Workers against Warfare: the American and Australian
Experiences Before and During World War 1
Verity Burgmann and Jeffrey Johnson
Before and during World War I, the far-left in Australia and the USA campaigned
against militarism and involvement in the Great War in differing circumstances:
Australia’s immediate involvement from 4 August 1914 and the United States’ later
entry into the war on 6 April 1917; contrasting roles played by the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW); and wartime divisions in Australia being played out within the
Labor Party, in government until it split over conscription. However, in one important
respect the situation in both countries was similar. Both were governed by parties with
traditional doubts and qualms about militarist exploits abroad, but which
unfortunately overcame these reservations to bring their respective nations
enthusiastically into the fray.
The Australian Labor Party was committed programmatically to the cultivation of
“Australian national sentiment,” toying even with republican notions in its most
radical moments of hostility to continuing British sovereignty over Australia.
Nonetheless, Labor leaders had shifted towards an outlook more acquiescent towards
Britain and the Empire, a process especially apparent during Labor’s period in
government 1910-1913. This transition away from customary Labor Party wariness
about British imperialism was confirmed by Labor leader Andrew Fisher when he
famously announced on 31 July 1914 that should the mother country become
embroiled in war: “Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to
our last man and our last shilling.” Robin Archer argues that the Australian Labor
Party’s position stemmed from its precocious strength as a political party already
1
capable of forming government and therefore keen to hold the support of the median
voter—in comparison with other labour and social democratic parties who opposed
the drift to war.1 Douglas Newton deems Fisher’s speech a calculated political tactic
that would protect against the accusation that the Labor Party, seamed through with
Catholic supporters of Home Rule for Ireland, was unfit to govern if war broke out.2 It
worked. The election held a month after the outbreak of war convincingly returned a
Labor government, judged by the nation at large in this period of patriotic fervour as
competent to conduct the war effort. Yet many within the party, both in parliament
and amongst the rank and file, especially in the trade unions, were hostile to the war,
influenced still by labour movement traditions of anti-militarism and anti-imperialism.
A moderate weekly labour newspaper in Melbourne commented at the outbreak of
war: “The workers have nothing to gain in the evidently coming slaughter, but all to
lose.”3 As its truth became ever more apparent, this position became an increasingly
popular one within the labour movement.
In the US the governing Democrats were solidly “isolationist”—until external
exigencies prompted them to reverse more than a century of this valued national
tradition in which they had strongly shared. American isolationism dated back to
Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address where he famously warned that the US
should avoid Europe’s “entangling alliances.” When war broke out in Europe in the
spring of 1914, the US stood committed against involvement. American reluctance on
the road to war is not surprising, given the attitudes of its citizenry and leadership.
Most Americans felt Europe’s quarrels were its own, and specific immigrant
communities had compelling reasons why America should stay out of such conflicts.
1
Robin Archer, “Stopping War and Stopping Conscription,” Labour History, no. 106 (May 2014):
2
Douglas Newton, “At the Birth of Anzac: Labor, Andrew Fisher and Australia’s Offer of an
62.
Expeditionary Force to Britian in 1914,” Labour History, no. 106 (May 2014): 19-20, 25, 30.
3
Quoted in Brian McKinlay, The ALP. A Short History of the Australian Labor Party (Melbourne:
Drummond, 1981), 39.
2
Irish Americans, for example, did not care to help England so opposed engagement;
and thousands of German-Americans did not want to fight countrymen from their
homeland. One of the more popular songs of 1915, “Don’t Take My Darling Boy
Away,” seemed to encapsulate these broader American isolationist attitudes.4
The outbreak of war in Europe had not made US intervention inevitable; but by
1915, “preparedness” took an increasingly strong hold despite traditional American
attitudes favouring isolationism. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and others argued
that a large and ready military remained critical to international prowess. Nonetheless,
President Woodrow Wilson and the Americans who broadly supported nonintervention adhered to an isolationist course for almost three years. Wilson, a pacifist
and a late-career politician with considerably more experience domestically (as
governor of New Jersey and a former Princeton professor) typified isolationist
feelings. “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with
foreign affairs,” he joked to a friend. However, he and his Secretary of State William
Jennings Bryan, also a pacifist with little foreign policy experience, were consumed
by foreign policy questions and the war. Nonetheless, Wilson remained committed to
isolationism during these relatively early days. Even after the Lusitania attack, Wilson
maintained in his declaration on neutrality that the US “must be neutral in fact as well
as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls.” And Wilson won reelection
in 1916 under the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of the War.”5
However, President Wilson’s positions had begun to shift, particularly in light of
the threats posed by U-Boat attacks and Pancho Villa in New Mexico. As US
involvement seemed increasingly unavoidable, preparedness advocates claimed that a
strong defence network, particularly a ready army and navy, mattered. Public displays
4
Harry Von Tilzer, “Don’t Take My Darling Boy Away!” sheet music (New York: Broadway
Music, 1915), available online at the Duke University Digital Collections
(http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm_a6074/).
5
David R. Woodward, Trial by Friendship: Anglo-American Relations, 1917-1918 (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 7; Pearson’s Magazine vol. 33 (February 1915): 250.
3
of preparedness and patriotism became increasingly common. On 14 June 1916,
Wilson headed Washington’s Preparedness Parade in front of an estimated 60,000
men, women, and children. Papers billed it “the most remarkable patriotic spectacle in
the capital has even seen.” By presidential order, all federal offices closed for the day.
A wide array of individuals joined the march, including cabinet officials, members of
congress, scientists, suffragists, boy scouts, and more. At the front was Wilson,
confidently marching with his head erect, shoulders back, and donning a straw hat.
