Before the creation of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people in 1947 a raft of potential candidates for a permanent homeland for Jewish refugees from the world war cataclysm were canvassed. Comprising all human–inhabited continents, the long list of proposed likely or unlikely sites (aside from Palestine) included several in the US (one being Alaska), Uganda, Madagascar, Russian Far East, Italian East Africa, British Guiana, Manchuria…and Australia!✪
Proposed area in WA for a Jewish homeland (image: Kununurra Historical Society)
A haven for one million people in the WA wilderness?: Yes Australia…a chapter in the country’s history not particularly well known. The proposed homeland in Western Australia’s sparsely–settled Kimberley region evolved out of an Anglo-Australian plan to settle migrants from the UK overseas in the 1920s. The Group Settlement Scheme had the purpose of expanding the population and economy of Australia’s almost boundless western state. Originally it targeted migrants of British and Irish stock only but the results of the scheme were dismally unsuccessful. Nonetheless the scheme captured the interest and imagination of the London–based Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization and gained concrete form when a Western Australian pastoralist, Michael Durack, offered to sell the League a large tract of his family’s land in WA’s East Kimberley. The proposal was investigated by the League with Issac Steinberg (formerly minister of justice in Lenin’s Bolshevik government) despatched to WA to determine the scheme’s feasibility and to get as many VIPs in Australia onside with the League’s objectives as he could. Steinberg’s PR skills and adept arguments for a Jewish homeland in northern WA were persuasive, managing to snare the support of many political and public figures including the WA premier and the Australasian Unions body (ACTU).
Issac Steinberg, emissary for a Jewish homeland
Despite the headway Steinberg was making on his mission, Australian politicians and the public clearly had mixed feelings about a Jewish settlement on Australian soil. The government in Canberra was committed to the objective of populating northern Australia (which the 75,000 and more refugees fleeing from Nazi persecution in Europe would certainly accomplish) but there was opposition to the plan from various sectors. Xenophobia and racism played its part, some in mainstream society were fearful that the Jewish migrants would not stick it out in the harsh conditions of the Kimberleys but would swarm to the cities, take Australian jobs and their “difference” would lead to social dislocation (‘How the Kimberley nearly became the Jewish homeland’, Ryan Fraser, Australian Geographic, 27-Sep-2018, www.australiangeographic.com.au). Newspapers like the Bulletin opposed the plan and of course no one thought to ask the local indigenous custodians of the region, the Miriwoong people, if they were happy with the plan’s ramifications. Some Australian Jews themselves were against it, fearing a backlash of anti-semitism and that the settlement would undermine the Zionist cause of securing a Palestinian homeland𖤘 (Beverley Hooper, ‘Steinberg, Isaac Nachman (1888–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/steinberg-isaac-nachman-117…, published first in hardcopy 2002, accessed online 28 January 2025).
Kimberley outback, WA
Preserving the monoculture and keeping diversity under wraps: No progress was made on the project for a few years due in part to the onset of WWII. Meanwhile conservative pressure was mounting on the Curtin Commonwealth Labor government from vested interests like the Graziers’ Association and the Australian Natives’ Association to veto the Kimberley plan. Finally in 1944 PM Curtin informed Dr Steinberg that the Australian government would not be altering its policy barring “alien settlements” in Australia of the “exclusive type contemplated by the Freeland League”. Further appeals to Curtin’s (Labor) successors and to the subsequent Menzies Liberal–Country Party government met with the same negative response, which affirmed Canberra’s refusal to budge from the overarching policy of assimilation. The discouraging experience prompted Dr Steinberg to wryly publish a book entitled Australia – the Unpromised Land (Brian Wimborne, ‘A Land of Milk and Honey? A Jewish Settlement Proposal in the Kimberley’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/essay/9/text29448, originally published 22 May 2014, accessed 28 January 2025).
SW Tasmania, an unpopulated wilderness (photo: Discovery Tasmania)
Endnote: An island wilderness for the Promised Land? The Kimberley region was not the only part of Australia that got a look-in as a possible home for Jewish refugees from Europe. One obsessively-determined, young Gentile from Melbourne, Critchley Parker, fostered the prospect of the Tasmanian wilderness providing a home for displaced Jews which, he proposed, would sustain itself on discovered mineral wealth in the area𖥠. Inspired by and infatuated with a Jewish–Australian journalist passionately involved in the Steinberg–led campaign for a Jewish homeland in the Antipodes, Parker set out in 1942, underprepared, on a solo expedition to find the ideal location for his own vision of “New Jerusalem”, but perished in the island-state’s southwest wilderness (‘Before Israel was created, Critchley Parker set off to find a Jewish homeland in Tasmania’s wilderness’, Rachel Edward’s, ABC News, 05-Dec-2020, www.amp.abc.net.au).
✪ not all of these were benevolent and altruistic proposals, Madagascar for instance was a Third Reich plan to forcibly remove European Jewry from the continent
𖤘 Steinberg and the Freeland League were opposed to Zionism
𖥠 the scheme with Jewish backing won the support of the Tasmanian state premier
The United States’ belated entry into the global fight against German Nazism and its Axis partners and the Allies’ strategy of “Germany First” had the consequence of seeing some 1.5 million American troops moving through the United Kingdom between January 1942 and December 1945. This aggregation of forces personnel included 150,000 black American troops (some sources put the figure at 240,000).
This development was to prove problematic both for the US military and its British host as the American armed forces maintained a strict policy of segregation of its personnel…White and African-American servicemen and women served in separate regiments, lived and ate in separate quarters and did not generally mix even in combat situations𝓪. Black servicemen were usually barred from combat roles𝓫 and utilised primarily in support or supply roles in the war (driving trucks, engineering works, catering, etc) [‘“They treated us royally”? Black Americans in Britain during WW2’, Imperial War Museums, (Emily Charles), www.imperialwarmuseums.org.uk].
An African-American regiment seeking directions from an English “bobby” (source: Channel 4)
Meeting American expectations of a segregated army: The dilemma was more acute for the Brits, Churchill had tirelessly courted Roosevelt with the objective of getting the US to intervene in the conflict on the allies’ side, Britain needed Washington’s military involvement and it needed America to bankroll the crippling cost of waging the escalating world war. The thorn in the side for Churchill was that American troops coming to the UK brought with them the US’ “Jim Crow” racial discrimination system which the American military was uncompromisingly wed to𝓬. A recent BBC documentary, Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid, explores how the Conservative war-time government calculatingly turned a blind eye to the Americans’ discriminatory practice towards its own citizens (a practice which Britain itself would not countenance). And yet Britain and its Allies were fighting a war of the highest stakes against Hitler, for freedom from totalitarian dictatorship [‘Channel 4 Examines UK’s ‘Secret Apartheid’ during WWII’, sphere abacus, 07-Oct-2024, www.sphere-abacus’s.com]. The irony of this contradiction was certainly not lost on the African-American servicemen and women stationed in Britain.
The Anglo–American special relationship:With the Churchill government intent on consolidating a “special relationship” with the US, in characteristically British fashion it settled for compromise, it “wouldn’t enforce the US’s extreme race policy, but wouldn’t ask any awkward questions about it either” [‘Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid, review: clickbait title masks a moving wartime story’, Anita Singh, Telegraph, 19-Oct-2024, www.telegraph.co.uk]. Britain acquiesced to Washington’s insistence on segregation but did so covertly, although Churchill biographer Baron Roberts of Belgravia contends that the British prime minister’s 1942 war cabinet comment that Britain would not assist the US Army in enforcing the segregation policy exonerates the Churchill government of collusion (sphere abacus). British soft-pedaling extended to mollifying American sensitivities by officially encouraging Britons in towns where Black soldiers were barracked not to get “too friendly” with them (Charles).
PM Winston Churchill (photo: PA)
Grass roots community support: Thus officially sanctioned, the prejudicial attitudes of White soldiers and officers (and military police) towards their Black countrymen in Britain continued to be given voice. What particularly inflamed the ire of White troops and led to violent clashes between the two groups was the sight of coloured servicemen fraternising and dancing with and enjoying the romantic company of local (white) English women. In fact, despite their government’s appeasing of the US, its failure to object to the colour bar in Britain thus perpetuating the inequality of Black troops, the ordinary people of the UK in the main took a much more positive and accepting view of the Black GIs and airmen (further enraging bigoted White servicemen). A 1943 poll in the UK indicated that the majority of British people opposed segregation [‘The Second World War, 1935 to 1945: Segregation’, RAF Museum, www.rafmuseum.org.uk]. Many Britons during the US occupation voiced a preference for the usually good-mannered Black servicemen over their entitled White counterparts.
Black GIs in rural England (photo: David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty)
Battle of Bamber Bridge:A pitched “battle” between a Black truck regiment and White MPs occurred in this small Lancashire village in 1943, the prolonged exchange of fire between the two groups resulted in one Black soldier being killed and several injured. The catalyst of the violent confrontation was the action of racist White officers who tried to coerce the three pubs in Bamber Bridge into serving whites only, this incident coming closely on top of news of a race riot back home in Detroit which had heightened tensions between the two groups of serving personnel in England. White prejudice was reinforced in the way the confrontation was dealt with by the top brass…the US military command in England chose to view the incident as an act of mutiny on the part of the Black soldiers and 30 of those involved were charged, convicted and court-martialled, whereas none of the White MPs were charged. Later in 1943 there was another inter-racial shootout between African-American and White soldiers stationed in Launceston, Cornwall. Again the trigger was attempts to exclude Black servicemen from the market town’s pubs and again the American military identified the offending party as the Black GIs, characterising them as “mutineers”. At the court-martial proceedings the Black Bamber Bridge defendants aired grievances which make clear their status in Uncle Sam’s army was that of second-class soldiers – compared to white troops they were given poor food, forced to sleep in their trucks when stopped at White bases and they were the victims of military police harassment for minor transgressions which were typically ignored for White GIs [‘UK village marks struggle against US Army racism in World War II’, Danica Kirka, AP, 24-June-2023, www.apnews.com].
Park Street, scene of the Bristol riot, 1944
War-time clashes between White and Black American military personnel weren’t confined to England…there were physical altercations between the two groups in Wales where many Black GIs were stationed at the ports, assigned to work as manual labourers. Blacks were also employed as labourers at the docks in nearby Bristol (west country England) under the supervision of less competent White officers. The city’s worse disturbance, known as the Park Street Riot (July 1944), escalated after heavy-handed attempts by White MPs to discipline the coloured soldiers, resulting in one White MP being stabbed, a Black GI killed and several wounded in the fracas.
The sight of inter-racial couples dancing together, even if in Britain and involving non-American women, was enough to enrage the more bigoted of White American servicemen (source: Gregory S. Cooke Collection)
𝓪 the US Army didn’t end segregation in the ranks until 1948
𝓫 those Black troops who volunteered for combat roles often had to relinquish their rank and take a pay cut…”the Army did not want a Black sergeant commanding a White private” [‘This WWII battle wasn’t against Nazis. It was between Black and white GIs in England’, Lauren Frayer & Fatima Al-Kassab, NPR, 21-Jun-2023, www.npr.org].
𝓬 the British Foreign Office had initially tried to persuade the US not to send Black troops on the grounds that it would create tensions but Washington ignored the request
The fifteen or twenty years following WWII witnessed a very uneven pattern of decolonisation in Asia and Africa, with a number of the old European powers slow to cast off their coloniser mantle…the Belgians in the Congo; the French in Algeria and Vietnam and the Netherlanders in Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in the end were extracted only after engaging in costly and unpopular wars. As the global wave of decolonisation gathered traction and other colonisers from the Old World divested themselves of their imperial territories, the Estado Novo regime of Portugal steadfastly clung on to its possessions – Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese Africa (Portuguese Guinea, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe), Goa (plus four minuscule enclaves on the western Indian coastline), Macau and East Timor.
Salazar: saviour of nation and empire
Portugal had been the first of the European powers to establish overseas colonies (enthusiastically followed closely by Spain), its earliest colonies date back to the 15th century. The Portuguese colonisers’ attitude towards the peoples they colonised in Africa, Brazil and elsewhere was really no different to any other rival European imperialist power of the time…undertake a Christian civilising mission to enlighten(sic) the “savages”, while economically exploiting them and their territories. In the 1950s with decolonisation starting to gain momentum, Portugal, a unitary, one-party state headed by dictator Antonio Salazar, looked for strategies to preserve its empire, aware that it faced a backlash from newly independent states in Africa and Asia who were a growing voice in the UN demanding it and other imperial powers decolonise ASAP. In 1952 Portugal effected a constitutional change, overnight the empire ceased to exist, Lisbon officially rebranded all of its overseas territories as províncias ultramarinas (overseas provinces). On paper it seemed Portugal had no colonies to decolonise, but the bulk of international observers saw the transparency of this, a technicality by Salazar to try to ward off criticism of the country’s failure to decolonise (a ploy that did buy Portugal some time but was always only a delaying tactic)[Bruno Cardoso Reis. (2013). Portugal and the UN: A Rogue State Resisting the Norm of Decolonization (1956–1974). Portuguese Studies, 29(2), 251–276. https://doi.org/10.5699/portstudies.29.2.0251].
