle of political as well as physical (racial) evolution. An unbreakable thread was
thought to link Australian governments and the judiciary to Whitehall and the Privy Council,
making rebellion against elected governments, except in the most extreme circumstances,
unthinkable. And whereas Americans had historically viewed themselves as revolutionaries and
citizens of a nation that would lead the world, Australians, by contrast, believed that they were
bringing a superior culture, of which they were only one component part, to the worlds furthest
reaches. So, Australian loyalists devotion to the British Empire not only circumscribed their
political goals but also robbed them of the single-minded purpose of their American counterparts.
Australian anti-communists were also distracted by extraneous issues which were not nearly so
significant in the United States. For example, Herbert Brookes and other important patricians
were arguably more preoccupied with their fight against papacy than Leninism; indeed, outrage
over perceived treasonous behaviour by Catholics during the 1917 St. Patricks Day parade in
Melbourne (not to mention the defeat of the two conscription referenda) was probably the most
important direct impetus for the attempted formation of the Australian Protective League. [66]
Brookes near-total identification with Britain encouraged him to express his sense of cultural
superiority and plans for political reform through an Anglo-Saxon, anti-Catholic paradigm. His
confidence in the racial supremacy of Anglo-Saxons and the cultural supremacy of Britain was
unbridled. He imagined that the British Empire was the greatest civilising force ever created and
even regarded George Washington as the quintessence of British culture. He also believed that of
the various forces threatening to destroy British peoples, the most horrible was Catholicism,
particularly Irish Catholicism. As the most isolated and distant outpost of Britain, Australia was
uniquely threatened by the potential loss of its British citizenship and could not rely on other
British colonies to defend the Empire. Brookes and his colleagues in the Victorian Protestant
Federation (VPF) were certain Australias large Irish Catholic population enjoyed ready
assistance from Sinn Feinists. Accordingly, the VPF produced reams of anti-Catholic
propaganda, including the pamphlets The Enemy Within Our Gates . [67] The Federation also
compiled a complete set of Electoral Rolls for Victoriawith all Roman Catholic names
crossed out, so that at a minutes notice, in case of emergency, it could thereby communicate
with all Protestants in all, or any particular electorate. The Federation was also disturbed by

Romes Domination of the Parliamentary Labour Party and studiously monitored Catholic
representation in the Cabinet of Catholic Prime Minister Joseph Scullin. [68]
Although the forces of anti-Catholicism and anti-communism were frequently allied, or one and
the same, it was difficult to translate anti-Catholic prejudice into concrete forms of official
repression and discrimination, for Catholicism was far more entrenched in Australia than
socialism. Anti-Catholicism, therefore, remained an additional simmering cause for civic dissent,
which, like anti-communism, never seriously threatened the fabric of the Australian state.
However, unlike in the United States, sectarianism actually drained important resources and
energy from the anti-communist movement. Anti-Catholicism had a time-honoured place in
American political culture, but it rarely intruded upon the anti-communist activities of zealots
like J. Edgar Hoover and the NCF.
Other, less lofty and ostensibly more radical quarters of the Australian anti-communist
movement also evinced a thoroughly traditional political weltanschauung , disavowing
American-style radical methods of political agitation. For all his swashbuckling rhetoric and
admiration for Fascist Italy, Eric Campbell still suffered from a paralysis of ambition typical of
Australian anti-communists. His ideal Fascist Australian state would, he imagined, not even
claim a role in world affairs independent of Great Britain. Indeed, Campbell remained content to
disavow real political obligation and hide behind the skirts of a crumbling Empire that was
hurling its children from the filial nest. The Westminster Statute conferring independence on
British Dominions was five years old and unratified when Campbell was dreaming of placing
on every man the responsibility of being in every way a worthy citizen of a great Empire.
[69] Significantly, the NG was also a very traditional socio-political order, conducting such
bourgeois activities as establishing libraries, card game and reading rooms, and organising
educational classes and publishing book reviews. The NG did not force radical right-wing agitprop on its members; its classes in political science schooled pupils in the works of Plato and
Aristotle, Gibbons Decline and Fall and more modern texts such as A.V. Diceys Law of the
Constitution . And at street level, attending inter-denominational church services was the most
radical paradigm shift the Guard contemplated. Outside Campbells inner circle, sympathy for
conventional values, and perhaps an indigenous antipathy for extremism, made the prospect of
Fascism, let alone Nazism, unpalatable. [70]
In assessing the overall impact of American anti-communism on Australia, it can be stated that
the glowing impression Australian loyalists had of industrial and political life in the United
States stimulated the amplification of elitism, anti-democracy and anti-labourism in Australia.