The President even carried an American flag over his shoulder. He smiled broadly and
often raised his hat to the cheers from the crowd before stopping and reviewing the
rest of the parade from a grandstand. At one point handlers released several hundred
carrier pigeons into the air in front of the President—“to take the message of
preparedness all over the capital.” In February Wilson had asked the crowd of 18,000
at Convention Hall in Kansas City to join him in a singing of “America.” And
thousands more marched at Seattle’s 1916 Preparedness Day Parade. Across the
nation, preparedness parades and rallies occurred, meant to celebrate American
readiness and participation.6
Though the outcomes were the same, Wilson took considerably longer than his
antipodean counterparts to lead his country into the war. In the US, therefore, antimilitarist agitation was focused much longer on campaigning against the idea of
preparedness. For many, indeed most, on the left, preparedness represented militarism
run amok, which the left had long opposed. In this campaign against preparedness, the
left, dominated by the Socialist Party of America (SPA), was careful to distinguish its
position from simple American isolationism. Socialist ideology had never fit with
militarism. For example, the Socialist Party of Washington’s 1912 platform outlined
formal objections to the Boy Scouts and the militaristic lessons of the organization. In
1917 they similarly adopted resolutions against compulsory military training in
Washington’s high schools. Anarchists and syndicalists were also hostile to militarism
6
New York Times, 15 June 1916, 3 February 1916.
4
and US involvement in the conflagration in Europe. Emma Goldman, for example,
delivered anti-war addresses across the country that warned of the dangers under titles
such as “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter.”7 But American socialists
led the charge. Without question, they proved to be the most unabashed and
outspoken critics of US potential and actual involvement in the European war.
The Marxist interpretation of the war in Europe offered by the SPA was clear:
Capitalism inevitably evolves into imperialism, as countries must expand beyond their
boundaries; eventually, imperialism continues until capitalist nations confront each
other’s economic interests, the outcome of which is inevitably war as these nations
endeavour to satisfy capitalist pursuits. “Every intelligent workingman and woman,”
announced the International Socialist Review in 1914, “is opposed to all capitalist
wars.” Socialists also stressed that workers provided the bulk of armies; the march to
war would ultimately mean the working-class in the trenches.
Left-wing newspapers printed graphic reports, such as the atrocities at Verdun, to
provide evidence for avoiding the viciousness of warfare. One from a French captain
dramatically described 7,000 dead bodies “heaped” along a 700-yard front. Socialists
used these vivid descriptions of war involving the death of European soldiers to
encourage working-class opposition. “The workers of one country are misled to
believing that they have some advantage in slaying the workers of another country,”
SPA leader Eugene Debs contended in the Northwest Worker. “War is Murder in
Uniform,” Debs declared later. “It is hell,” the great agitator continued, “and the
profit-mongers for whom it exists . . . are devilish.”8
In the much shorter period of Australian preparedness, socialists and members of
the syndicalist or revolutionary industrial unionist organisation, the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), were predominant amongst the oppositional elements,
as John Barrett acknowledges in his definitive history of “boy conscription” 1911-
7
At Averill Hall on Fillmore Street, San Francisco, reported in San Francisco Chronicle, 22 July
1916.
8
Northwest Worker, 5 August 1915, 20 January 1916, 1 June 1916.
5
1915.9 When the Labor government introduced military training for males aged 12-26
from 1 January 1911, the IWW Clubs issued a pamphlet that urged workers not to
fight “fellow workers of other lands” and to understand that “there are only two
nations in the world—the working class nation, one despite race, creed, or color; and
the capitalist nation, one in greed of gain, lust of exploitation, and unity of purpose to
keep the working nation in subjection.” Instead of patriotism it recommended “class
hatred” and the international union of all workers, the IWW.10 Precisely because the
Social Revolution required thorough-going industrial solidarity, the IWW Club
opposed all forms of divisiveness amongst workers, such as craft unionism, “national
prejudices” and “race hatred.”11
The IWW Clubs had been established in Australia by the Socialist Labor Party
(SLP) from 1907 onwards. The SLP were followers of American socialist Daniel De
Leon, leader of the Detroit IWW that placed equal emphasis on industrial unionism
and socialist party organising. Although the non-political Chicago IWW became the
dominant IWW brand in Australia after its establishment in Adelaide in 1911 and
especially from 1914 onwards, IWW ideas were first brought to Australia by these
IWW Clubs. The SLP weekly newspaper The People emphasized that the enemy was
at home, not abroad. National prejudices and racial hatreds were “fostered by the
ruling class and its emissaries” to keep workers of each nation “ready at command to
fly at and tear one another’s throats with the ferocity of wild beasts.”12 The SLP
highlighed the Labor Party’s sordid role in the process. “In defence of its infamous act
of introducing child-conscription into Australia,” the ALP painted a lurid picture of a
9
John Barrett, Falling In. Australians and “Boy Conscription” 1911-1915 (Sydney: Hale &
Iremonger, 1979), 87-94.
10
IWW Club, Anti-Militarism. An Appeal from the I.W.W. Clubs to the Australian Working Class
(Sydney: State Executive of the IWW Clubs, June 1911).
11
IWW Club National Executive, The Two Wars (Sydney: IWW Club, n.d.), 1-31.
12
People, 13 September 1913, editorial.