‘The Masters and the Servants’ (source: errancias.com/) Enter Freyre and Lusotropicalism
The Estado Novo in the Fifties turned to a Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre for guidance. The noted sociologist had developed a theory⦑ą⦒ in the 1930s concerning the effect of Portuguese culture on its former colony of Brazil, a phenomena that became known as Lusotropicalism⦑ც⦒. Basically, Freyre’s thesis was that Portugal and Portuguese culture diverged from other late-stage imperialist countries because of two factors, the first Portugal’s unique history as a “pluricontinental nation”, in the pre-modern era being inhabited by Celts, Romans, Visigoths and Moors et al resulting in extensive integration between the different groups⦑ƈ⦒. Freyre contended that (extensive) miscegenation in Portuguese metropolitan and colonial societies was a “positive” in that it led to the creation of “racial democracy” across the empire (ie, Portuguese and Lusophone society was “non-racist”)…as supposed evidence of this Freyre and conservative apologists could tender the de jure eligibility for Portuguese citizenship availed to non-white people, the attainment of assimilado status. The stark reality however is that the Portuguese authorities put so many obstacles in the way that made it virtually impossible for blacks from the colonies to ever secure the same legal rights and status as white citizens [Almeida, J. C. P., & Corkill, D. (2015). On Being Portuguese: Luso-tropicalism, Migrations and the Politics of Citizenship. In E. G. RODRÍGUEZ & S. A. TATE (Eds.), Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations(pp. 157–174). Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1gn6d5h.14]⦑ɖ⦒.
Lisbon street scene, late 16th century Just your warm and friendly colonisers?
The other component of the Freyre thesis concerns the Iberian climate. Portugal’s warmer climate, Freyre argued, made it more humane and friendly, and more adaptable to other climates and cultures⦑ꫀ⦒. The combination of these two factors led Freyre to conclude that the Portuguese were “better colonisers”. A question arises, given that Spain shares the same climate and its “biological stock” and culture has undergone the same process of multinational hybridisation over epochs of history as its contiguous neighbour, why wouldn’t Spain be equally good as assimilators and have a similar experience of inter-racial harmony?
Salazar, though initially wary of a controversial philosophy which had at its centre a “glamourised” miscegenation and pseudoscientific mythologising about race, eventually reshaped Freyre’s theory into his regime’s official doctrine, a framework staking Portugal’s claim to ideological legitimacy to continue its anachronistic practice of colonisation. Lisbon’s politicians and diplomats were unleashed in the UN to burst forth with volleys of rhetoric about the soi-disant “special” relationship between the homeland and the overseas provinces⦑ᠻ⦒: the two were indivisible; the provinces were an integral part of Portugal’s unique, singular, multiracial nation; Portugal’s very identity depended on their retention, etc. [Cristiana Bastos, ‘Race, Racism and Racialism in Three Portuguese-Speaking Societies’, in Luso-Tropicalism and its Discontents, edited by Warwick Anderson, Ricardo Roque and Ricardo Ventura Santos (2019)].
Portuguese military in the colonial war with Angola
⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ ⌖
Pariah state or defender of the West?
A spate of new decolonisations, speedily attained after 1960, leveraged even more pressure on Lisbon to decolonise – or at least to seriously begin a dialogue about a path to decolonisation, Salazar dugs his heels and refused to do either. Portugal was condemned in the UN as a practitioner of “colonisation in denial and in disguise” and was even more trechantly criticised after the coloniser engaged colonial rebels in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea in wars of liberation. Lisbon responded by making a Cold War pitch to try to shore up Western solidarity on the issue…Salazar claimed to be defending Western civilisation in Africa against the menace of communism. This earned them few brownie points in Washington where the Kennedy Administration was among those pressing Lisbon to decolonise, while at the same time not going too hard, remembering its own vested interests (US was using the Azores Islands as an military base courtesy of Portugal). To its UN detractors and to the international community, Portugal throwing itself in full-scale colonial wars to prevent decolonisation was not a good look, resulting in further condemnation (Reis). Portugal’s international position was further undermined when, first, India overran the Portuguese colony of Goa by force in 1961 and annexed it, and later in the decade, another blow to Portuguese prestige, it lost control of its tiny enclave Macau to Communist China. Portugal, against the tide of history, continued to cling doggedly to its small portfolio of overseas possessions long after it could be said to amount to anything worthy of the name empire.
The Carnation Revolution overthrows Portugal’s “New State” (Image. lisbonlisboaportugal.com)
Postscript: Old habits
Significantly, the Lusotropicalism mindset didn’t end with the overthrow of the Estado Novo dictatorship in 1974, despite the new democratic government moving quickly to grant independence to the Portuguese colonies…conservative apologists in Portugal’s democratic era continue to celebrate and romanticise “mixedness” as “something inherently progressive” [‘Luso-tropicalism’, Global Social Theory, www.globalsocialtheory.org]. It seems the Portuguese politics has still not freed itself from the national myth-making that its long-dead leader Salazar had institutionalised in the 1950s…in 2017 the Portuguese head of state at an international meeting in Senegal was happily extolling “the virtues of Luso-exceptionality” (Bastos).
Endnote: Social integration myth The Lusotropical notion which claimed that Portuguese colonists integrated with the colonised subjects in a superior way was contradicted by the Portuguese town planning model for Africa, the colonatos. This scheme envisaged whites-only settlements which were intended to be “miniature Portugals”. When put into practice in Angola and Mozambique the colonatos were organisational disasters, poorly planned, little infrastructure and technical assistance, poor transport lines, etc. [Cláudia Castello, ‘Creating Portugal in Colonial Africa’, Africa is a Country, 25-May-2020, www.africasacountry.com].
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⦑ą⦒ labelled a “quasi-theory” by some scholars (Cláudia Castello, ‘“Luso-Tropicalism” and Portuguese Late Colonialism’, Buala, 28-May-2015, www.buala.org)
⦑ც⦒ Luso = pertaining to Portugal + tropicalism
⦑ƈ⦒ with transference to Brazilian society through its coalescence and integration of Europeans, enslaved Africans and native Amerindians
⦑ɖ⦒ with regards to colonial Brazil Freyre in his best known work The Masters and the Slaves misrepresents slavery as “a mild form of servitude” and he has been further criticised for exonerating the absolving the colonisers of any racist practices in modern Brazil and glossing over the iniquities of the slave trade [Wohl, Emma (2013). ‘“Casa Grande e Senzala” and the Formation of a New Brazilian Identity’,
On New Years Day 1915 two members of the small immigrant Afghan community of Broken Hill launched an unexpected and deadly attack on a passing convoy of open ore-trucks carrying 1,200 industry picnickers to Silverton. The incident itself did not escalate much further, the so-called ‘battle’ was over after a 90-minute shootout, with the perpetrators dealt with and summarily despatched by a contingent of police, soldiers and private riflemen from the town, however it’s ramifications were more lasting and widespread. What was on the surface a random, mindless and unprovoked attack on innocent picnic-goers, had a complicated lead-up.
The picnic train with overflowing “sardine tin” of passengers (Photo: Broken Hill City Lib)
The casualties:
In the carnage two of the “sitting duck” picnic party were killed by the attackers’ gunfire and up to ten others wounded. The two gunmen then retreated from the scene towards the West Cameleers camp, killing another, unrelated civilian on the way. The police, troops and volunteer militia members of the ‘posse’ caught up with the two attackers at Cable Hill and engaged them in a shootout at a nearby rocky quartz outcrop known as “White Rocks”. During the shootout a fourth victim was killed by stray shots from the perpetrators’ gunsⓐ. A police constable was also wounded and both Muslim assailants were ultimately killed in the affray.
‘White Rocks’ (Source: The Conversation)
In the immediate aftermath of the incident the two perpetrators were wrongly identified as Turks—the Ottoman Turkish Empire has recently sided with the German Reich in the world war against Britain (and therefore against Australia)—due to a Turkish flag and a letter pledging allegiance to the Sultan of Turkey found among the possessions of one of the attackers. In fact the two Muslims originated from the northwest frontier of British India (within modern Pakistan or just over the border in Afghanistan).
A still from a 1981 film, ‘The Battle of Broken Hill’
The assailants:
Badsha Gool Mahomed
(aged about 40) a Pashtu-speaking Afghan Afridi tribesman whose two stays in Australia were punctuated by periods of service in the Turkish Army. After a decline in work for cameleers he was employed in the Broken Hill area’s silver mines before being retrenched. At the time of the incident Mahomed was an ice cream vendor in the townⓑ.
Mullah Abdullah (aged about 60) a Dari-speaking halal butcher and imam for the local cameleer community. Abdullah too tried camel-driving but finding it not feasible turned to working as a butcher in “The Hill”, supplementing it by presiding as spiritual leader for the Afghan community.
‘Barrier Miner’ 2 January 1915’
The influential local newspaper the Barrier Miner had a field day with the incident… “War in Broken Hill”, “The New Year’s Day Massacre“, (Attack) “under the Turkish flag”. Some modern writers have described the “Battle of Broken Hill” as a terrorist incident, “terrorist-suicide mission” (and Abdullah as a) “grey-bearded zealot, fiery when insulted” [Christine Stevens, ‘Abdullah, Mullah (c. 1855–1915)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/abdullah-mullah-12763/text23021, published first in hardcopy 2005, accessed online 10 February 2022], and inevitable parallels have been drawn with the contemporary landscape of international terrorism. Giving credence to the train ambush being considered a politically motivated act was the edict of Ottoman sultan Mehmet V that the faithful of the Islamic world take up the fight (jihad) against the enemy in the war, made just two months earlier in November 1914 (which undoubtedly struck a cord with the radicalised Mahomed) [‘History repeating: from the Battle of Broken Hill to the sands of Syria’, Panayiotis Diamadis, The Conversation, 03-Oct-2014, www.theconversation.com].
A union closed shop
Imam Abdullah on the other hand had fresh personal grievances against the locals. He had for some time suffered racist harassment from the town’s youths. In addition, Abdullah had fallen foul of the local branch of the Butchers Trade Union which took a discriminatory approach to not-British butchers in the town…only a week or so earlier the non-unionised Afghan butcher had been convicted for the second time of selling meat without a licence by the chief sanitary inspector. Whether the two men were motivated by a sense of persecution or patriotism, relations between the Afghan community and the Europeans in Broken Hill had been disintegrating for some time with the ‘Ghan’ cameleers camp targeted for sabotage. [‘The Battle of Broken Hill and repercussions for the German Community’, The Enemy At Home, www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au].
Photo: brokenhill.nsw.gov.au
Economic downturn knee-jerk
A heightening of inter-ethnic tension was a direct result of the grim economic climate of the day, mine closures in Broken Hill meant unemployed miners and the search for alternate work…it didn’t take long for resentments to surface about Muslim immigrants taking white jobs. Afghan immigrants were made to feel unwelcome in Broken Hill and other outback towns with the cameleers relegated to living on the edge of European society in ‘Ghantowns’. Tensions were particularly heated between the local unionised teamsters and the immigrants, largely due to the Afghans cameleers being simply more competitive labour options than the white teamsters…cheaper to hire and providing a quicker service than that of the teamsters’ wagons. This perceived threat to the position of European teamsters in the Broken Hill district led them to retaliate with violence against the Afghan community [‘The Battle of Broken Hill’, Mike Dash, Smithsonian Magazine, 20-Oct-2011, www.smithsonianmag.com].
Razed German Club house (Photo: Broken Hill City Archives)
A “lone wolf” attack
Despite the assailants leaving a note indicating that they had acted alone, many citizens in Broken Hill connected the event to the Turkish enmity towards the British Empire in the warⓒ. An incensed mob, hell-bent on wreaking retribution against the Afghan cameleer camp, had to be prevented from launching reprisals against the outlier Afghan community. The focus then switched to Broken Hill’s German community who many believed had agitated the brace of Afghans into attacking the picnic train. The police and military this time were unable to stop the rampant mob from torching the German Club to the ground.
Wider ramifications
A crackdown of the authorities was not long in coming. With newspapers like the Barrier Miner and the jingoistic Sydney Bulletin beating up the story for all it’s worth and with headlines trumpeting “Turk atrocity” and “Holy War”, “enemy aliens” from Austrian, German and Turkish working in the Hill’s mines were sacked, followed swiftly by Federal attorney-general Billy Hughes’s blanket internment of all foreign aliens in the country.
Photo: Destination NSW Media Centre
Footnote: In a bizarre coincidence Broken Hill’s “ice cream cart terrorism” had a resounding echo in the abhorrent 2016 Bastille Day “lone wolf” terrorist attack in Nice, France. The perpetrator who drove his lorry down a seafront promenade, killing 86 pedestrians (most of them mowed down by the speeding vehicle), told the police when questioned at the site prior to committing the atrocity that he was delivering ice cream.