Nonetheless, for a range of complex environmental and psychological reasons, the influence of
American anti-communism on Australians remained largely theoretical. It is testament to the
extraordinary power of anti-communism, however, that it encouraged Australias loyalist leaders
to seriously consider substituting Australias democracy with more authoritarian systems of
government and to look to environments other than those of Britain for solutions to the Red
Menace.
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Notes

[1] While Richard Gid Powers gives something approaching due attention to pre-McCarthy anticommunism ( Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism , Free Press, New
York, 1995), Ellen Schrecker ( Many Are the Crimes McCarthyism in America , Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1998) and Joel Kovel (Red Hunting in the Promised Land:
Anticommunism and the Making of America , Basic Books, New York, 1992) arguably do not.
Earlier studies such as John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism,
1860-1925 , Atheneum, New York, 1973; Robert K. Murray, The Red Scare , University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1953; Peter Buckingham, America Sees Red: Anti-Communism in
America, 1870s to 1980s A Guide to Issues and References, Regina Books, Claremont, 1988;
Gilbert C. Fite and H. C. Peterson, Opponents of War, 1917 1918 , University of Washington
Press, Seattle, 1957; William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters Federal Suppression of
Radicals, 1903 1933 , Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966 also, sometimes in spite of their
empirical findings, underplay the significance of political developments between the wars. Back
[2] See John F. Williams, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism, 19131939 , Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995; Terry King, The Tarring and Feathering
of J. K. MacDougall: Dirty Tricks in the 1919 Federal Election,Labour History , Vol. 45,
November 1983; R. W. Connell and T. H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History ,
Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980; Richard Hall, The Secret State Australias Spy Industry ,
Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1978; Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume IV,
1901-1942, The Succeeding Age , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986; G. L.
Kristianson, The Politics of Patriotism The Pressure Group Activities of the Returned
Servicemens League , Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1966; Keith Richmond,
Response to the Threat of Communism: The Sane Democracy League and the Peoples Union
of New South Wales, Journal of Australian Studies , Vol. 1, June 1977, pp. 70 83. Back
[3]Offending American scholars include, besides Murray, Buckingham, Fite and Peterson and
Higham, Joan Hoff Wilson and contributors to her volume, The Twenties The Critical
Issues, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1972 and A. Mitchell Palmers biographer, Stanley
Coben ( A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician , Columbia University Press, New York, 1963).
Australian scholars such as Hall and J.R. Poynter (The Yo-Yo Variations: Initiative and
Dependence in Australias External Relations, 1918-1923, Historical Studies , Vol. 14, 19691971, pp. 231-49) make the same error. Williams is more careful. Back
[4] Verity Burgmann and Stuart Macintyre have both written monographs examining Australian
left wing, revolutionary parties. Burgmann limits her account of the Australian Industrial
Workers of the World to profiling an organisation which offered an example of more effective
oppositional politics, whether within the labour movement or in wider society, while Macintyre
also declines to comment extensively on the legacy of the repression of the Communist Party of
Australia, preferring to focus on the deep flaws that nurtured tyranny within its emancipatory
scheme. See Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism The I.W.W. in Australia ,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 276 and Stuart Macintyre,The Reds The

Communist Party of Australia, from Origins to Illegality , Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p.
413. Back
[5] Any scholar evincing such critical failings in the field of Russian revolutionary history
would, I believe, struggle for serious recognition. Back
[6] Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism , p. 218. Back
[7] Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History ,
Charles Scribners Sons, New York, 1916 and Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Herbert
C. Hoover MSS, Box 157, Preliminary Drafts on Bolshevik Manifestations, document for
President Wilson, 25 April 1919. Hoover was, at this time, director of the USRed Cross mission
to Europe. Back
[8] T. R. Ashworth, Pamphlets for the People No.1, Communism in Australia The Lesson of
the British Seamens Strike and Other Papers , National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA),
John G. Latham Collection MS 1009, Series 44 (subsequent references Ashworth,Communism
in Australia ). Back
[9] See for example letter from Latham to Jones, 22 September 1927, Australian Archives
(hereafter AA), A467, Item Bundle 94/SF42/64 286. Back
[10] NLA, William Morris Hughes Collection MS 1538, Series 26, Folder 6, Los Angeles
Examiner , June 1924. ThePhiladelphia Evening Public Ledger dryly commented of Hughes
views that, another way of increasing friction with Japan would be to invite the Rt. Hon.