6
Brown Australia “to get the working class of Australia shackled to Conscription and
militarism.”13 The anti-conscription resolution of the 1912 SLP Conference ended:
The workers of the world, being a wage-slave class with economic interests in
common, have no quarrel with each other, and urge upon the workers to organise upon
the basis of the preamble of the I.W.W. and the S.L.P., for the complete overthrow of
capitalism and the establishment of a universal republic.14
The other major socialist formation, the Australian Socialist Party, was prominent
in encouraging boys to refuse to register. Like the SLP, it supported the Second
International’s resolution for a general strike in the event of imminent war, “and
through the threat of industrial war force the capitalists to refrain from military
war.”15 In March 1912, its leader Harry Holland was one of the first parents convicted
for failing to register his son for military training. Holland’s pamphlet The Crime of
Conscription, published by the ASP, counseled all working-class boys to refuse drill:
“we Socialists are no patriots!”16 The only socialists who demurred were some
members of the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), close to the Labor government. Their
prevarication on the issue of boy conscription prompted anti-militarist VSPers to form
a Melbourne branch of the VSP in 1912. When the VSP attempted to reunite with the
ASP in 1913, the ASP responded this was impossible because the VSP supported the
Labor Party, and many of its members supported militarism, thereby discrediting the
socialist movement.17 A similar split occurred in Western Australia about September
1912, the new Perth ASP contemptuous of the older Western Australian Socialist
Party because: “They appear to believe that a Citizen Army has nothing to do with
militarism. They support the Labour Party’s Conscription Act, which is more drastic
13
People, 15 February 1913.
14
People, 13 April 1912.
15
International Socialist, 24 June 1911.
16
H.E. Holland, The Crime of Conscription (Sydney: ASP, 1912), 13-15.
17
IS, 20 December 1913.
7
and despotic than the German Act. Bluntly, we say they are a barrier to the progress
of scientific socialism.”18
The ASP’s pamphlet The Crime of Conscription promised that the ASP would urge
general strike action to prevent Australia marching armed forces against the workers
of any country.19 It was unable to do so when the guns of August 1914 sounded, but
the ASP was confident their socialist comrades in Europe were organising a general
strike to hamper warmongers.20 It discounted, as lies of the “Yellow” press, the first
information mid-September that European socialists had done nothing to prevent the
war, and expressed its confidence that “against war and militarism the Socialist party
throughout the world is as solid as a rock.”21 The SLP likewise believed that the
Second International was mobilising to prevent war. “Alone, the Socialist, whether of
German, French, British, Austrian, or Russian origin, sets his face against nationalities
… no one country is so superior to any other country as to justify the sacrifice of a
single life in its defence.”22 Although workers and socialist party activists did indeed
mobilise in their thousands to oppose the war, socialist deputies in Germany, Austria
and France all voted for war credits, effectively putting an end to the Second
International.23
When the truth was revealed, the ASP argued that alleged socialists who voted for
war credits were no more socialists than ALP politicians.24 “‘The working man has no
country,’ said the authors of the Communist Manifesto, but the Socialists of Europe
18
IS, 28 December 1912.
19
Holland, The Crime of Conscription, 13-15.
20
IS, 15 August 1914, 22 August 1914, 29 August 1914.
21
IS, 12 September 1914.
22
People, 27 August 1914.
23
For a recent study of this disaster, see Andrew G. Bonnell, “The Great Catastrophe: 1914 and the
End of the Second International,” The Queensland Journal of Labour History, no. 19 (September
2014): 19-29.
24
8
IS, 15 January 1916. See also IS, 14 November 1914, 14 October 1916.
have been indulging in a lot of revisionism lately.”25 The SLP was likewise aghast to
discover European socialists had allowed “false sentiments” to govern their thoughts
and actions.26 In editorials early in 1915 the People concluded the Second
International had failed to prevent war because it was not organised along industrial
unionist lines, so there was insufficiently effective organisation to be able to enforce
the General Strike.27 Its collapse proved the validity of Detroit IWW methods: ballots
not bullets, industrial organization of the working class not its military mobilization.28
However, it was the Chicago IWW that led Australian anti-war agitation from the
moment hostilities commenced.29 In contrast, Melvyn Dubofsky argues that the
American IWW “did nothing directly to interfere with the American war effort.”30
Other scholars of the American IWW broadly concur with this assessment, noting for
example that the IWW even withdrew its anti-war pamphlets from distribution,
having decided that anti-war activity would distract from organising at the point of
production and invite government repression.31 This is precisely what happened to the
Socialist Party of America as it continued its principled opposition to warfare and US
25
IS, 14 October 1916.
26
People, 7 January 1915.
27
People, 18 February 1915, editorial.
28
People, 4 March 1915 editorial.
29
Direct Action, 10 August 1914, p.1.
30
Melvin Dubofsky, “Dissent: history of American radicalism,” in Dissent: Explorations in the
History of American Radicalism, ed. A.E. Young (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1968),
202. See also Verity Burgmann, “Antipodean Peculiarities: Comparing the Australian IWW with the
American,” Labor History, vol. 40, no. 3 (1999): 387-9.
31
Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 206-207; Thorstein Veblen,
“Farm Labor and the I.W.W.,” in Essays in Our Changing World Order (New York: Viking Press,
1954), 329; Conlin, Bread and Roses, 80; Philip Taft, “The Federal Trials of the IWW,” Labor History
3 (1962): 59, 71-3.
9
entry into the Great War. According to Eric Foner, the SPA’s opposition to the war
“laid the party open to the massive repression” and ultimately led to its demise.32
President Wilson’s call for war came on 2 April 1917, and the formal resolution
passed both houses of Congress on 6 April despite the continued objections of
prominent statesmen like William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette. Formal
protest came quickly from the SPA. On 7 April 1917, the SPA held an emergency
convention in St. Louis, Missouri. Approximately 200 delegates descended on St
Louis’s Planters Hotel as one observer remembered, “the war clouds grew thicker and
thicker.” At the convention the attendees adopted a “united, decisive, and determined
position on the question of war,” one that expressed the party’s explicit anti-war
commitment and reinforced objections to looming conscription and strike restrictions.