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ⓐ the four victims of the two cameleers’ localised “Holy War” were the only Australians killed on home soil as a result of enemy fire during the Great War
ⓑ Mahomed‘s ice-cream cart was used to transport the duo’s concealed weapons to the railroad ambush site
ⓒ some people in hindsight saw the incident as a prequel on Australian soil to the Gallipoli conflict later that same year
Having delved recently into the historic fascist groups in Hungary and Romania between the wars—“Arrow Cross and Iron Guard: The Native Fascist Movements in Interwar Hungary and Romania”, blog 10-Aug-2021)—I thought it’d be interesting to take a comparative look at their contemporary counterpart in Yugoslavia. The most conspicuous fascist organisation active in post-WWI Yugoslavia shared many of the features of other European far-right movements while exhibiting some characteristics that departed from the standard typology of European fascism.
(Image: Mapsland)
⇑ Alexander I, the “Royal Dictator”
Fear of a Pan-Serbia
Like all European fascist groups in the interwar period the “home-grown” fascist movement embodied in the Croatian Revolutionary Movement, known as Ustaše🆚 (or anglicised as ‘Ustasha’) evolved out of discontent with the new national arrangements following the conclusion of hostilities. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (originally the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), came into existence from a ”polyglot mosaic of little states“. From the start there was a built-in tension between the centralism of the unitary Yugoslav state and Serbia and the federalist impulses of the other nationalities. Feeding and intensifying Croatian nationalism was Serbian control over the new state – the head of state, the king, was a Serb and the Yugoslav army was essentially Serbian. What wrangled most Croats was that “the new Yugoslavia was not a state of narodno jedinstvo (national unity) (as promised) but a greater Serbia in all but name“ (Judah). In the early years of the kingdom, the political voice of Croatian disapproval of the lop-sided state of affairs came from the moderately rightist Croatian Peasants Party (CPP), who advocated for land reform to alleviate the conditions of Croatian peasantry (75% of the kingdom’s population was agrarian-based). The assassination of the CPP leader in parliament was followed by a coup by King Alexander who installed a “personal dictatorship” and a political crackdown. In response to the crisis Ante Pavelić a former CPP member formed the extremist Ustaše Party🅾️.
Ustasé ideology
The Ustaše movement’s ideological framework contained many of the traits typically found in other European far-right groups—ultranationalism❎ (stridently advocating the uniqueness of the Croatian nation); rabidly racist (though it’s antisemitism seems to have become more visible later after prompting from the Nazis); the significance of religion (Catholicism in its case) and patriarchal life; anti-communist (rejecting Marxism for it’s interference with family life); anti-capitalist and also anti-democratic, believing that the mechanism of parliamentary democracy was corrupt; adopting the personality cult common to most fascist organisations (Pavelić under the influence of the big dictators Mussolini and Hitler styled himself Poglavnik, broadly analogous to Il Duce and Führer, and following the cult’s blueprint demanding unswerving submission to the will of the leader.
Constructing a separate racial theory
The Ustaše view of the racial origins of the Croatian people was a complicated one, but one that suited their national aspirations, to create “a completely independent, ethnically homogeneous nation-state”…this requited separating ’pure’ Croats from the melange of ethnic and religious minorities in Croatia, especially from the more numerous Serbs. Ustaše party ideologues set about trying to minimise the Croats’ Slavic roots while developing the idea that the Croats‘ hybrid stock comprised a kind of “Ayran-Nordic-Dinaric” amalgam, which they contrasted with the alleged “Balkan-Vlach” identity of the Serbs. The Ustaše identified the Croats as descending from the Goths and therefore of Germanic stock, a contrivance by Pavelić by which he hoped “to curry favour with the Nazis”Ⓜ (Bartulin, ‘Ideology of Nation and Race’). The Ustaše aped other aspects of Nazi racial vilification, applying the derogatory term Untermensch (“sub-human) to its scapegoats, Serbs, Jews, etc.
⇑ “A slave never!” (Source: Pinterest.ca)
National regeneration: Forward to the past
As we saw with the Iron Guard Movement’s Omol nou in Romania, Ustaše theory extolled the concept of Novi čovjek, the “New Man”. The movement’s mission as it saw it was to ‘reawaken’ the racially authentic (ie, ‘Aryan’) Croat—the koljenović—who had been corrupted and debased by centuries of foreign rule. The Ustaše Novi čovjek aligns with a core element of generic fascism, formulated by political theorist Roger Griffin called “palingenetic ultranationalism”, which combines “a myth of rebirth or regeneration” with a nationalism that is populist and “radically anti-liberal”, ie, ultranationalism. In the world according to Ustaše, the regenerated Croat warrior, heroic and uber-masculine, is the conduit for a new order to replace the old “decadent and decaying” one.
Ustaše and Iron Guard
Commonalities between the Ustaše movement and Romania’s Iron Guard fascists were many, both were deeply mystical organisations, preoccupied with a death cult and notions of violence and martyrdom (though the Ustašhe didnt express the same degree of intense religious ritualism as Iron Guard). Both Ustaše and Iron Cross members tended to see the world in extreme Manichean terms, regularly evoking the imagery of the ”overtly apocalyptic and chiliastic” (Yeomans).
Ustaše militias unleashed an unrestrained violent onslaught to deal with the perceived enemies of Croatia, terrorist targeting of political foes, assassinations, shootings, knifings, bombings, etc. The pattern of party violence culminated in attempts at outright genocide when Pavelić’s fascists gained power in Yugoslavia during World War One. Ustaše ‘reprisals’ were concentrated against the Serbs, Jews and Roma who came under their area of control – estimations of atrocities committed the Ustaše and the authorities vary, somewhere between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbian civilians were slaughtered in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in just one year of an out-of-control, manic bloodlust. Another Ustaše strategy supposedly to purify the NDH or the “Independent State of Croatia”—accomplished with the collaboration of Croatian Catholic clergy—was the forcible conversion of somewhere in the vicinity of 250,000 Orthodox Serbs and Jews⛎. In a further emulation of Nazi extermination methods Ustaše built a notorious concentration camp in Slavonia, Jasenovac, where upward of 100,000 Serbs, Roma and Jews were barbarically killed during the war (consequently Jasenovac is known as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans”).
⇑ Two uniformed Ustaše women (Source: Pinterest)
Footnote: Women in the Ustaše world
Just as the Ustaše envisaged a new type of Croatian man reinvigorated with the lost values of valour and struggle, it wanted to return Croatian women to a previous, less pluralist life. The Ustaše railed against the sexual status quo, against an encroaching feminism which had liberated women from the home, becoming, in Ustaše eyes, “cafe dolls without children”, sacrificing family for their careers. The movement wanted to revive the cult of motherhood, making Croatian women submissive and dutiful home bodies again, procreating a new generation of Croats. At the same time the Ustaše hierarchy organised women into their own separate body called the “Vine of Ustaše Women”, their main task was to act as social workers of sorts, circulating among the peasant women in Croatia to bring about improvements in their lives. Interestingly, as Rory Yeomans outlined, the leadership received pushback from militant young female members of the movement who wanted the same opportunity as Ustaše men to become warriors and immerse themselves in the revolutionary activities of the cause. In any event, the drain on Croatian manpower during the war necessitated a re-expansion of female roles to fill the gaps left by men in offices and factories and even in the military ranks (Yeomans).
“Greater Croatia” ⇑
Postscript: The Ustaše fascists failed to establish a mass base of support as a precondition for its revolutionary movement that Arrow Cross and Iron Guard movements achieved in their respective countries. And in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Croatian peasantry, Ustaše never matched the appeal of CPP. Added to this, Ustaše’s growing chauvinistic stance in pursuing a “Greater Croatia” ensured it made no headway in trying to appeal to any other national group in the country. Ustaše as a consequence was forced to draw on Croatian students, right wing intellectuals and the lower clergy for its core support. An additional brake on Ustaše power was the effectiveness of opposition from the left in Yugoslavia—in stark contrast to the situation in Romania and Hungary—from the well-organised communist party (brilliantly led by Tito).
Poglavnik Pavelić ⇑
⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫
🆚 = ‘Insurgents’
🅾️ the spiritual antecedent to Ustaše was probably the right wing nationalist Party of Rights (including the Frankovci cell)
❎ Ustaše‘s brand of fascism was ultranationalistic, see ’National regeneration: Forward to the past‘
Ⓜ for his part, Hitler was at best lukewarm toward Pavelić’s movement, considering them too violently aggressive, preferring a stable and neutral Yugoslavian regime to allow Germany to continue to access it’s raw materials during the war. The Nazis only reluctantly turned to the Ustaše as a “puppet government’ after civil war broke out in Yugoslavia
⛎ assistance given by the Catholic Church to Ustaše reached the highest pinnacle. At war’s end, when things turned dire for Pavelić and his cronies, the Vatican facilitated their escape to Argentina via the notorious German “Rat line” by issuing them clerical passports (Stockton)
♠♣ ♠♣
Texts and articles consulted:
‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies’, Roger Griffin, Library of Social Science’,www.libraryofsocialscience.com
‘Ideology of Nation and Race: The Croatian Ustasha Regime and its Policies Toward the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945)’, Nevenko Bartulin, Croatian Studies Review, 5 (2008)
Rory Yeomans. “Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 2005, pp. 685–732. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4214175. Accessed 12 Aug. 2021
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (3rd edition, 2009)
Nevenko Bartulin, The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and Theory (2014)
‘Meet the Ustaše, The Brutal Nazi Allies Even Hitler Couldn’t Control’, Richard Stockton, ATI, Upd. 6-Jun-2020, www.allthatsinteresting.com
Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919-1953 (1991)
The immediate aftermath of the First World War saw a redrawing of the map of Europe. With the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires, a raft of new successor states emerged on the continental landscape. The redistribution of territory in peace-time and the establishment of new sovereign entities led to new tensions and political instability and contributed to the rise of “home-grown” authoritarian and fascist political parties in interwar Europe. The following will look at how this development played out in Hungary and Romania after 1918—focusing on the two states’ main far-right political force (Arrow Cross Party (H), Iron Guard Movement (R)—showing that the growth of fascism in the two states shared core similarities albeit with some individual differences.
(Image: Emerson Kent)
Successor states Hungary and Rumania were on opposing sides during the First World War. Backing the Central Powers, Hungary was a big loser, newly landlocked, forfeiting more than two-thirds of its territory (to Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) and five-ninths of its former population – with ramifications for future irredentism, about three-and-a-half million ethnic Hungarians outside the homeland. Conversely, Romania, ally of the Entente Powers, was the principal beneficiary of Hungary’s reversals. As a consequence, for the new state of Hungary, the seeds of a ready-made grievance for revisionist vengeance against its eastern neighbour was well and truly sown.
🚹 Arrow Cross (top) & Iron Guard flags
Agrarian-based societies
Romania and Hungary were predominately peasant-dominated populations between the wars…in Romania they comprised 78% of the population, in more urbanised Hungary they were less dominant but still a very significant 55% of the population. Because of lingering serfdom-like conditions and the abject failure to implement effective land reform, the bulk of peasants remained impoverished. The onset of the Depression in the 1930s exacerbated their plight, in such a time of crisis many of the peasantry found fringe groups like Arrow Cross (Nyilasok pártja)⧆ and the Iron Guard Movement (the Legion) offering a panacea for their woes with more appeal than the promises of the mainstream parties❂. The increasingly xenophobic pronouncements of the Legion’s ultra-nationalists struck a receptive chord among the Romanian peasantry, who Corneliu Zelea Codreanu identified as the mass base required for his planned revolutionary seizure of power…the Iron Guard leader exploited the peasantry’s distrust of communism and outsiders, making an appeal to “the custodian of the national historic mission” (of the peasantry) to conquer the towns (supposedly controlled by Ukrainian Jews and other ‘foreigners’)(Constantin Iordachi, ‘Ultranationalist utopias and the realities of reconciliation (part one)’, New Eastern Europe, 25-Feb-2021, www.neweasterneurope.eu).
🚹 Codreanu (R) with Gen. Antonescu, the ‘Conducător’
Characteristics of the movements
Political outliers
The Iron Guard Movement (IGM) and Arrow Cross (ACP), as self-described revolutionary movements, laid out radical platforms and pursued electoral strategies which placed them clearly outside the political mainstream…a deliberate repudiation of not just ideologies on the left, communism and social democracy but of the establishment right, the capitalist system, conservatism and bourgeois liberalism as well.
🚹 Codreanu, “The Capitane “
Nationalism
Both native fascistparties were fiercely nationalistic in outlook. The nationalism of Romania’s Iron Guard Movement is considered to have been an unusual “variety of fascism” (Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (1964)). The movement was also infused with a strong Christian Orthodoxy, befitting it’s alternate name, Legion of the Archangel Michael. The party’s leader Codreanu enveloped the movement’s ideology in an odd form of chiliastic mystical religiosity with “spiritual and transcendental aims”, mixing a ‘morbid’ element of Christian martyrdom and ritualism together with a violent nationalism (‘An Unique Death Cult’, Stanley G. Payne, Slate, 22-Feb-2017, www.slate.com). Codreanu and Iron Cross formed a political strategy called by Weber “murder as method”, their plan being to launch “a murder campaign to clear the country…of the Jews and their corrupt protectors”. However the ring-leaders including Codreanu were arrested before they could enact it.