William Morris Hughes, former Prime Minister of Australia, to address Congress, 12 May
1924. Back
[11] The Office of External Affairs in Australia played a negligible role in policy development
and execution until the mid-1920s. Prior to the Great War the Prime Minister assumed almost
full responsibility for directing foreign affairs and the office was actually abolished in 1916. It
was not until 1924 that a senior clerk attached to Imperial Foreign Office was stationed in
Melbourne, Australia, and an Australian High Commission established in London. See J. R.
Poynter, The Yo-Yo Variations and review by W. J. Hudson, The Yo-Yo Variations: A
Comment,Historical Studies , Vol. 14, 1969-1971. Back
[12] Herbert Brookes, Commissioner-General in USA to PM Scullin, 13 February 1930, AA,
A984, Item Com. 33. Back
[13] Letter from SDL to Prime Minister Lyons, 11 July 1932, AA, A1606/1, Item B5/1. Back
[14] Report from Secretary Attorney-Generals Department to Secretary Prime Ministers
Department, 30 June 1931, AA, A1606/1, Item B5/1. Back
[15] NLA, MS 1009, 27/5/169. Back

[16] Francis Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance, 1916-1932: Reactions to Radicalism
During and After the First World War , PhD Thesis, Monash University, 1979, p. 76. Back
[17] Despatches from New Scotland Yard, passed on by the High Commission in London, rarely
troubled Bruce, who routinely forwarded them to Latham. In this respect, Bruces preparedness
to allow his subordinates to pursue the donkey-work of anti-communism contrasts markedly with
Hughes direct administration of the secret services. See correspondence to and from the London
High Commission (NLA, MS 1009, Item 41/6). An example of Bruces professional but dry anticommunist electioneering is a speech he gave on 9 September 1925 in Dandenong, published in
pamphlet form by the National Publicity Bureau (NLA, MS 1009, Item 27/4). The Bruce who
emerges in the observations of contemporary anti-communists, including Herbert Brookes,
seems too remote to be passionately disturbed by communist intrigue. Brookes, who was
appointed Australian representative to the 1923 Economic Conference in Britain and, in 1929,
Commissioner-General to the US by Bruce, remarked that Bruce was as indifferent to foes as he
is to friends, apparently. See Rohan Rivett, Australian Citizen Herbert Brookes, 1867-1963 ,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965, p. 89. Back
[18] Memorandum from Solicitor General Robert Garran to Latham, 9 February 1934, AA,
A467, Item Bundle 28/SF10/15.Back
[19] Ashworth, Communism in Australia, p. 44. Bryces principal American work, The
American Commonwealth , published in 1888, was perhaps a little out of date as a guide on
contemporary industrial relations. Nevertheless, it was of sufficient currency to be of use to
Herbert Brookes, no intellectual crank, during his stint as Commissioner-General for Australia in
the US from 1929-30. See Rivett,Australian Citizen , p. 112. Back
[20] NLA, MS 1009, Items 27/118, Folder 5. The VEFs journal was renamed several times
during Ashworths tenures as president, from Liberty and Progress to The Employers Monthly
Review to Industry and Trade . Back
[21] Ashworth repeatedly argued that the limitation placed on federal industrial power by State
courts was injurious to industrial and economic harmony and order. He contrasted Australian
industrial relations mechanisms unfavourably with those of New Zealand, which did not have to
contend with the complications of rival federal and State jurisdictions. Ashworth wanted
Australia to create a central court to determine such fundamental questions as basic wage and
working hours, and co-ordinate the awards of decentralised tribunals operating in all the States.