Delegates drafted a pamphlet titled “Proclamation and War Program” and States,
including those in the Pacific Northwest, made arrangements for distribution
campaigns.33
As in Australia with the pre-war disputes between socialists over the Labor
government’s boy conscription, this St. Louis meeting in the immediate wake of US
entry into the war revealed that unanimity on militarist matters did not completely
prevail among American socialists either. However, in the US as in Australia, the
anti-militarist position clearly predominated. At St. Louis, Kate Richards O’Hare
chaired a new “War and Militarism” committee to hear the varied voices of delegates.
The hearings, with Washington State’s Kate Sadler seated on the committee, indicated
that a clear majority unabashedly opposed the war and hoped to continue their vocal
32
Eric Foner, “Why is there no Socialism in the United States?,” History Workshop, no. 17 (Spring
1984): 72.
33
HC Peterson and Gilbert Fite, Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1957), 4-5, 8. This was the SPA’s sixth national convention. Delegates from Washington, Idaho,
and Montana all sat on committees. Northwest Worker (Everett, WA), 5 April 1917, 12 April 1917, 10
May 1917; David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), 26; David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1955), 93-94.
10
resistance. Of the three formal opinions submitted to the committee, the first and most
popular voiced clear opposition to capitalist wars and conscription. Three delegates
offered a more moderate position that reiterated the majority opinion almost entirely,
but upheld the right of socialists to moot disagreement in public. Finally, a small but
not insignificant minority resolved to support the war and make the necessary
sacrifices the nation needed. When the delegates came to vote on the matter, the
convention excluded the middle position for its similarity to the majority one. During
national balloting, socialists ultimately supported, nearly three to one, the majority
position of opposition to the war.34
Though the St. Louis resolution opposing the war offered the appearance of
agreement, the debates revealed the complex divisiveness within leftist American
politics brought by the war. From these first anti-war resolutions, according to
historians H.C. Peterson and Gilbert Fite, the war issue threatened to “split the
Socialist party wide open.” Several popular and vocal socialist intellectuals, notably
Charles Edward Russell, John Spargo, Upton Sinclair and William English Wallace,
criticized as “treasonous” the SPA’s anti-war position throughout 1917, and supported
the American war effort. Some of them, including Spargo, Russell and Sinclair,
formally defected from the party. Their departure encouraged others in their belief
that the party was factionalised between pro- and anti-war socialists. For example, in
the Northwest an article titled “Socialism and the War” in Everett’s Co-operative
News observed how “the Socialists of America have split into two factions. It is one
of the most remarkable political phenomenon [sic] of our history that at [a] time when
the Socialistic movement of many years seemed nearest fruition, the Socialist[s]
should fall out among themselves.” Nationally and regionally there were always
exceptions, but according to Shannon, “an overwhelming majority of Socialist Party
members were strongly opposed to the war and were committed to agitation against
it.” In speeches, demonstrations and propaganda, the country’s socialists voiced their
34
Shannon, The Socialist Party, 95, 97.
11
objections to warfare in general and the Great War in particular. This majority
position was expressed by Adolph Germer, SPA national secretary in 1917, who
encouraged his comrades to “keep up the war on war. Don’t relax one moment in your
agitation.”35
Though Australian socialists in both the ASP and SLP were also solidly anti-war, it
was nonetheless the IWW that spearheaded left-wing opposition to Australia’s
participation in the war. The principles and tactics of revolutionary industrial
unionism provided an explicit and developed basis for IWW internationalism.
Moreover, the ASP and the SLP were embarrassed by European socialist parties
voting for war credits on the outbreak of war, which raised further the profile of the
IWW, untainted by the Second International’s disgrace. Because the US was not at
that stage involved in the war, the behaviour of European socialists at that historic
moment was less harmful to the morale and authority of American socialists than it
was to their Australian counterparts. The Australian IWW was mindful of the dangers
that had prompted American IWW circumspection about anti-war activity but threw
itself wholeheartedly into anti-war campaigning. In so doing, it increased its
opportunities to organise at the point of production, because its anti-war activity won
it supporters amongst workers inclined to be critical of the senseless slaughter and
angered by inequalities of sacrifice on the home front. It used this wartime moment to
grow in size and influence.
On 7 August, the Saturday night following the outbreak of war, IWW anti-war
speakers in Bathurst Street were heckled by “patriotic interrupters” and much
argument ensued. The following day, the IWW organised an anti-war demonstration
in the Domain at which its orators denounced the war under an IWW banner bearing
35
Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 10; Shannon, The Socialist Party, 99, 101-104; Kennedy,
Over Here, 27; “The American Socialists and the War,” Pamphlet, 1917, MSS 1513, Box 18, Folder
12, OHS; Co-operative News (Everett, WA), 18 April 1918; Socialist Party Bulletin, March 1917, SPA
Papers, Reel 130.
12
the motto “WAR! WHAT FOR?”36 On 10 August 1914, underneath a gruesome
depiction of war, the front page of Direct Action answered that question.
For the workers and their dependents: death, starvation, poverty and untold misery.
For the capitalist class: gold, stained with the blood of millions, riotous luxury,
banquets of jubilation over the graves of their dupes and slaves. War is hell! Send the
capitalists to hell and war is impossible.37
The following Sunday, the IWW Domain meeting drew an exceptional crowd,
“ringing cheers” were given against the war and 800 copies of Direct Action sold.