A plan for Hungarian regional hegemony
The ultra-nationalism espoused by ACP was a component of a peculiar ideology concocted by founder Szálasi…the party’s idiosyncratic nationalism was mixed in with ample doses of anti-communism, anti-capitalism, the promotion of agriculture and Szálasi’s own notion of anti-semitism, which he called “a-semitism” (by which he meant that Jews were not compatible to live in Europe with other ‘races’ and should be removed from Central Europe)§. Szálasi’s multifaceted program which was known as Hungarism was strongly revisionist with the Vezető pledging to restore the ”historic’ Hungary, uniting all of the Carpathian-Danube peoples under a Magyar-dominated empire, extending Hungary’s boundaries as far as the Black Sea.
🚹 Danube monument to Jewish victims of Arrow Cross
Anti-semitism and racialist policy in the Legion
IGM matched the virulence of ACP’s militant anti-semitism. Legionnaire ideologues harboured a fear that the heterogeneity of the Jews in Romania “might spoil the national unity required by the creation of a powerful state capable of fostering a strong culture that would propel Romania into History” (Marin). Ideas of purity and racial superiority were deeply embedded in the IGM ideological firmament◘ (“The Iron Guard and the ‘Modern State’. Iron Guard Leaders Vasile Marin and Ion I. Mota, and the ‘New European Order'”, Mircea Platon, Brill, 01-Jan-2012, www.brill.com). In the early 1940s when IGM was briefly in a power-share arrangement with military strongman General Ion Antonescu (National Legionary State), thousands of Jews, Slavs and Roma (Gypsies) were liquidated by its paramilitary arm. In the late stage of WWII ACP militiamen executed thousands of Hungarian Jews on the Danube riverbank, the location marked today in Budapest by a memorial to the victims (“Shoes on the Danube Promenade”).
🚹 Iron Guard Legionnaires
Anti-capitalism
The anti-capitalist plank of fascist nationalism was a distinctive feature of both Hungarian and Romanian fascist movements✮. IGM philosophy rejected both the class antagonisms of Marxism and the materialistic excesses of bourgeoiscapitalism – a transparently populist appeal by Codreanu to the anti-capitalist sentiments of the large, powerless Romanian peasantry. Instead Codreanuproposed a “spiritual third force”, the Legion’s own unique cocktail of targeted terror and mystical authoritarianism as salvation for the masses (G.L. Mosse, International Fascism (1979)).
Anti-communism
Both ACP and IGM exploited the masses’ distrust of the spectre of communism. In Hungary this was made easier with Hungarians having already in 1919 tasted “the disillusioning experience of the Bolsheviks”, the brief and unpopular Hungarian Soviet regime led by Béla Kun (Deák, I. (1992). ‘Hungary’.The American Historical Review, (4), 1041-1063. doi:10.2307/2165492).
(Source: reddit.com)
Cult of the leader
Both ACP and the Legion forged personality cult leadership structures in their respective movements, based around the charismatic and youthful figures of Szálasi and Codreanu – strong, magnetic leaders whose authority could not be questioned. Arrow Cross and Szálasi repeatedly suffered harassment and persecution at the hands of the conservative Horthy nationalist regime, creating in ACP a sense of martyrdom which the movement transformed paradoxically “into a process via which the leader gained charisma, instead of losing it” (‘The Arrow Cross. The Ideology of Hungarian Fascism – A conceptual approach by Áron Szele (Central European University), Budapest 2015),www.etd.ceu.hu). In Romania the Legion’s propaganda projected Codreanu as the new messiah guiding his devoted, bordering on the fanatic followers, on a millennialist mission to purify Romania by punishing the enemies of the Tara (fatherland), communists, Jews, ‘foreigners’ (Constantin Iordachi, in Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth–Century Southeastern Europe, Edited by John Lampe and Mark Mazower (2004)). Codreanu and Szálasi’s integrity and legitimacy was enhanced by the leaders’ decision to pursue power by constitutional means⇹.
Handcuffing the left
Fringe right parties like ACP and IGM had their path to power facilitated by the neutralisation of the left. In Hungary and Romania conservative governments outlawed the communist party, shackled trade unions and kept social democratic parties in check. In addition to this, the law treated fascist terrorists more leniently…eg, Codreanu’s “death squad” Legionnaires were acquited of having assassinated Romanian premier Duca in 1933.
A right Royal millstone
The deteriorating state of internal politics in Romania in the Thirties was a boost to IGM’s fortunes. The extreme avarice and corruption of the egregious Romanian king, Carol II, a drift towards political stagnation, all combined with “the immiseration of the peasantry” to steer support towards the Legion (‘The Little Dictators’, Richard J Edwards (30-Nov-2006), www.gresham.ac.uk).
🚹 Szálasi and Hitler (Photo: Hitler-archive.com)
End-notes: (i) National regeneration
Both Szálasi and Codreanu had unwavering faith in the power of their wills, believing that they were destined to lead their movements in the revival of their respective nations, to lift them out of the morass of economic crisis, national trauma and social dislocation.
Arrow Cross militia
(ii) A fascist brotherhood under the Swastika
Like many alt-right groups in interwar Europe, ACP and IGM looked to the “first rank” far-right, totalitarian states, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, for inspiration and ideas. As Anthony Polonsky remarked, “fascism seemed to many the philosophy of the future – an efficient and orderly means of modernizing a backward country” (Evans). Widely regarded as puppets of Nazi Germany, Szálasi and Codreanu saw themselves as part of an emerging new order, a larger pan-European movement of fascist states, one in practice however securely under the control of Hitler and the Nazis.
🚹 Arrow Cross women (Photo: CEU Gender Studies)
Postscript: Arrow Cross women
The fascism practiced by ACP and the Legion, it has been noted, was not without a degree of plasticity. Both fascist parties perhaps surprisingly included a focus on the position of women. IGM was more predictably traditional in reinforcing the domestic role of women, but ACP made a concerted appeal to Hungarian women, attracting female members from those women marginalised, politically or professionally. ACP was the first political organisation to acknowledge and propose a plan to protect women from sexual harassment in the workplace (‘Lessons for Today: Women in the Hungarian Arrow Cross Movement’, Andrea Petö, Central European University, 01-Aug-2019, www.ceu.edu)
⧆ Arrow Cross was just the most prominent of several small “fascist-wannabe” political groups that surfaced in Hungary after WWI
❂ just as the German masses found Hitler’s message fresh and appealing cf. the tired, failing efforts of the Weimar politicians
§ Szálasi’s “a-semitism” was also directed at Arabs
◘ Szálasi’s Hungarism subscribed to a similar view of “master race” status for the Magyar people
✮ significantly though the fascists never moved beyond rhetoric to actually threaten the entrenched position of private property
⇹ ACP’s electoral zenith was in 1939 when it won 25% of the vote in Hungary, becoming the country’s most important opposition party
France’s penal colony network in New Caledonia (see preceding post) was not exactly a summer camp for delinquents, it was a brutal, unforgiving and unrelenting environment for existing rather than living. Comparatively though, it pales into lesser significant when stacked up against the unimaginable inferno of its South American equivalent in the colonies pénitentiaires of Guyane française.
The Napoleonic manoeuvre In 1851 Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon, elected president of the French Republic, staged a coup from above. With army backing he neutralised the national parliament and enacted a new constitution giving himself sweeping new dictatorial powers, a decisive step on the road to emulating his uncle by declaring himself emperor, Napoleon III, in 1852. With France’s jails and hulks overflowing with the incarcerated multitudes, swollen further by the emperor’s defeated opponents, much of the surplus prison population was transported to France’s Algerian colony. At the same time Louis-Napoleon took the opportunity to establish a new penal colony in French Guiana and send out the first lot of transportés. Transportation to penal colonies, especially to Guyane, to New Caledonia and to Algeria, allowed France to rid itself of dangerous and incorrigible offenders at home, and to punish them for their sins by subjecting them to a life of hard labour❋ [Jean-Lucien Sanchez. ‘The French Empire, 1542–1976’. Clare Anderson. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, Bloomsbury, 2018. hal-01813392. HAL Id: hal-01813392].
Economies of labour Aside from cleansing France of the criminal element, transportation served another purpose for Napoleon III. Slavery had been the engine of growth for France’s colonial empire, but France’s abolition of the institution in 1848 resulted in a massive shortage of cheap labour. Turning French Guiana (FG) and other French colonies into penitentiaries—replacing the lost plantation workers, the freed black African slaves (known as Maroons) with convicts in FG—neatly solved the problem [‘France’s “dry guillotine” a hell on earth for convicts’, (Marea Donnelly), Daily Telegraph, 22-Aug-2018, www.dailytelegraph.com.au].
Bagne le plus diabolique The penal system in Guyane française revolved around two principal locations⧆, one was the Prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni which functioned as the destination of first arrival for transportés (and usually only a temporary home for the majority). From here, the worst of the bagnards (convicts), the recaptured escapees and the relégués (recidivists), were relocated down the coast to the other Guyane penitentiary, Bagne de Cayenne. Here, a small group of off-shore islands, Îles du Salut (Salvation Islands) comprised the penal colony on which French Guiana’s dark reputation hangs. Better known as Devil’s Island, a collective descriptor for three distinct islands, the farthest away and most inaccessible of which, Île du Diable, was reserved for a select group of prisoners⦿.
(Image: www.thevintagenews.com)
The history of Devil’s Island is one of notoriety and longevity (operating from 1852 to 1946). Conditions for inmates were horrendous… hard labour from six in the morning to six at night (including being assigned to endlessly building roads that were never intended to be finished); working and living in a malarial coast and tropical jungle environment; susceptibility to a host of diseases including yellow fever, typhus, cholera and malaria; the more dangerous prisoners solitarily confined to tiny cells 1.8m x 2m indefinitely, and often exposed to the elements [‘French Guiana Prison That Inspired “Papillon”, (Karin-Marijke Vis), Atlas Obscura, 11-Aug-2015, www.atlasobscura.com].
Île du Diablo (Photo: Romain Veillon / www.thespaces.com)
A tropical death camp A sense of mortality in the penal colony was ever-present – convicts fought and murdered each other, punishment by execution (by guillotine) was regularly meted out❂. For those who could no longer stand the psychological and physical torture of incarceration in such a sub-human hell hole, driven to near-insanity, the urge to escape (“Chercher la belle”) exerted a powerful pull. This however was virtually a suicidal course of action as would-be escapees faced shark-infested waters and jungles teeming with jaguars, snakes and other deadly beasts [‘The story of the world’s most infamous penal system – ever?’, (Robert Walsh), History is Now Magazine, www.historyisnowmagazine.com]. In the first 14 years of the Guyane prisons’ operation, two-thirds of the convicts perished (Sanchez) At its worst point Devil’s Island had a 75% death-rate.
The sentencing regime was particularly harsh…bagnards transported to FG were subjected to the penalty of ‘doubleage’. This meant that on the expiration of a prisoner’s sentence, he or she✦ had to remain working in the colony for an additional period that was equivalent to the original sentence. And if prisoners were sentenced to terms of more than eight years, this automatically became a life sentence (Donnelly).
⌂ the Dreyfus Tower
Dreyfus Affair puts the spotlight on Devil’s Island Among the over 52,000 déportés sent to Devil’s Island/Cayenne from its inception to 1936, its most famous inmate was Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongful arrested on a trumped-up charge of selling military secrets to Germany. Dreyfus endured over fours years on solitary Île du Diable before his case became a cause célèbre taken up by prominent citizens like novelist Emile Zola. Protests forced the French government—in a convoluted set of developments—to reopen Dreyfus’ case, retry him, re-convict him then free him and eventually exonerate him. The Dreyfus affair exposed entrenched anti-Semitism in the French military and in society [‘Devil’s Island Prison History and Facts’, Prison History, www.prisonhistory.net/].
⌂ the Devil’s Island story became widely known after ex-inmate Henri Charriere’s published account of his escape, ‘Papillon’, was made into a Hollywood movie in the early 70s
An anachronism of incarceration historyThe penitentiaries at Cayenne and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni persisted for an inordinately long time, considering that apart from absorbing the overflow from the prison system in Metropolitan France they didn’t achieve all that much that was positive. The penal colonies were not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but an economic disaster…the planted crops failed badly and self-sufficiently was never achieved, signalling a complete failure in the objective of transforming the bagnards into settlers. In one year alone, 1865, the soaring cost of the FG enterprise reached in excess of 3.75 million francs! (Sanchez). After Salvation Army adjutant Charles Péan exposed the horrors, the utter inhumanity, of France’s Devil’s Island in a damning investigation⌽, the French authorities dragged their feet for another 25 years before they finally drew the curtain on this shameful chapter of their penal history [‘Devil’s Island’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
(Map: BBC News)
Endnote: These days France calls Guyane française an overseas department rather than a colony, and the colonial prisons are barely a distant memory. Instead today FP hosts the Guiana Space Centre (close to the town of Kourou), a Spaceport run in conjunction with the European Space Agency.