These decentralised bodies, he believed, could function on the side of Conciliation rather than
of Arbitration, thus avoiding the class bitterness that arises from legal conflict. See The
Employers Monthly Review , 31 March 1927, cited in Shirley Thomas, Challenge: The First 100
Years of the Victorian Employers Federation , Victorian Employers Federation, Burwood, 1985,
p. 108. Back
[22] Letter from Ralph Easley to Patrick J. Hurley, Secretary of War, 24 May 1930, File 101102630 1, U. S. National Archives, United States Military Intelligence Files, MI-MSS, Reel
23.Back

[23] Letter from Ralph M. Easley to Churchill, 13 April 1920, MI-MSS, Reel 19. Back
[24] Ashworth, Communism in Australia, p. 4, see also 75 8. Back
[25] Ashworth, Communism in Australia, pp. 14 and 35. Back
[26] Ashworth, Communism in Australia, p. 46 and Rivett, Australian Citizen , pp. 54 5.Back
[27] Ashworth, Communism in Australia, p. 75. Back
[28] Censuring the integrity of the people, the NCF argued that they required firm moral
guidance and support to counter the growing confusion in the public mind resulting from
erroneous information upon economic and political subjects; the lack of a widespread
understanding of the principles underlying representative government; and the failure of citizens
generally to fulfil their obligations. Ashworth,Communism in Australia, p. 75. Ashworth
criticised the diffusion and dissipation of Australian employers collective strength, represented
by their lack of centralised organisation. M. P. Campbell from the delegation to the Industrial
Mission to America reported to the VEF the concentration of employers strength into one allrepresentative bodynot split up into Chambers of Commerce, Chambers of Manufactures,
Employers Federations and other rival Associations. Ashworth prescribed the study of
economics, ethics and politics for employers in Liberty and Progress , 25 October 1921. See
Thomas, Challenge , pp. 111 and 102. Back
[29] Ashworth, Communism in Australia, pp. 75-6. Back
[30] Ashworth, Communism in Australia, pp. 21-2. Back
[31] S. M. Bruce, like Ashworth, opined to the VEF that a system in which you have courts,
perpetual reference to courts, and employers and employees constantly meeting together in an
atmosphere of legal proceedings can never achieve very much. Reported in The Employers
Monthly Review , 31 March 1927, cited in Thomas,Challenge, p. 109. Back
[32] Communism in Australia Its Genesis and Development, report by H. Jones submitted to
Prime Minister Hughes, c. 1922, pp. 11-14, NLA, MS 1538, Item 21/156. Back
[33] Liberty , Vol. 1 No. 5, 17 September 1932, p. 4, AA, A432/86, Item 1933/152 hereafter
referred to as Liberty , with appropriate publication date. Back
[34] Liberty , 17 September 1932. Back
[35] Parts 1 and 2, Senate of the State of New York, New York, originally published in 1920
(1971 edition published by Da Capo Press) as Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose
and Tactics, With an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb
It Report of the Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities Revolutionary
and Subversive Movements Abroad and At Home , Vol. I, Part I, pp 17-18 and Vol. II, Part I, p.
1476. Back

[36] Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary
Organisations in N.S.W: 1930-32, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1989, pp. 1314. Back
[37] Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance , 1979, p. 319-20. Back
[38] These men had been meeting since November 1917 for this purpose. See Moore, Secret
Army , pp. 22-5.Back
[39] Letter from Brookes to Senator George Pearce, 29 November 1918, NLA, Herbert Brookes
Collection MS 1924/17/2. Back
[40] Spy Glass , Vol. 1, No. 1, p.1; Spy Glass , Vol. 1, No. 7, p. 4. Numbers 8 and 9 and a Special
Supplement exhorted members to Get These Dangerous Enemy Aliens, German-born citizens
and residents of whom large photo identities were supplied. Bureau of Investigation chief, A.
Bruce Bielaski, formalised the incorporation of the APL into the government, ordering all Bureau
employees to give full cooperation to League members in their slacker tracing endeavours,
supporting their authority when required. See Spy Glass Vol. 1, No. 10, p. 3, all issues U. S.
National Archives, BI MSS, Records of the APL, Box 1, Entry 14, 15, 16. Back
[41] Gilbert Fite and H. C. Peterson,Opponents of War, 1917 1918 , University of Washington
Press, Seattle, 1957, p. 19. Back
[42] Spy Glass proudly stated that according to the Provost Marshal Generals office, the League
had arrested between 20,000 and 25,000 delinquents, in more than two hundred cities and
communities during the period from June 1917 until the Drive of September 1918. See Spy
Glass , Vol. 1, No. 7, p. 1. Back
[43] Spy Glass noted that 12,115 slackers were netted from just five New Jersey cities in the G
reat Drive. See Vol. 1, No. 8, p. 4. Back
[44] See Spy Glass, Vol. 1, No. 7; Vol. 1, No. 12; Vol. 1, No. 11; Letter of Chief Examiner St.