Detective Nicholas Moore visited IWW headquarters and asked JB King for an
undertaking that the Wobblies would stop criticising the war; no such promise could
be extracted.38 Instead, the next issue of Direct Action declared on its front page:
LET THOSE WHO OWN AUSTRALIA DO THE FIGHTING. Put the wealthiest
in the front ranks; the middle class next; follow these with politicians, lawyers, sky
pilots and judges. Answer the declaration of war with the call for a GENERAL
STRIKE … Don’t be fooled by jingoism: The workers have no quarrel with Austria,
Germany or Japan. The workers in those countries are as ruthlessly robbed and
exploited as the workers of Australia.39
The IWW’s distinctively insulting argot railed against “patriotic boneheads” and
“Mr Blocks” who boycotted so-called “enemy aliens” in the workplace;40 and the
“mugs” who donned “the uniform of slavery and wholesale murder, and when the big
war drum beats rush to the aid of a master class to slaughter their foreign classbrothers.”41 Mr Simple, the cartoon character lampooned in Direct Action, was the
type to go to war, devoid of class-consciousness, lacking insight into the nature of
capitalism and imperialism. On the other side of the class ledger, “the whole horde of
36
Australian Peace Alliance file, Merrifield Collection, La Trobe Library, Melbourne; DA, 22
August 1914, 3; State Archives of New South Wales 7/5543.
37
DA, 10 August 1914, editorial.
38
APA file; L.C. Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968),
105 [1935]; DA, 22 August 1914, 3; State Archives of New South Wales 7/5543.
39
Direct Action, 22 August 1914, 1.
40
DA, 1 January 1915, 2.
41
DA, 15 May1915, 1, 3, 4. See also DA, May Day 1915, 2; 1 August 1915, 2.
13
capitalist flunkeys” would sacrifice the last man and the last shilling “so long as he
was not the last man and the shilling was not his own”. “Let these cowardly windbags stop bleating and howling for blood.”42
Direct Action emphasised the class-based inequality not just of sacrifices at the
front but also privations imposed at home. Bosses, the IWW pointed out, used the
increasing unemployment in the early years of the war to attack wage levels and
working conditions, to make workers work harder for less money. Landlords evicted
the wives and children of men who had joined the army, even of those killed at the
front. It was wage-workers who lost their jobs as government finance was directed
towards the war effort. Employers profiteered in providing the Australian government
with goods for the army that were grossly underweight or woefully inadequate. The
IWW argued that, apart from the obvious opportunities for making vast profits, the
war was useful to the capitalist class as a means of dividing workers and checking
their rising aspirations.43
The “recruiting poster” that started appearing on Sydney buildings in July 1915
was the ultimate Wobbly commentary on the hypocrisy of the war-mongers:
TO ARMS!!
Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians,
Landlords, Newspaper Editors, and
Other Stay-at-home Patriots.
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU IN
THE TRENCHES!
WORKERS
FOLLOW YOUR MASTERS!!44
In December 1915 talented young Direct Action cartoonist Syd Nicholls depicted
vividly the contrast in wartime experience between that of the worker who died at the
front and the capitalist who prospered at home.45
42
DA, 15 August 1915, 1; 15 July 1915, editorial, 2.
43
DA, 15 February 1915, 2; 16 October 1915, 1; 15 April 1915, 2; 25 December 1915, 1; 22 August
1914, 4; 15 May 1915, 2; 15 June 1915, 1; 1 April 1916, 4.
44
DA, 1 October 1915, 3.
45 DA, 4 December 1915, 1.
14
Contemporary activist Fred Coombe recalls how the IWW gave public voice to
private feelings: “the thoughts in people’s minds they couldn’t articulate, but the old
Wobblies could.”46 Sydney IWW speakers—Donald Grant, Tom Barker, Tom Glynn,
JB King, Charlie Reeve, Peter Larkin and Jock Wilson—were “unrivalled in their
agitational vigour,” according to Norman Jeffery, as they alerted people to facts about
the war obscured or repressed by the authorities. In the West, too, from the onset of
war, Monty Miller, Mick Sawtell and other Wobblies “exhibited courage and
steadfastness with their anti-militarist views and critical attitude to the War.” Ted
Moyle, one of the central figures in the anti-war movement in South Australia, claims
that the IWW in Adelaide “faced up to the hostility of the soldiers and the ‘patriots’
practically on its own” as it “gave to its audiences what it considered to be the plain
unvarnished Truth of having been wage-slaves they were now to become cannonfodder in the interests of the same master class.” In Queensland, IWW agitators
regaled the crowds with anti-war propaganda. When Prime Minister Hughes
addressed a lunch-time meeting from the post office steps in Brisbane, Wobblies
decided to “count the bastard out” and, by the time they reached ten, the crowd had
joined in so loudly Hughes could not continue to speak.47
In Australia, unlike the US, the question of conscription was put to the people in
referenda on 28 October 1916 and 20 December 1917 and defeated both times. These
referenda provided invaluable opportunity for those who opposed compulsion to
explain their reasons. Peter Rushton observed: “From a ginger group on the periphery
of the labour movement, it was transformed into the most provocative and vocal, if
46
DA, 15 February 1915, 4; 24 June 1916, 1; Fred Coombe, interview with Verity Burgmann, 15
May 1984.
47
Norman Jeffery, “The labour movement,” 6 (unpublished manuscript in possession of Verity
Burgmann); Ted Moyle, 10 August 1945, to Alan Finger, and notebook no.1, Ted Moyle Collection (in
possession of Jim Moss, transcribed by Verity Burgmann 1995); Ray Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty.
Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914-18 (Sydney/London/Boston: Allen & Unwin,
1987), 75; Dick Surplus, interview with Jim Beatson, 1972 (recording in possession of Verity
Burgmann).