Changing pattern of deportations from metropole to colonies 1852-1866: majority of deportees sent to French Guiana From 1866: deportees from Europe sent to New Caledonia From 1866: deportees from North Africa, Asia and the Caribbean sent to French Guiana
§§ a rider to the system was that the ultimate destination of deportees could also depend on whether they were common or political prisoners
▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂.▂▂▂▂▂
❋ while lightening the burden on the government for domestic prison expenditure
⧆ plus a scattering of sub-camps of convicts located around different parts of French Guiana
⦿ mainly traitors (or accused ones like Dreyfus) and political dissidents. In WWI it housed spies and deserters (Donnelly). Others falling foul of French colonial justice ended up in Caribbean penal holdings on islands such as Guadalupe and Martinique
❂ the macabre pet name of inmates for Devil’s Island was the “Dry Guillotine” (“it kills it’s victims more slowly than the actual guillotine but kills them just as certainly”)
✦ women convicts were transported to FG, but there were only just shy of 400 deported in the duration of the penal colony
⌽ in 1928 duty of care was still non-existent: the prison administrators’ gross negligence was still resulting in 400 inmates dying each year and 2,400 freed prisoners left to fend for themselves
These days the Australian government it seems welcomes the French presence in New Caledonia. Canberra offered a tacit endorsement of France’s retention of its colonial hold over New Caledonia following the recent referendum which voted for a second time against independence for the French Pacific colony. From a geopolitical standpoint it seems that it is in Canberra’s interest for the French, a Western naval power, to continue to have a stake in the Pacific…as it constitutes the existence of a “significant counterweight” to the uncertain but fluid intentions of China in respect of the western Pacific [‘Australia is part of a Black region; it should recognise Kanaky ambition in New Caledonia’, (Hamish McDonald), The Guardian, 25-Oct-2020, www.theguardian.com].
Noumea, NC ▵
A look back into history reveals that Australia hasn’t always been as sanguine about the French settlement in its near Pacific island neighbour. The French connection with New Caledonia formally began in 1853 when it established a colony, settling a small expat population from Metropolitan France. Prior to this time the British through its colony in New South Wales had assumed a sort of “titular control” of New Caledonia❋. As well as being within the British-Australian sphere of influence, there was a pre-existing triangular trade between Australia, the New Caledonian islands and China… Australian merchants traded iron and metal utensils and tools and tobacco for sandalwood with the native (Kanak) population, which the merchants then exchanged with China for tea [‘The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australia’s View of New Caledonia In The 19th Century’, (Elizabeth Rechniewski), Portal. 2015. Vol 12, No 1. http://doi.org/10.5130/portal.V12i1.4095].
France’s decision to annex New Caledonia (NC)—a further sign to the British of French imperial designs in the south Pacific after its earlier acquisition of Tahiti—prompted a considerable degree of commotion within the Australian colonies. They criticised the colonial office in London for being lax in not having secured the colonisation of NC by Britain to block just such a takeover by the French. Australian newspapers like the Moreton Bay Courier had been warning for some time of NC’s suitability as an ideal location for a naval station from which to attack the Australian coast (Rechiewski).
Pacific pénitentaires◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌Australian concerns and anxieties grew exponentially in 1864 when the French turned NC into a penal colony using Britain’s penal system as a model – prisons were established at two locations, at Île Nou (Noumea Bay) on Grande Terre (NC’s main island), and a second pénitentaire on Île des Pins (Isle of Pines, or Kunié in Melanesian culture)✪. The outcry from the press in Australia and from some politicians against the French presence intensified…a NSW colonial secretary urged Britain take diplomatic action to discourage Paris from continuing the transportation of “these scum of France”.The intensity of Australian hostility to the NC penal colony, has led one historian to suggest that the fierceness of the opposition may have reflected an element of post-convict shame” within Australian society itself, given that transportation to Australia had only recently been ended [Jill Donohoo, ‘Australian Reactions to the French Penal Colony in New Caledonia’, Explorations: A Journal of French-Australian Connections, 54, 25-45, www.isfar.org.au].
▿Isle of Pines: vestiges du Bagne (Photo: Marco Ramerini/www.colonialvoyage.com)
19th century “boat people”: Apprehensive eyes looking west ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ In the last quarter of the century the principal external anxiety, especially for Queenslanders and New South Welshmen, was the fear of ‘invasion’ from bagnards or forçats (convicts) in NC. Many east coasters on the mainland were fixated on the threat of convicts—either having escaped from the NC colony or whose sentences had expired or had been pardoned—coming to Australia. Although perhaps exaggerated in actual numbers involved, the incidence of arrivals was more than merely perception, with periodic if isolated boatloads landing mainly on the Queensland coast (also in NSW and some reached New Zealand). With France flagging its intent to increase its transportation of habitual criminals to NC in the 1880s, anxieties further intensified. An additional concern was that in the event of a war erupting between France and Britain, France might unleash boatloads of the most dangereux kind of convicts in menacing numbers onto coastal Australian towns. A French proposal at the time to up the annual transportation numbers of bagnards including lifers to NC and to extend transportation to the adjoining Loyalty Islands as well, did nothing to abate Australian apprehensions [‘The problem of French escapees from New Caledonia’, (Clem Llewellyn Lack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1954].
Queensland’s northward anxieties◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌At the same time the Queensland colonial government in particular was equally anxious about imperial German ambitions in the region. Fear of German intentions to annex the eastern half of New Guinea to its immediate north, prompted Queensland first to push the colonial office in London to ratify a British protectorate over thesouthern portion ofeastern New Guinea, and then to unilaterally and rashly plunge ahead with its own plans for annexation in 1883 [‘Queensland’s Annexation of Papua: A Background to Anglo-German Friction’, (Peter Overlack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1979].
Conditions in the Île des Pins were of an extreme nature, the bagnards were subjected to cellular isolation, material deprivation and endemic disease, and worse, they were brutalised, beaten and tortured by the guards. The severity of their treatment was conceivably aggravated by the invidious situation of the wardens who themselves were in a kind of “occupational neverworld” (Toth). Entrapped in a low pay, no future work environment, theguards were looked on by both administrators and prisoners as merely “loathed turnkeys” [‘The Lords of Discipline. The Penal Colony Guards of New Caledonia and Guyana’, (Stephen A Toth). Crime, Histoire and Sociétés. Vol. 7. No. 2, 2003. Varia. http://doi.org/10.4000/che.544].
Memorial to 1871 political deportes, Île des Pins
By the time France ceased transportation to the Nouvelle Calédonia pénitentaires in 1897—a decision prompted by the economic failure of using bagnard labour to colonise NC rather than by any humanitarian motives—anywhere up to a total of 40,000 convicts had been transported since 1864. This includedsome 5,000 political prisoners – the Communards, transported for their involvement in the Paris Commune revolt at the end of Napoleon III’s disastrous 1870 war with Prussia (Lack).
Spying for the nation, the first tentative steps◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ Nouvelle Calédonia and other Pacific islands played a role in the formative days of Australia’s espionage history. In 1902 Major William Bridges, acting on orders from the commander of the Australian land forces General Hutton, undertook a military spy mission to NC with the purpose of ascertaining the strength of fortifications in the French Pacific colony. Bridges came to this task already with experience of intelligence work having been on a mission to Samoa in 1896 to suss out German designs for the island [‘The growth of the Australian intelligence community and the Anglo-American connection’, (Christopher Andrew), Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 4, 1989 – Issue 2, 218-256, http://doi.org/10.1080/02684528908431996; Richard Hall, The Secret State: Australia’s Spy Industry, (1978)].
Aside from having French and German ambitions in the region to worry about, the Australian colonies from the 1890s had a new threat to preoccupy them, Japan. Through a series of bold and aggressive moves—annexing Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea , establishing a foothold on the Chinese mainland, and in defeating Tsarist Russia in a Pacific war—Japan signalled it’s arrival as a force in the Asia/Pacific region, and a rival to British-Australian (or Australasian) dominance in the western Pacific. As the 20th century progressed Australian anxieties about the “Japanese menace” would reach a level of hysteria.
PostScript: New Hebrides – contested ground◌◌◌◌◌◌◌By the 1880s the Australian colonies’ concern about the French in NC had extended to elsewhere in Oceania, especially its ambitions for nearby New Hebrides (NH). Some in Australia feared that France might use NC as a base to annex Nouvelles-Hebrides and energies in Australia were directed at ensuring the British government blocked any French attempts to plant the French tricolour on the island group. In 1886 France did just this, establishing military posts with small detachments of troops at two ports, Havannah and Sandwich. The Queensland government, alarmed that this presaged French intentions to also use NH as a convict dump, pressured London into securing assurances from Paris to the contrary (Lack).
Condominium compromise Notwithstanding this, the French maintained a presence in NH and tensions between the British and French on the islands persisted, including some violent exchanges between the two groups. In 1904-06 a curious solution of sorts was reached with an accord in which both sides made concessions⚉, future governance of NH was to comprise an Anglo-French Condominium. This created a dual system with separate administrations (known as residencies) in Port Vila, police forces, prisons and hospitals▣. The French and British residencies had control over their own ressortissants (‘nationals’) with separate Francophone and Anglophone communities – which led to the inevitable communication difficulties. All of this administrative duplication proved unwieldy and at times unworkable. In the middle of what some cynics tagged “the Pandemonium” rather than the Condominium were the disadvantaged indigenous population of NH, the Ni-Vanuatu who were left stateless (proving difficulties for some of them later trying to travel overseas when they found that they lacked a proper passport) [‘New Hebrides’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Lack]. The unique if bothersome governance arrangement continued until 1980 when the island state finally gained independence as Vanuatu.
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❋ the island chain’s first visit from a European was by Captain Cook in 1774 who gave it its name but didn’t formally claim if for Great Britain
✪ prior to colonising New Caledonia France had shown an interest in the southwestern region of Australia as a possible repository to offload criminals from overcrowded French jails [Bennett, B. (2006). In the Shadows: The Spy in Australian Literary and Cultural History. Antipodes,20(1), 28-37. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org./stable/41957504]. A few French convicts were despatched to a spot in the Pacific even more remote, Tahiti
⚉ France recognised the British occupation of Egypt in return for recognition of its interests in Morocco
▣ though there was a Joint Court established for all residents
Before the Sovereign Citizen Movement came along (see preceding blog), there was an earlier fringe organisation in the US, Posse Comitatus, which mined the same ideological/conspiracy terrain and employed similar disruptive tactics against federal authority. Emerging in the late 1960s, Posse Comitātūs (Latin for “force of the county”), sprouting anti-Semitic hate speech and uncompromising anti-government dogma and railing against federal taxes, appealed to a range of conservative and reactionary fringe groups — including the Tax Protest Movement, 2nd Amendment Absolutists, Christian Identity adherents and other ”white WASPs”, and ’preppers’ or survivalists. The driving impetus for Posse Comitatus anti-came largely from one William Potter Gale who took over the movement from its founder Henry Lamont Beach⁕. Gale, a self-styled minister, preached retributive violence against US public officials who violate the law and the Constitution (Gale’s “sound bite”: they should be hung by the neck at noon at the nearest intersection of town) [‘Too Weird for The Wire’, (Kevin Carey), Washington Post, May/June/July 2008].
⟰ WP Gale, Posse Comitatus ideologue and leader
The trans-Atlantic sheriff Posse Comitatus drew on an earlier institution in American history, the office of the sheriff. This office deriving from 9th century Anglo-Saxon England—the word ‘sheriff, meaning literally the “shire guardian”—was exported to England’s American colonies where the sheriff of a county came to be directly elected as a constitutional officer holding great autonomy and independence in his position [‘Sheriffs and the posse comitatus’, (David Kopel), The Washington Post, 15-May-2014, www.washingtonpost.com].
⟱ Office of the sheriff had its genesis during the rule of Alfred the Great in Wessex (Source: www.historytoday.com)
After America became a republic, the institution of sheriff retained its status as the grass-roots hub of local law enforcement, although over time regional variations emerged. In the more densely populated North-East of the country the creation of urban police forces eroded the office’s power, but not so in the South and the West, where the preponderance of larger rural counties meant the sheriff remained a key force in tying together isolated communities. Here the overriding perception commonly is that ”the sheriff in his county is more powerful than the president”§ [‘The Renegade Sheriffs‘, (Ashley Powers), The New Yorker, 23-Apr-2018, www.newyorker.com].