Louis INS to APL, 26 July 1918, BI MSS, Records of the APL, Box 1, A1, Entry 14, 15, 16,
and Spy Glass , Vol. 1, No. 10, p. 1, and Fite and Peterson,Opponents of War , p. 286. Back
[45] Report from Robert D. Elliot to Minister for Defence, 29 November 1917, AA, B197/0,
Item 1851/2/43. Regarding Elliots business operations and Country Party affiliations see
Rivett,Australian Citizen , pp. 86-7. Back
[46] Report from Robert D. Elliot to Minister for Defence. Back
[47] On at least one occasion in January 1925 the CIB persuaded the Governor of the
Commonwealth Bank of Australia to peruse the Banks records for evidence of funds flowing
from Russia, through the Bank, to the Communist Party of Australia. See report of Sydney CIB
to Melbourne HQ, 14 January 1925, AA, A8911/1, Item 154 Part 1.Back

[48] Letter from Herbert Brookes to Senator Pearce and Departmental Memorandum to Pearce,
both 2 May 1918, AA, B197/0, Item 1851/2/43. The Departmental Memo list included names
such as Brookes, Robert Elliot, E. Joske, Registrar of the Dental Board of Victoria, Archibald
Strong, Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, John Clayton, of Collins House, O.
Morrice Williams of the London Bank, Professor Picken of Ormond College, J. Davies,
Secretary of the Commercial Travellers Association, F. P. Brett of Blake and Riggell Solicitors,
C. S. Crouch, Secretary of the British Medical Association and Alderman W. W. Cabena, of
Balaclava. Back
[49] Frank Cain writes that George Steward worked to sabotage the scheme. See Cain, The
Origins of Political Surveillance , 1979, p. 311. Back
[50] Notes regarding Meeting in Prime Ministers office for APL, 29 May 1918, AA, B197/0,
Item 1851/2/43, C 571/1/374. Chief of General Staff Legge was also concerned that the League
would have to be absolutely above Party prejudice. Back
[51] Moore, Secret Army , pp. 155, 186-7, 198 and 234. Several Guards were in fact members of
the Lyons government. Back
[52] Regarding the LNS cessation of repression of political movements see Stuart
Macintyre, The Reds , pp. 232-3. Regarding OGs refusal to liaise with LNS see Mitchell
Library, [New Guard] Series 4951 & 4952 [CY] Reel 2579.Back
[53] Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Westchester Security League Collection MSS,
Box 1. Back
[54] WSL internal report c. 1935.Back
[55] WSL, Inc. Annual Reports, 1934-1935 and 1935-1936, WSL MSS, Box 1. Back
[56] WSL, Inc. Annual Reports, Internal Report , and internal memo Early contacts of W.S.L .,
WSS MSS, Box 1. Back
[57] Letters of J. Edgar Hoover, Special Assistant to Attorney-General to Mrs. Lucia R. Maxwell,
19 May 1923 and R. M. Whitney to Maxwell, 14 June 1923, MI MSS, Reel 19. Back
[58] Letters of Brigadier-General Amos A. Friez to Captain J. H. Bogart, Munitions Building,
Washington D.C., 23 April 1924 and Ida L. Jones to Colonel James H. Reeves, MI, War
Department, 26 April 1927, MI MSS, Reel 19. Back
[59] MI MSS, Reel 19, File 10110-1935. Back
[60] This is indicated by correspondence between Jones and 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 Departments gratitude, he was unable to suggest that the man be placed [directly] in

touch with any branch of the government. See Letter from Jones to Latham, 22 January 1932,
AA, A467, Item Bundle 94/SF42/64 286. Jones argued that it was not desirable that [the
informant] should know where the interest in these matters lies. Back
[61] Jacob Spolansky, The Communist Trail in America , The Macmillan Company, New York,
1951 and Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities and Propaganda
in the United States, in United States Congress, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, 1931. Back
[62] Report No. 205, 12 March 1932, ML Series 4951 & 4952 [CY] Reel 2579. Toman was
also appointed to his intelligence position in the face of opposition from the Country Defence
League. Back
[63] The Australian Protective League was greatly disturbed by the magnitude of community
outrage regarding the spurious prosecution of the IWW men (NLA, MS 1924, Item 17/116 and
Ian Turner,Sydneys Burning , Melbourne, Heinemann, 1967 and Burgmann,Revolutionary