15
not the most important, organ of anti-conscription.”48 Ted Moyle considers the
conscription issue was “food to the I.W.W.,” giving it “life and movement” and
“elbowroom to agitate,” because it was “in the front line of a great & popular mass
struggle.”49 Ernie Lane recalls that the IWW played a prominent and uncompromising
part in the anti-conscription campaign: “Unlike the official Labour movement, the
I.W.W. with rare courage and reckless of all consequences denounced and exposed
the true causes of the war as a deadly clash of interests of conflicting imperial
capitalist groups.”50
The IWW was careful to distinguish its extreme anti-war position from the more
muted philosophy of most with whom it cooperated in the anti-conscription
movement, the “pure and simple antis,” who were “unscientific and illogical since
they uphold the capitalistic system.” The IWW “not only opposes conscription, but it
attacks militarism in all its forms.”51
It was not simply that IWW anti-militarist propaganda was more extreme than anticonscription rhetoric; so also were the means by which it intended to contest any
introduction of conscription. As early as 1 October 1915 it urged workers to answer
the threat of conscription with a general strike: “A Conscription Act should be the
signal for industrial revolt and insurrection.” Be prepared, it advised workers, “to stop
every industry and every wheel in Australia, and tell these unscrupulous vampires that
if they want blood a little may be shed at home.” VG Childe notes how effectively it
produced the impression that it was a formidable and desperate body that would resist
to the utmost any attempt to impose compulsory service.52
48
Peter Rushton, “The Industrial Workers of the World in Sydney, 1913 -1917” (MA thesis,
University of Sydney, 1969), 207-8, 435.
49
Ted Moyle, notebook no.1.
50
E.H. Lane, Dawn to Dusk, Reminiscences of a Rebel (Brisbane: William Brooks, 1939), 174.
51
DA, 28 October 1916, 3.
52
DA, 1 October 1915, 2; 6 May 1916, 1; also 9 October 1915, 2; 1 July1916, editorial, 2; V.G.
Childe, How Labour Governs (Melbourne University Press, 1964) [1923], 146.
16
Yet the IWW also made an original contribution to the arguments specifically
against conscription. It made two distinctive and important points: that conscription
would be used to discipline the workforce; and that, in opposing conscription, it was
an important matter of principle that there be no pandering to racial fears about the
import of coloured labour to replace the white labour at the front.
The ASP and SLP followed the IWW lead. A People editorial announced:
“Australia is in danger. At least the working class of Australia is in danger. The
conscription conspiracy is raising its head and gathering all its force to shackle the
workers with the chains of compulsory militarism.”53 In a lengthy article in November
1916, the ASP denounced the anti-conscription elements of the Labor Party for using
such a racial idea as the White Australia Policy in their campaign, and at a time when
efforts should be made to rid the world of national animosities.54 The socialist
contribution to the anti-conscription movement was less dramatic than that of the
IWW but was nonetheless significant. Indeed, the most famous poem of the anticonscription movement, “The Blood Vote,” is attributed to W.R. Winspear, treasurer
of the ASP 1912-1916, who often also edited the International Socialist.55
In Australia the issue of conscription, because it never happened, was to an extent
separate from the matter of the war itself. It was possible, as many in the labour
movement did, to support the war effort but vehemently oppose the possibility of
conscription. In the US war involvement and conscription were intertwined from the
outset, with the government passing the draft law to introduce conscription on 18 May
1917, only a few weeks after US entry into the war. At the centre of labour and the
left’s objections to war therefore were arguments against forced military service.
Alexander Berkman (of Fricke assassination fame) ran his own radical anarchist paper
in San Francisco, titled The Blast, which characterized ant-conscription agitation. In
53
People, July 1916 editorial.
54
IS, 18 November 1916.
55
Verity Burgmann, “The Mightier Pen. William Robert Winspear,” in Rebels and Radicals, ed.
Eric Fry (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 175-6.
17
an issue of this paper, Berkman urged those eligible for conscription to not register
with the government: “The war shouters and their prostitute press, bent on snaring
you into the army, tell you that registration has nothing to do with conscription. They
lie. Without registration, conscription is impossible … To register is to acknowledge
the right of the Government to conscript.” New York’s The Sun reprinted his pleas
and observed that the comments “may interest the government” hinting that this type
of disloyalty would not be tolerated.56 Leftist critiques of the draft mounted by
socialists and other radicals did not resonate with the American people. Nationally,
according to World War I historians Peterson and Fite, Americans did not generate a
massive outpouring of opposition to conscription; instead “the vast majority” of
citizens “accepted conscription in rather calm resignation,” believing it an obligatory
and patriotic duty to support and raise an army.57
The debate that polarized Australian society simply did not occur in the US. Those
who waged working-class war against warfare also spearheaded the campaign against
conscription, and the fight against compulsion was strengthened by the existence of a
broader battle against militarism. Like the IWW, the SLP and ASP opposed the war
itself and Australia’s participation in it, not just conscription, but in Australia it was
the IWW that made the most noise about its anti-militarism and therefore had the
greater influence on the anti-conscription cause. For this it was to pay the heaviest
price of those forces on the left that opposed war and conscription, as subsequent
events reveal.
In the USA it was the socialists, outspoken against the war, who most felt the
rebuke of the state and suffered most. The US government was concerned to repress
leftist and “disloyal” speech, even prior to April 1917. During early 1916, the Labor
World cited seven attacks in ninety days on the “liberty of the working class press.”
Authorities arrested Margaret Sanger for “misuse of the mails,” and the arrests of
56
The Sun, June 3, 1917; Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey
of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 253.
57
Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 23.