An alternate history of US law: Common law trumps statutory law Posse Comitatus doctrine affirms the office of sheriff as the truly ‘legitimate’ arm of law enforcement in the land. In the minds of its adherents, it authorises the office-holder to determine local laws based on judicial decisions of county courts. Thus it holds that common law always takes precedence over statute or written law [‘Posse Comitatus’ (organization), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
“Constitutional sheriffdom” Influenced by Posse Comitatus and other extremist anti-federal government groups a body of sheriffs in the US have gone further to enunciate their local authority over the law. These hardliners in 2011 formed themselves into an association of ‘constitutional’ sheriffs (Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association or CSPOA)✪. CSPOA’s position echoes that of Posse Comitatus– the sheriff represents the highest authority in the county (Powers). In the early 2010s CSPOA mobilised sheriffs to take a very strong stand against President Obama’s attempts to establish gun control legislation [‘Line in the Sand’, (Mark Potok & Ryan Lenz), Southern Poverty Law Center, (Summer Issue, 13-Jun-2016), www.splcenter.org].
Posse Comitatus stoking the Midwest farm crisis
A farm recession in the American Midwest in the early 1980s, resulting in economic ruin, bank foreclosures, etc., “created the conditions necessary for the (Posse Comitatus) doctrine to attract significant support” among desperate and disenchanted farmers⊞. Gale’s acolytes “crisscrossed the region explaining to farmers and ranchers (that they) were under no obligation to repay overdue loans or peacefully accept the foreclosure of their property” [‘Posse Comitatus’, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, www.plainshumanities.unl.edu]. Some unscrupulous peddlers of Posse Comitatus ideology even sold the hard-hit farmers bogus prepackaged legal defences to circumvent their financial obligations (Carey).
(Source: Iowa PBS)
Followers of the Posse Comitatus manifesto often refused to pay taxes, obtain driver’ licences or pay vehicle insurance counterfeiting (steming from a denial of US fiat money) and other acts of federal disobedience. Posse Comitatus groups set up “common-law courts and juries”✦ to try public officials who had earned their enmity. Some members of Posse Comitatus groups, like today’s Sovereign Citizens, also engaged in more lethal actions. In 1983 one Posse member killed federal marshals and a local sheriff.
Continuing ideological after-effects By the late 1980s with William Gale’s death, Posse Comitatus activism ebbed away. The movement’s decline has been attributed to a lack of effective leadership. Nonetheless the attraction of its ideology to disaffected fringe elements lies in the durability of its receptive message to many [‘The Anti-Government Movement Guidebook’, (1999, National Center for State Courts), www.famguardia.org]. Gale’s inflammatory ideas “gave people on the paranoid edge of society a collective identity” (Carey). The Posse Comitatus ideology held the appeal it did, according to Daniel Levitas, because Gale forged an American-sounding ideology which married together appeals to anti-Semitism, anti-communism, White Supremacy and the sovereignty of the people [‘The Terrorist Next Door’ (Daniel Levitas), New York Times, 17-Nov-2002, www.nytimes.com].
Endnote: The archetype of the posse in the old west In countless Hollywood western movies the standard trope shows sheriffs raising posses to apprehend fugitives or to marshal back-ups to defend a community or town under threat. This was not merely Hollywood mythology but did occur. On the western frontier during the 19th century the sheriff had the authority to command a posse. Posse service was a right and a duty of responsible citizens of the day (Kopel). The reality behind the Hollywood depiction of posses is that they “routinely overstepped their quasi-legal function and were themselves responsible for mob violence” [‘Hate Normalized: Posse Comitatus’, Siouxland Observer, 30-Apr-2018, www.siouxlandobserver.blogspot.com].
⟰ Former Arizona sheriff, Richard Mack, a co-founder of CSPOA (Source: www.azcenter.com)
Postscript: ”An increasingly central role in partisan battles” The Marshall Project has identified at least 60 sheriffs across the US that are currently using the wide discretionary powers they have to oppose state government-imposed restrictions due to COVID-19. This has meant not enforcing pandemic safety measures such as stay-at-home orders, the wearing of masks, business closures, etc. [‘The Rise of the Anti-Lockdown Sheriffs’, (Maurice Chammas), The Marshall Project, 15-Aug-2020, www.themarshallproject.org].
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⁕ a far-right activist who had been a member of the “Silver Shirts” (American neo-Nazis) in the 1930s
§ the familiar image again courtesy of Hollywood is of the racist, tyrannical southern sheriff who rides roughshod over everyone, personified in the film In the Heat of the Night
✪ the idea of constitutional sheriffs was Gale’s, first proposed in the 1970s
⊞ by the late Seventies there was 80 or more distinct Posse Comitatus groups in the plains states, with Wisconsin in particular a ‘hotbed’ (‘Anti-Government Movement’)
✦ the common law courts, together with Sovereign Citizens, have been described as ”the direct ideological descendants of Posse Comitatus” (‘Anti-Government Movement’)
When testosterone-charged visitors to coastal Belgian towns began strolling around the shops and cafes bare-chested in 2015, locals objecting to this aesthetic blight on the landscape took to labelling the offending blow-ins “Tarzan tourists”. References to that archetypical, mesomorphic white hero of amorphous jungle habitats, Tarzan, have permeated popular culture for over a century. Since the time pencil-sharpener salesman Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) turned his hand to writing his first story in 1912, the aura of Tarzan, carefully cultivated by the author into a cultural icon, has extended from pulp fiction, to various media including comic strips, films (over 90!), radio shows, TV series, Broadway musicals, computer games and a raft of commercial merchandise𝓪.
Celluloid Tarzan – from urbane gent to LCD savage The phenomenal success of ERB’sTarzan of the Apes and follow-up pulp novels provided prime adventure material for a rapid transition into cinema, starting with a silent movie in 1918. Later sound film interpretations, especially those with former American Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, departed radically from Burroughs’ original conception of the heroic jungle adventurer as a cultured, multilingual, erudite aristocrat (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke). Weissmuller’s “dumbed-down” depiction of Tarzan was as an innocent and noble savage, the “strong and silent” type given only to monosyllabic utterings (“Me, Tarzan, you, Jane”).
⇩ERB at home in Tarzana, California
White skin, white supremacist As successful as the books and later franchises have been, Tarzan’s character has engendered a persistent stream of controversy. ERB’s creation, from the start, was an obvious target for accusations of racism – a white boy/man𝓫 thrown into a dangerous and alien environment (the “dark continent”), who manages not only to survive but to triumph over hordes of dark-skinned peoples and over numerous wild animals. Tarzan emerges from the pages as a “consummate colonial-era adventurer” – “a white man whose novel civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals…using appropriate technology” to help natives who “cannot solve their own problems” [RJ Gordon in Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist … and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure, (edited by Luis A Vivanco & Robert J Gordon), 2006]. The world that Tarzan creates in the jungle is in effect a “white supremacist Eden parable”, the books and films completely omit the point-of-view of the indigenous people who live in the African jungle (or the Amazonian rainforest𝓬) ‘[‘The Only Good Tarzan is a Bad Tarzan’, (Aaron Bady), Pacific Standard, 08-Jul-2016, www.psmag.com; ‘From Tarzan to Avatar: the problem with “the white man in the jungle”’, (Steve Rose), The Guardian, 06-Jul-2016, www.theguardian.com].
⇧TV Tarzan (loin-clothed Ron Ely) translocated to Mesoamerican climes (Source: www.nbc.com)
A white world of comfortable racial assumptions Tarzan’s brand of chivalrous “white masculinity” precludes him from engaging in sexual violence against women, but he is utterly implicated in the negative racial stereotyping of Africans, an explicit feature of the books – black men aredescribed as “lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering”, Arabs are “surly looking”. Without holding back, ERB tells us, Tarzan is “a killer of many black men”, revelling, shockingly for modern sensitivities, in the act of ‘lynching’ blacks [Gail Bederman, quoted in ‘Tarzan’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
The mystique of Tarzan: Green mascot, eco-warrior and proto-expat Part of Tarzan’s durability as a cultural icon might lie in his versatile utility. It has been noted that Tarzan possesses an “ability to adapt to the zeitgeist of different eras”. In seamlessly managing an environment that is unnatural and unfamiliar to him, he demonstrates a flair for “ecological sustainability”, we are shown the ape-man’s apparently impeccable “green credentials” [‘The Untamed Image of the Perfect Savage’, (Bram Wicherink), Efnofoor, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp.90-97. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25758188. Accessed 10 July 2020]. For Paul Theroux, who hadhands-on experience of being part of the ‘invasion’ of Africa by Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s, Tarzan is “in the jungle, but notof the jungle”…therefore he was the “first expatriate”𝒹[Theroux, P.“Tarzan Is an Expatriate.” Transition, no. 32, 1967, pp. 13–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2934617. Accessed 10 July 2020].
⇩The first screen Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, 1918
Tarzan as metaphor – defender of masculinity The period in which ERB wrote the first Tarzan books (just before, through and after WWI) saw the emergence of a challenge to the hegemony of white masculinity – from the Suffragette Movement…according to Robert Gordon, Burroughs’ creation of the all-conquering jungle superhero constituted a buffer against that perceived threat. This held sway again in the 1960s and 70s when the advent of women’s, LGBT and civil rights movements loomed as a threat to (white heterosexual) masculinity. Tarzan, as “the archetypal white-manhood fantasy” represented a “refuge of sorts for white audiences”. What they could observe in the story of Tarzan was an ideal of manliness, a he-man proving himself physically in the most testing of circumstances [Gordon; ‘Me, Tarzan. You, Really Still Doing This?’, (Devon Maloney), Mel, 11-Jul-2016, www.melmagazine.com.
PostScript: An attempt at a politically-corrected Tarzan The talkies motion picture era has seen a string of mostly forgettable actors taking on the role of Tarzan, as well as a TV series or two and even Disney animation versions of the vine-swinging king of the jungle. In recent decades the Tarzan phenomenon has appeared to be running out of steam, although a recent entry, a 2016 screen production, The Legend of Tarzan, sought to present a Tarzan with ‘woke’ politics and more psychological complexity. Tarzan is this time avowedly anti-colonial, taking to task the odious slave-based Congo empire of Belgian king Leopold II, and displaying his capacity for “racial sensibilities” in the endeavour. Resurrecting a Tarzan who is more nuanced is still in itself problematic for its contemporary tone-deafness – “propagating…a white saviour narrative during the charged era of Black Lives Matter” is not the most prudent or politically savvy card to play [Glenn Kenny, ‘The Legend of Tarzan’, (01-Jul-2016), www.rogerebert.com]. The hero’s mate Jane departs from her character’s standard “eye-candy” function and exhibits a “feisty proto-feminist” defiance and the film gives a nod to environmental and conservationist concerns. Unfortunately the movie got at best only mixed reviews and basically bombed at the box office [‘The Legend of Tarzan’ Falls Well Short of the Tree Tops’,(David Edelstein), Vulture, 01-Jul-2016, www.vulture.com].
Footnote: Tarzan, very much “all-American” Oddly, in all the graphic representations of Tarzan—in films, on book covers and illustrations—he is presented as clean-shaven, always sans beard, somewhat of an anomaly considering he is almost always off the grid, cut off from all the usual paraphernalia and comforts of life.
⇧Just your average Middle American family – the Weissmullers
𝓪 Tarzan was “the first fictional character to be multi-mass-media marketed…the growth of a veritable Tarzan industry, with “Tarzan Clubs” rivalling the Boy Scouts (Gordon). But not just boys, famed ethnologist and world chimpanzee authority Jane Goodall was captivated by the mystique of Tarzan, his impact on the primatologist’s childhood imagination “set her on a path to Africa to work with wild animals” [‘How Tarzan created Jane Goodall and how Goodall then repaid the favour’, (Shawn Thompson), The Ethical Ape, (2013), www.news.mongabay.com]
𝓫 in the books Burroughs explains that the name given the eponymous hero, ‘Tarzan’, means (in African “ape language”) “white of skin”
𝓬 occasionally for plot variety the setting for Tarzan’s adventures diverts from the customary (vaguely) African location to Latin America and India
𝒹 apparently he was the inspiration for future adventure junkies – for many restless souls in the West who flocked to join the Peace Corps in an Africa emerging from colonialism, as well as for later devotees of the ongoing craze for adventure tourism (Gordon)
The literary character Charlie Chan, created by Earl Derr Biggers, is best remembered in numerous cinema representations from the 1930s and 1940s. While the obsequious but sagacious Chinese-American detective became one of the enduringly nostalgic fictional figures of US popular culture, his creator in fact based him on a real life-and-blood Hawaiian-Chinese policeman – Chang Apana (his name is Hawaiianised but he was born “Chang Ah Pang” of Chinese migrant parents).
⍐ Downtown Honolulu, circa 1935 (Source: www.reditt.com)
Over the first three decades of the 20th century, the diminutive and slightly-built Chang Apana, a paniola(Hawaiian cowboy) before entering the Honolulu police service, patrolled the dingy and dangerous Chinatown district of Honolulu armed only with a 1.5m-long bullwhip. Chang’s detective escapades were legendary, involving – audacious, single-handed arrests of members of gambling dins, mastery over disguises in working undercover and shrewd and meticulous powers of sleuthing on murder cases (a cornucopia of material for Biggers to drawn on). Biggers’s own account of Charlie Chan’s genesis, is that he happened upon the existence of the “real Charlie Chan” after reading about Chang’s exploits in a Honolulu newspaper one day in the New York Public LibraryA.