Industrial Unionism ). Harold Jones protected organisations such as the LNS from the Scullin
Labor government and offered the OG the services of the CIB (See Michael Cathcart,Defending
the National Tuckshop Australias Secret Army Intrigue of 1931 , Mc Phee Gribble/Penguin,
Melbourne, 1988, p. 61 and Moore, Secret Army , pp. 63, 135 and 188). Yet, he knew State police
forces would not support his dream of a national counter-propaganda agency (CIB report on
Communism in Australia, 8 August 1921, NLA, MS 1538, Item 27/2). The New South Wales
police force regarded the NG as a useful punching bag that afforded them the opportunity to
demonstrate that they were not biased against labour (Moore, Secret Army , p. 151). Conservative
politicians and business elements were in no doubt that it was politically vital to divorce the
armed services and unreliable paramilitary organisations (i.e. not the OG see Moore, Secret
Army , pp. 38 and 186 7) and the Lyons government had to fight off a proposed Royal
Commission into the NG. Back
[64] AA, A467, Item Bundle 94/SF42/64 286. It is difficult to believe that Australian intelligence
forces junior status did not diminish their enterprise and confidence; in spite of British
authorities assurances to the contrary, the flow of intelligence from Britain to Australia was not
entirely reciprocal and this likely influenced the CIB, which was remiss in sending information
to New Scotland Yard. Back
[65] The regular Army and State police forces did not begin to collect security information in a
systematic fashion until the mid to late 1930s. See Francis Cain, The Origins of Political
Surveillance in Australia , Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1983, pp. 252-6.Back
[66] NLA, MS 1924, Items 21/83 and Moore, Secret Army , p. 125. Among Brookes antiCatholic confreres were the industrial magnate Sir James Elder, Sir John Grice and Justice W. L.
Baillieu. Regarding the sectarian bitterness of April 1918, which presaged the Commonwealth
Governments invitation to Brookes to help form the League the following month, see
Rivett, Australian Citizen , pp. 57-64. Back
[67] NLA, MS 1924. With regard to Brookes Anglo-Saxon passion and its effect on his feelings
about the USA, it is worth noting that Brookes and his wife were early champions of the English

Speaking Union, a trans-Atlantic organisation promoting relations between Great Britain and
the USA . See Rivett, Australian Citizen , p. 109. Back
[68] The Vigilant , Vol. IX, 5, 14 December 1931, NLA, MS 1924. Back
[69] Liberty , 15 November 1932. Back
[70] Liberty , 15 November 1932. Liberty s literary reviewer, P. H. Coates, demonstrated this in
his unfavourable comparison of the works of the contemporary German philosopher Oswald
Spengler with Sir Arthur Salter, an English economist. Back

[65] The regular Army and State police forces did not begin to collect security information in a
systematic fashion until the mid to late 1930s. See Francis Cain, The Origins of Political
Surveillance in Australia , Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1983, pp. 252-6.Back
[66] NLA, MS 1924, Items 21/83 and Moore, Secret Army , p. 125. Among Brookes antiCatholic confreres were the industrial magnate Sir James Elder, Sir John Grice and Justice W. L.
Baillieu. Regarding the sectarian bitterness of April 1918, which presaged the Commonwealth
Governments invitation to Brookes to help form the League the following month, see
Rivett, Australian Citizen , pp. 57-64. Back
[67] NLA, MS 1924. With regard to Brookes Anglo-Saxon passion and its effect on his feelings
about the USA, it is worth noting that Brookes and his wife were early champions of the English
Speaking Union, a trans-Atlantic organisation promoting relations between Great Britain and
the USA . See Rivett, Australian Citizen , p. 109. Back
[68] The Vigilant , Vol. IX, 5, 14 December 1931, NLA, MS 1924. Back
[69] Liberty , 15 November 1932. Back
[70] Liberty , 15 November 1932. Liberty s literary reviewer, P. H. Coates, demonstrated this in
his unfavourable comparison of the works of the contemporary German philosopher Oswald
Spengler with Sir Arthur Salter, an English economist. Back