18
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Emma Goldman quickly followed. The government
crackdown on those who opposed preparedness included suppression of three papers:
Revolt, The Alarm, and a spring 1916 issue of Berkman’s Blast. For Berkman, this
marked “an era of commercial imperialism backed by the bayonets of
‘preparedness.’”58
With entry to the war, David Shannon argues that “a new problem confronted
American Socialists” and radicals. Now, it seemed, anti-war agitation and dodging
persecution for their “disloyalty” constituted most socialist activity.59 Socialists in
particular came to realize their anti-war principles held serious political and judicial
consequences for them, as the persecution of socialists steadily shifted beyond namecalling and charges of disloyalty to arrests and indictments. For instance, Minnesota
politicians Jacob Bentall and James Peterson served years in prison for their anticonscription and anti-war actions. When Scott Nearing published an anti-war
pamphlet, “The Great Madness,” he promptly faced indictments for his disloyalty. All
across the country, opposition to war met quick reaction from authorities.60
To empower the state in its repression of anti-war agitation, federal legislation was
enacted in the form of the Espionage Act of June 1917, the Trading with the Enemy
Act of October 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, which targeted radicals
through restrictions on speech and expression. Accusations of “disloyalty” abounded
against socialist anti-war activists. By such means the federal government aimed to
halt anti-war politicizing. By mid-1917 post offices regularly denied International
Socialist Review and Appeal to Reason distribution. Later in the year authorities
blacklisted approximately sixty papers nationally. Among the national SPA
leadership, Victor Berger, J. Lewis Engdahl, Irwin St. John Tucker, William F.
58
Labor World (Duluth, MN), 22 April 1916.
59
Shannon, The Socialist Party, 80.
60
Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 184; Clemens P. Work, Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition
and Free Speech in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 49;
Shannon, The Socialist Party, 87, 98; Kennedy, Over Here, 26.
19
Krause, and Adolph Germer faced indictments. In June 1918 Eugene Debs delivered a
famed three-hour anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, and told the audience they were
slaves and “cannon fodder.” Authorities convicted Debs under the auspices of the
Espionage Act and he received a ten-year sentence.61
American anti-war socialists were key targets of these patriotic pieces of
legislation. By contrast, the IWW threat, of a broader industrial nature, was contained
by privatised retribution—beatings, lynchings, intimidation and torturings by
employers and loyalists—and “criminal syndicalism” legislation enacted in twenty
states and two territories between 1917 and 1920.62 This legislation was unusually farreaching in that it did not simply cover the actual commission of acts of violence
against life, property and government, but made criminal the advocacy of doctrines of
arguably violent change to the existing economic and political order.63 Whether aimed
at socialist anti-war agitation or revolutionary industrial unionist activism, it was
apparent that in these years of American involvement in the war and immediately
beyond, being part of the nation’s left or in any way associated with the “radicalism”
moniker had disastrous consequences for individuals. Undeterred, Debs famously ran
for president one final time in 1920—from his jail cell. Anti-radicalism reared its head
again when Congress twice refused Wisconsin’s Victor Berger his rightful seat in the
61
International Socialist Review 15 (November 1914): 309; International Socialist Review 15
(March 1915): 561; “Platform of the Socialist Party of Washington, 1912”, Ephemera, Washington
State Historical Society; Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 13-15; Co-operative News, 22 November 1917; Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the
United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 105.
62
E. F. Dowell, A History of Criminal Syndicalism Legislation in the United States (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1969), 21; Dubofsky, “Dissent,” 202-3; R. E. Ficken, “The Wobbly horrors: Pacific
Northwest lumbermen and the Industrial Workers of theWorld, 1917-1918,” Labor History, 24, 3
(Summer 1983), 325-41; R. C. Sims, “Idaho’s Criminal Syndicalism Act: one State’s response to
radical labor,” Labor History, 15, 4 (Fall 1974), 511-12.
63
Dowell, Criminal Syndicalism Legislation, 46, 144-5; Sims, “Idaho’s Criminal Syndicalism Act,”
513; Dubofsky, “Dissent,” 203.
20
House; and in 1920 the New York State Assembly similarly unseated five socialists.64
Though the war in Europe was over, the Red Scare waged in the US from about 1919
to 1921 meant that US radicals were still under siege.
In Australia it was the IWW rather than the lower-profile socialists who most
dramatically experienced the iron heel of repression, not just for their industrial
militancy but also for their leading role in anti-war activity.65 Also different from the
circumstances in the USA, this state repression was carried out by governments,
federal and State, run by IWW opponents within the labour movement. The IWW’s
anti-war agitation had encouraged the fragmentation of the labour movement into a
left/anti-conscription majority and right/pro-conscription minority, leaving the likes of
Hughes and Holman unable to control their parliamentary Labor party room meetings.
A split was looming but, well before this, the forces at the disposal of the Hughes
federal Labor government worked closely with those of the NSW Holman Labor
government to meet the challenge laid down by the IWW.
For the poster prejudicial to recruiting, Barker was fined £50 and given a £200
bond or six months imprisonment with hard labour if he failed to comply with the
War Precautions Act in the future. Broken Hill miners responded by refusing to hear
Holman on his propaganda tour; he was obliged to stay on his train and return to
Adelaide.66 In March 1916 Barker was again convicted for publishing the Syd
Nicholls cartoon. He was fined £100, refused to pay and was sent to jail on 4 May
64
Jeffrey A. Johnson, They Are All Red Out Here: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-
1925 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 151.
65
For more detailed studies, see Verity Burgmann, “The Iron Heel. The Suppression of the IWW
during World War 1,” in What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History, ed.
Sydney Labour History Group (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), 171-191; Verity Burgmann,
Revolutionary Industrial Unionism. The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181-245.
66
DA, 1 October 1915, 3; Ian Turner, Sydney’s Burning (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1967), 16; D.
Grant, F.J. Morgan, N .Rancie, J.B. King, Barker Defence Committee, IWW Correspondence, NLA,
Canberra, MS3516; E.C. Fry, ed., Tom Barker and the I.W.W. (Canberra: ASSLH, 1965), 23, 25.
21
1916.67 Mat Hade’s contemporary pamphlet claims “the prosecution of Barker made
known to everyone that the organisation was in existence. And from then on, it
received a tremendous advertisement, and went ahead enormously.”68
In October 1916 Holman and Prime Minister Hughes argued the IWW were
violent saboteurs whose influence amongst workers should be confronted by the
“true” representatives of the labor movement.69 After a series of charges and
convictions secured against Wobblies, in October 1916 Sydney police arrested twelve
Wobblies and charged them with treason-felony: that they did “feloniously and
wickedly compass, imagine, invent, devise or intend to levy war against the King
within the State of New South Wales.” The alleged means by which the IWW was to
levy such a war was by arson on Sydney business premises.70
Humiliated by the defeat of the first conscription referendum on 28 October 1916,
Hughes complained in November 1916 that the IWW was “largely responsible for the
present attitude of organised labor, industrially and politically, towards the war.”71
When the parliamentary Labor party effectively expelled him on 14 November,
Hughes and his 23 supporters (out of a “caucus” of 65) formed the National Labor
Party, ultimately becoming the Nationalist Party by absorbing conservative opposition
Liberal party members in February 1917. Hughes called his new government the
“Win-The-War” government, aiming to win from Labor those voters who opposed
conscription but not necessarily the war.72 In the meantime the IWW was to be
67
DA, 4 December 1915, 1; 29 July 1916, 1; Turner, Sydney’s Burning, 18-19.
68
M.J. Hade, Justice Raped; Exposure of the I.W.W. Frame Up (Sydney, 1920), 3; Fry, Tom
Barker, 28; DA, 12 August 1916, 1.
69
Reported in DA, 21 October 1916, 4.
70
NSW Police Department, Special Bundles, re IWW, Box 7/5588, State Archives of NSW; P. J.
Rushton, “The trial of the Sydney Twelve: the original charge,” Labour History, no. 25 (November
1973), 56; Turner, Sydney’s Burning, 35-6.
71
Jauncey, The Story of Conscription in Australia, p.223.
72
McKinlay, The ALP, 46-48.
22
punished not just for its anti-patriotism per se but for its radicalising influence on the
broader labour movement.
On 1 December, on the evidence only of police informers and witnesses anxious to
avoid prosecution themselves, and corroborated only by the police whose evidence
contained many inconsistencies, a jury had found the Sydney Twelve guilty. The
“hanging judge” sentenced them to terms of imprisonment ranging from five to fifteen
years.73 Labor organisations believed that, in the words of the Newcastle Industrial
Council, the Twelve were the “victims of one of the foulest conspiracies and framesup known in history.”74 A few weeks later, the Hughes National Labor government
enacted a law akin to American criminal syndicalism legislation. In introducing this
Unlawful Associations Bill in December 1916, Hughes referred to its principal object,
the IWW: “I say deliberately that this organization holds a dagger at the heart of
society, and we should be recreant to the social order if we did not accept the
challenge it holds out to us. As it seeks to destroy us, we must in self defence destroy
it.” Under this Unlawful Associations Act, passed on 19 December, any member of
the IWW could be imprisoned for six months.75 In the next few months, 103 Wobblies
were imprisoned, usually for terms of six months with hard labour, and many more
were sacked from their jobs. Jock Wilson’s deportation resulted from an anticonscription speech in the Domain in which he declared: “I am not going to the war to
have Broken Hill lead pumped into me by the Germans.”76 Wilson was one of the
twelve foreign-born Wobblies deported; at the same time, United States authorities
73
Kevin Seggie, “The role of the police force in New South Wales and its relation to the
government 1900-1939,” PhD thesis (Macquarie University, 1987), 205, 180; Argus, 4 December
1916, 7; H.E. Boote, The Case of Grant. Fifteen Years for Fifteen Words (Sydney: Worker Print,
1918), 8.
74
Toiler, 20 August 1920, 9.
75
Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, LXXX, 18 December 1916, 10100, 10111; 19 December
1916, 10158, 10178-9.
76
Quoted in Alf Wilson, “All for the Cause” (unpublished manuscript in possession ofVerity
Burgmann), 79.
23
were shipping some American Wobblies to Australia.77 They probably passed each
other in the Pacific Ocean. In 1919 a Sydney newspaper noted that, with the help of a
miscarriage of justice, the IWW had been more effectively repressed in Australia than
in the USA.78 It had been punished with the utmost severity for endangering not only
the existing order but Australia’s participation in the Great War.
On both sides of the Pacific, those who sought to keep the working class out of the
trenches suffered greatly for their principles. In the US too it seemed nothing was
gained either while much was lost as the anti-radical backlash exacted a high price,
political and otherwise. American socialists, despite considerable manoeuvring, could
stop neither the war nor anti-radicalism. While most socialists were in agreement in
their opposition to the war, Shannon argues, “they did not know what to do to stop the
bloodshed . . . there was little they could do.” Social critics and anti-war advocates of
the period realized the war was out of their control. As author and social critic
Randolph Bourne recognized, “The war will go on whether it is popular or not.”79
This was true too in Australia, but down the anti-war movement at least succeeded in
ensuring that workers were not compelled by military conscription to lay down their
lives in the most pointless war of all time.
77
Frank Cain, “The Industrial Workers of the World. Aspects of its suppression in Australia, 1916-
1919,” Labour History, no. 42 (May 1982), 57-8; Ted Moyle, notebook 2, Ted Moyle Collection;
Francis Shor, “Masculine power and virile syndicalism: a gendered analysis of the IWW in Australia,”
Labour History 63 (November 1992), 98.
78
Truth, 29 June 1919.
79
Shannon, The Socialist Party, 85; Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals, 1915-1919, Carl
Resek, ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 41.
24