⍐ ‘The House Without a Key’ (1925): the first Charlie Chan novel, although Chan appeared in it only as a minor character
A wellspring of a literary character The portly Chinese detective with a penchant for “Confucius says”/fortune cookie-style aphorismsB appeared in six crime novels—initially serialised in the influential American magazine Saturday Evening Post—in the 1920s and ‘30’s. Biggers’ premature death in 1933 cut short the Chan literary sequence but not the film adaptations which continued to proliferate with a series of extremely popular Fox mystery filmsC. Charlie Chan‘s first screen appearances were in obscure silent movies with Japanese and Korean actors playing the leads before Walter Oland, a US actor with Swedish-Russian parents, took over and played Chan in 16 pictures. Upon Oland’s death American Sidney Toler assumed the mantle for 22 more CC movies,and lastly, Roland Winters, the son of German and Austrian parents, for a further six films.
⍗ ED Biggers
Life inextricably entwined with art There were some interesting connexions arising from ED Biggers’ magnum opus…firstly, Chang and Chan’s creator actually met – in 1928. By then, such was the fame of CC, people in Honolulu had started to call the real detective ‘Chan’. The local newspaper recorded their meeting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel as “AUTHOR MEETS ‘LIVE’ CHINESE DETECTIVE”. Three years later there was the even more improbable meeting of Chan and Chang when 20th Century Fox shot The Black Camel on location in Honolulu. The meeting between sleuth Chang and actor Walter Oland and obligatory photo op occurred during filming…Chang was invited to watch the action and ended up coming every day apparently totally engrossed in the unfolding film [‘Chan, the Man’, (Jill Lepore), The New Yorker, 02-Aug-2010, www.newyorker.com].
⍗Chang and Oland (Chan) meet at Waikiki
The dragon’s embrace of Chan Charlie Chan’s international cinematic popularity extended, perhaps surprisingly to observers looking at it with the greater cultural sensitivity of the present time, to the Chinese themselves. Walter Oland, at the height of his CC fame, visited Shanghai in 1936 on a promotional tour – to widespread acclaim. Local Chinese newspapers even presented the event in terms that suggested that Biggers’ literary creation was in fact a real person: “Great Chinese Detective Arrives in Shanghai”D. And of course the Chan movies spawned home-grown imitators within China [‘Charlie Chan in China’, The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History,08-Jul-2011, [http://web.archive.org]. Chinese-born American academic Yunte Huang’s hunch as to why people in China took so whole-heartedly to the clearly faux-Chinese film character is to do with a tradition you see in Chinese operas of performing “the other”. He explains, there’s an acceptance of this “kind of imitation (be it opera or cinema) as part of the artistic culture of China” [‘Investigating The Real Detective Charlie Chan’, NPR, 07-Sept-2010, www.npr.org].
(Source: www.movieposters.ha.com)
🀂🀂🀂 Charlie Chan, detective at large As the series progressed and the search for plots to accommodate the oriental ace detective widened, Charlie Chan took on a ”globe-trotting” role à la the “Road to“ series. Hence the public were served up increasingly formulaic offerings in a variety of exotic locales – Charlie Chan in Shanghai, Charlie Chan in Egypt, Charlie Chan in Panama, Charlie Chan in Paris, Charlie Chan in Rio, Charlie Chan in Reno, Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, etc, etc.
Backlash against the honourable Mr Chan in an era of PC sensitivity What passed—unchallenged in a ‘whitebread’ society—for innocuous humour in the 1930s and ‘40’s was viewed very differently in the more pluralistic and multicultural milieu of the 1980s and ‘90s and beyond. Many Asian-Americans looking back have found the Charlie Chan depiction objectionable, a Chinese racial stereotype of subservience and pidgin English, a relic of ‘yellowface’ (a kind of “Yellow Uncle Tom”, much akin to the contemporary view of ‘blackface’ minstrel entertainment in the US) [Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History, Yunte Huang (2010); Lepore].
⍗Chan (Sidney Toler) with #1 son and #2 son
Yunte Huang has sought to redress or balance this jaundiced perception of Charlie Chan, arguing that the fictional Asian-Honolulan super-sleuth is “as American as Jack Kerouac” – “precisely because of (Chan’s) theatrical implausibilities and mixed-up origins”. To Yunte Chan “epitomises (both) the racist heritage and the creative genius of (America’s) culture”, and he notes that while Chan himself is Chinese, “his methods and his milieu are American”, eg, the books and films’ settings are Hawaiian/American mainstream, not set in Chinatown [‘Watching the Detective’, (Pico Iyer), Time, 23-Aug-2010; Yunte].
Assuaging the perception of ‘Orientals’ in America The dominant literary precedent to Charlie Chan in American (and Western) popular culture of Asians was the figure of Fu Manchu. The creation of English writer Sax Rohrer (Arthur Henry Ward), the Fu Manchu novels (1913-48), exploited the “Yellow Peril” conspiracy image prevalent in the West of an Asian stereotype of evil – Fu was depicted in literature and on-screen as a mad scientist–cum–archvillain hellbent on a mission to rule the world. Yunte points out that Charlie Chan fulfilled a purpose of refuting or challenging the negative Fu Manchu image in the minds of many Americans. In contrast to the iniquitous Fu Manchu wreaking havoc everywhere, Chan is a “man of logic” (as are his fellow detectives extraordinaire Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes), Chan’s personal qualities are that of moral rectitude, observation and logic (Yunte). Biggers himself derided the Fu Manchu portrayal as “sinister and wicked” and “old stuff”, compared to his creation, “an amiable Chinese on the side of the law (which) has never been used (before)” (1931) [‘Creating Charlie Chan’, Popular Culture, 1975].
Other observers concur that the amiable Chinese detective was a departure from the old, more overtly racist stereotypes in US fiction at the time – supplanting the “heathen Chinee” with a more positive image of a Chinese person [‘The Importance of Being Charlie Chan’, (Sandra M Hawley), in Jonathan Goldstein, Jerry Israel & Hilary Conroy (Eds), America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now, (1991)]. Fletcher Chan notes that the books and movies “were a big factor in softening the attitude of white Americans towards Asians”, Charlie Chan as a sort of “goodwill ambassador” [‘Charlie Chan: A Hero of Sorts’, Fletcher Chan, Californian Literary Review, 26-Mar-2007, www.calitreview.com].
Where the Yellow Peril stereotype of Fu Manchu personifies the evil, scheming and immoral Asian in popular culture, the character of Charlie Chan presents—albeit with the retention of some truly cringeworthy ethnic stereotyping—an equal, at least intellectually, to the whites in the world he traverses [Yunte; ‘Charlie Chan’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⍐Mr Wong: Charlie Chan rip-off with Boris Karloff
Endnote: Hollywood imitators, Moto and Wong The success of Charlie Chan on the big screen led other filmmakers to try their hand at using European actors to portray Asian-American crime fighters, however these were pale imitations of the original and lacking the Chan series’ success and its longevity. Fox’s “Mr Moto” series had Hungarian-American Peter Lorre as a Japanese secret service agent with a Viennese accent. Monogram Pictures, a low-budget specialist, also tried to emulate the success of Chan with its copy/interpretation of a Chinese-American detective Mr Wong, with British horror specialist Boris Karloff in the title role. The last in the series of Mr Wong flicks, Phantom of Chinatown, was a first…in place of Karloff, Chinese-born Keye Luke (previously Charlie Chan’s “Number One Son”) featured in the role of Wong, avoiding the then standard ‘Yellowface’ casting for Asian-American roles.
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A Biggers’ story of reading about a slick piece of detective work by Sergeant Chang Apana and another Hawaiian-Chinese detective Lee Fook has been extensively investigated by Yunte Huang who could not confirm the said article appearing in the Honolulu media of the day. An alternative explanation is that Biggers discovered the local police celebrity on a holiday he took to Hawaii in 1919 or 1920 Beg., “Tongue often hang man quicker than rope”; “Mind like parachute – only function when open”; “Front seldom tell truth. To know occupants of house, always look in backyard”; “Truth is like football – must receive many kicks before reaching goal”; ad nauseam. This idiom or element of Chan’s persona is known today as a ‘flanderisation’ – where a single (often minor) trait or action of a character is increasingly exaggerated or accentuated until it becomes the character’s defining characteristic [www.allthetropes.fandom.com] C as well as a regular stream of radio shows, comics and television series D mind you, contestants on a 1980s US quiz show asked to name some historical or contemporary Chinese persons came up with “Charlie Chan” as their fifth response (‘The Chinese Mirror’)
Hugo Boss … luxury watches, fragrances, men’s suits and fashion wear and accessories, Nazi uniforms. Wait! Run that last one past me again? Yes, it’s true. Hugo Boss AG＊, that doyen of international fashion houses with annual revenue exceeding €2.7 billion (2018) and over 1,100 stores worldwide, provided the German Nazi Party, with their uniforms during (and prior to) the Third Reich. Although you wouldn’t know so from a perusal of the Hugo Boss website which keeps a firm lid on the company’s unsavoury past❂.
The clothing company was started in Metzingen (southern Germany) in 1924 by the eponymous Hugo (Ferdinand) Boss…it commenced supplying the NSDAP (National-Socialist Workers Party) with their brown military uniforms, according to the company’s own claim, in 1924 (the year in which Hugo Boss was founded)∅. Initially Boss designed and provided the standard Nazi brown-shirted outfits including Stürmabteilung (SA) uniforms, Nazi workwear, and Hitler Youth uniforms. In the Depression Boss’s company was like many, many businesses severely hit and Boss was forced into bankruptcy in 1931. That year was momentous for another reason, HF Boss joined the Nazi Party, an event that was to turn his fortunes round dramatically. At the same time the failed businessman also joined the SS (Schutzstaffel) as a “sponsoring member”.
By appointment to the Führer
Membership of the party meant more contracts for Hugo Boss as a favoured supplier of Hitler. Under the Nazi dictatorship Boss’ sales grew from 38,260 RM in 1932 to 3,300,000 RM in 1941 (Timm). Boss’ motives for joining have been attributed to “economic opportunism” and its clear that he saw the business advantages of tying his colours to the Nazi flagship, but there’s equal little doubt that his commitment to the Nazi cause was heartfelt (a photo of him with the Führer was said to to be one of the tailor’s most prized possessions)❊ [‘Hugo Boss’ Secret Nazi History’, (Fashion and War), M2M, (video, YouTube)].
🔻A Boss ad placed in the SS newspaper
Nazi fashionistas
From 1937 on, the relationship acquired an exclusivity, Hugo Boss made clothing only for the Nazis, including the black uniforms worn by the elite Nazi force, the SS (Boss didn’t design the uniforms worn by Himmler’s SS Corps, two party members unconnected to the company designed them). Boss continued to heavily advertise his fashions in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, and fashionably chic the uniforms were! One of the pillars of the Nazis’ ideology was the pseudo-scientific belief in Aryan superiority, this involved showing the world what the “new man” looks like. There was no finer exemplar of this than the Wehrmacht military man, and this is where Boss provided the finishing touches. The firm’s stylish, sharply cut uniforms conveyed the desired outer appearance, the SS corporate identity that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to project to the world (Fashion and War).
HB as slave-labour drivers
From 1940 Boss used slave labour at it’s Metzingen textile factory, predominantly comprising women and later supplemented by the infusion of Polish and French POWs. The company (sans it’s founder), after decades of dodging accusations, finally came clean about it’s shameful Nazi collaboration, after being pressured into issuing a mea culpa in 1997 for the gross mistreatment of the workers. Later the corporation commissioned a book on it’s dark past association❏ [‘“Hitler’s Tailor” Hugo Boss apologises for using slave labour to make Nazi uniforms’, (Lauren Paxman), Daily Mail, 24-Sep-2011, www.dailymail.co.uk].
(Source: www.militaryuniforms.net/Pinterest)
A discounted form of justice
After the war Boss was tried along with other German collaborators by a regional Denazification tribunal. The man known as “Hitler’s Tailor” claimed in his defence that he only joined the Nazi Party to save his firm. The court found Boss to have been a “beneficiary of the system” and fined him 100,000 RM, made him sever all connexions with his own firm and stripped him of the right to vote, join a political party or professional organisation. However, on appeal, the fine was reduced by 75%, the other restrictions were lightened and his culpability was downgraded to ‘follower’ of the regime. Before the findings could be ratified by the French Military Government and the punishments imposed, Boss died in 1948 (Timm).
Endnote: Supping with the 卐 devil
Hugo Boss AG was far from the only company to profitably cohabitate with Hitler and the NSDAP. The list of big corporations doing mutually advantageous business was extensive, both within Germany and outside – including Volkswagen, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Kodak, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Siemens, Chase National Bank and Associated Press [‘Companies with Ties to Nazi Germany’, (Debra Kelly), Grunge, (Upd.17-Dec-2019), www.grunge.com].
┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷
＊ Aktiengesellschaft (German limited company)
❂ either that or trying to conceal or gloss over the inconvenient truth of the corporation’s history, eg, “in the 1930s it produced uniforms for various(sic) parties around the time of the world war”, www.bangandstrike.com
∅ the firm’s advertising in the 1930s stated that it was a “supplier of National Socialist uniforms since 1924”, however research suggest that this overstates by four years the length of Boss’ association with Hitler and the Nazis [Elisabeth Timm, ‘Hugo Ferdinand Boss (1885-1948) und die Firma Hugo Boss: Eine Dokumentation’, (Metzingen Zwangsarbeit – Forced Labour), MA Thesis, 1999]
❊ it was a ‘reunion’ of the two humble German corporals from World War I
❏ author Roman Koester wrote: “it’s clear that (Boss) did not just join the party out of economic calculation…he was a convinced Nazi” (Hugo Boss, 1924-1945. A Clothing Factory During the Weimar Republic and Third Reich)
It was ten years ago to the decade this happened. We had done what we wanted to do on the Zambian side—dog-paddled from Livingstone Island across the Zambezi River blissfully oblivious of crocs and hippos, summoned up the courage to take the big leap down into the deep but small Devil’s Pool on the precipice, inches away from an unthinkable 208 metre drop to the rock-strewn bottom of the great falls. We had seen what we wanted to see on the Zambian side—the best viewing points to survey the majestic Mosi-oa-Tunya from; the statue of explorer/evangelist Davie Livingstone. Now, having wrestled with our ethical demons and overcome them, we decided to buy a day tripper visa and cross the bridge into Zimbabwe, swayed by the lure of it supposedly having superior vantage points for seeing Vic Falls.
(Photo: www.victoriafalls.net)
As we approached the checkpoint at the Zambian end we skirted round an African kid waving copper bracelets in our face (copper bracelets are one of the few items dirt-poor Zambian youngsters have to barter in exchange for South African rands). After completing the immigration stuff we didn’t dilly-dally around at the check-point, I had read that the local troop of baboons here could be quite aggressive with tourists (just before we came to Zambia 🇿🇲 I had read that one unfortunate tourist had fallen over the falls to his doom trying to avoid the pressing attentions of a baboon who had taken a fixedly determined interest in the bright orange bag he was carrying).
(Map: Lonely Planet)
We tip-toed very cautiously onto the bridge, avoiding eye-contact with the bulky and menacing guard on border duty brandishing an AK-47, save for a single furtive glance in his direction to catch his cold, expressionless countenance. There was none or minimal passing foot traffic as we did the 1.8km bridge trek into the Zimbabwe tourist township. This bridge apparently is famous for being the site of a formal “pow-wow” between the white UDI regime representatives and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF rebels which signalled the end of the long Rhodesian Bush War (I could be wrong about this as it might be the other one, the nearby railway bridge, where the icing was put on the cake of peace?)
Not long after passing the customs point, having got a set of fresh new Zimbabwe stamps in our passport, we encountering our first Zim local keen to barter with the tourists. We managed to out-walk most of these but finally we relented and stopped for one particularly persistent guy who just wouldn’t take ‘NO!’ for an answer. As it turned out this Zim street trader did have something we were interested in – some Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 bank notes. These were not any old legal tender that you might get back in change at the nearby Victoria Falls Town shops when you buy some souvenirs of Zimbabwe, these were examples of the fiat currency that the Mugabe regime was infamous for!
So, after a very short bargaining session, in exchange for a handful of wrinkled RSA rand notes✳, we walked away with three crisp, new looking Zimbabwe bank notes. They were, respectively, a Z$20 billion note, (which we discovered was merely petty cash compared to) a Z$50 trillion note and, la crème de la crèam, a mind-boggling fresh, ‘new’ Z$100 trillion note! Talk about collectors’ items! When I enquired of the street trader what exactly could I buy with the Z$100 trillion note, he produced his default smile and replied, “one loaf of bread”! But I can happily report that on checking later I discovered he was wrong…for the Z100Trn note I could get three loaves of bread – at least…and probably a few buns thrown in as well!
Yes, I had heard about Zimbabwe’s notorious mega-inflation. Back in high school history classes I had learnt about the troubled Weimar Republic in the 1920s and it’s crazy, runaway hyperinflation which led to workers being paid every day, twice a day (morning and afternoon) and having to cart away their ‘soft’ mark currency notes in wheelbarrows! But I didn’t appreciate the full dimensions of Zimbabwe’s economic calamity until I came here. In 2008 the country’s insouciant and haphazard economic mismanagement had resulted in a tsunami of hyper-inflationary escalation which peaked at a staggering 231 Million percent. At its year’s worse, prices were doubling every 24 hours [‘Where is the next Fiat Currency Revaluation?’, (Andrew Henderson), Nomad Capitalist, Upd. 28-Dec-2019, www.nomadcapitalist.com]. A worthless, disposal nappy of a currency. Zimbabwe – welcome to the world of the “starving billionaires” as the Zimbabwe cynic (ie, realist) would put it!
As well as adding naughts to the money denominations at an alarming rate of knots, Zimbabwe in a currency-printing frenzy went paper money crazy – they started issuing notes for all the coin denominations too. At one point they even had a one cent note! In the hyper-inflationary swampland that is Zimbabwe, imagine the lunacy of printing a 1₵ note! Then again, perhaps we are underestimating the government’s capacity for irony…or maybe it was an artistic statement, theatre of the absurd, surreal farce, that sort of thing!
Within two years the out-of-control inflation reached even more embarrassing stratospheric heights – 89.7 sextillion percent. Finally the Zimbabwe government arrived at a solution of sorts, it jettisoned the worthless local dollar currency for the US dollar. It began trading principally in US$ and South African rands (today the country accepts up to eight other foreign currencies as legal tender—including the Botswana pula—in place of the valueless Zim $).
Sadly, the economic situation in Zimbabwe today is not much better. In 2019 the economy took another sharp downturn and hyperinflation rose again like an exploding thermometer…at this point Zimstat (the Zimbabwe stats office) stopping releasing inflation data (in a desperate attempt to cover the government’s own scandalous ineptitude). However the IMF put the level of Zimbabwe inflation in August 2019 at 300 per cent. Bread was now something like US$10 a loaf. The annual inflation rate as at December 2019 was sitting around 521 percent! Venezuela could happily reclaim second place in the world’s worst stakes [‘IMF: Zimbabwe has the highest inflation rate in the world’, (29-Sep-2019), www.zimbabwesituation.com; ‘Zimbabwe Inflation Rate’, www.tradingeconomics.com].
Footnote:Trillions, Quadrillions, Sextillions, Septillions, Octillions, etc.—ultimately it’s a numbers game of theoretical interest only
The dubious honour for having printed the world’s highest numerical value banknotegoes to postwar Hungary – 1 sextillion pengö back in 1946. Zimbabwean financial control suddenly doesn’t look quite so bad!
𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕠
✳ and my wife’s plastic tube of hand-sanitiser gel, which the guy’s infant kid had taken a fancy to
Many observers of the abject collapse of the West Indies Federation (WIF) in 1962, looking to particularise the reasons for it (and viewing it from outside Jamaica), tend to point the finger squarely at that largest of British Caribbean islands and more precisely at the role of the powerhouse politician of Jamaica, Norman Manley.
Manley as chief minister of the colony of Jamaica and founder of the Jamaican People’s National Party (PNP) at the onset of the Caribbean Federation was in a position to exert a centrally prominent role and even a guiding influence over the shaping of the new multi-island federation. Manley however chose not to put himself forward as candidate for the WIF’s prime ministership✲, or even to stand for election to the new parliament as an MP. And given that Manley was revered within Jamaica as a national hero/father figure, his non-participation in the fledgling WIF, certainly would have dissuaded other Jamaicans from embracing the cause of union [Kwame Nantambu, ‘W. I. Federation: Failure From the Start’, (art. updated 26-Oct-2014), www.tricenter.com].
⇣ Norman Washington Manley
Federalism as an essential stage to independence
Manley’s backing off from active involvement in the WIF at its formative stage was not an indication per se of his opposition to federation in the Caribbean. Manley had long advocated his support for federalism – but for him (as for others) it was a necessary stage on the road to achieving national independence for Jamaica. As he unequivocally stated in 1947: “I cannot imagine what we should be federating about if it is not to achieve the beginning of nationhood” [‘Jamaica’s Brexit: Remembering the West Indies Federation’, (Stephen Vasciannie), Jamaica Observer, 25-Jun-2016, www.jamaicaobserver.com].
Two unit ten-pins fall and the Federation splinters
Jamaica’s and Manley’s disaffection with the Federation, and with the perceived direction it was heading in, did not abate over the next two years. In 1961, under pressure from the opposition Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) Manley put the issue to a referendum of the Jamaican people. The wily JLP opposition leader Alexander Bustamante managed to persuade some of the constituents that the referendum was a choice between federalism with independence and independence for Jamaica. The vote came down 54.1% to 45.9% in favour of exiting the WIF (only just over 60% of eligible Jamaican voters cast a ballot)…Bustamante’s reward for publicly taking a consistent line against federation was his election in 1962 as the first prime minister of an independent Jamaica [ibid.].
⇡ Eric Williams, 1st PM of independent Trinidad & Tobago
Jamaica’s departure from the WIF was a crippling blow to it, but it was Trinidad and Tobago which applied the coup de grace. Trinidad’s leader, Eric Williams, responding to Jamaica’s exit with his famous aphorism “one from ten equals nought!”, followed suit, withdrawing Trinidad and Tobago from the Federation as well. Without the two most economically advanced islands the WIF was simply not viable and the Federation collapsed abruptly in January 1962.
Jamaica was the linchpin that determined the fate of the WIF but there was more behind its eventual opt-out than simply the political jockeying of rivals Manley and Bustamante for power…there were a complicated set of considerations for Jamaica in appraising it’s role in the Federation.
The ‘exceptionalism’ of Jamaica and Trinidad within the island-countries of the West Indies
In the late 1950s nearly all the West Indian islands making up the WIF were poor, beset by unemployment and woefully lacking in development. Jamaica and Trinidad however were the economic exceptions. With the advantage of comparatively larger land masses and significantly larger populations, both colonies were able to attract foreign capital and establish export markets (Jamaica with its discovery and production of bauxite, and Trinidad with its oil). Their spurts in economic growth set them apart from the other eight territorial units of the WIF. This stark disparity in resources and economic progress would work against the Federation’s efforts to unify it’s members [‘Norman Manley and the West Indies Federation’, part two (the referendum) (David Tenner) (Narkive Newsgroup Archive, 2004), www.soc.history.what-if.narkive.com]. The differing levels of development across the southern Caribbean archipelago was a handicap to the objection of integrating the parts of the Federation❂.
“Two rival conceptions”: Trinidadian centralism v Jamaican localism
Over the course of its existence two competing views of the WIF’s raison d’être took centre stage – succinctly encapsulated by one of the antagonists (Eric Williams) himself: Federation as a “weak, central government” (Jamaica) and Federation as a “strong, Central power” (Trinidad) [Vasciannie, op.cit.]. Williams and T & T also harboured fears and misgivings about the direction the WIF was heading (though Jamaica’s and Manley’s misgivings were more demonstrative). At the heart of Jamaica’s position was that no “extraordinary powers” granted the Federation should encroach on its national sovereignty. Being more wealthier than the others Jamaica was particularly concerned with the scope and application of federal taxes…Manley believed that they would inevitably rise and therefore hit Jamaica the hardest.
Jamaica’s antipathy to the WIF centralist model drew criticism from the other member-states…Albert Gomes, first chief minister of Trinidad and Tobago accused Jamaican politicians of a power-grab, manipulating the Federation, making regular demands with the purpose of supplanting “Whitehall with Kingston✥” [Nantambu, loc.cit.].
All of the eastern Caribbean islands advocated a strong role for the central authority, but T & T chief minister Williams was the WIF’s strongest voice. Seeking dominion status for the British Caribbean islands Williams in 1956 laid out the predicament for its small countries: “The units of government are getting larger and larger…federation is inescapable if the British Caribbean territories are to cease to parade themselves to the twentieth-century world as eighteenth-century anachronisms” [Vasciannie, op.cit.]. This echoed the UK’s position at the time of the 1947 Montego Bay Conference: union was the only way the “small and isolated, separate communities could achieve and maintain full self-government” [Narkine, loc.cit.].
⇡ Kingston 🇯🇲 (1960s)
The eastern Caribbean islands’ push to make WIF more centralised kept tensions between it and Jamaica at a high point. The centralisation issue was at its most polemical on the question of the Federation’s tax provisions. PM Adams tried to run the line that federal taxing power could be applied retrospectively, much to the consternation of the Jamaicans⌖. In fact the scope of federal authority was intended to be quite limited (eg, allocating grants under the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, assisting the University College of the West Indies)⍟. The bulk of government functions were allocated to the territorial units [Vasciannie, op.cit.].
The internal migration issue
Another revenue worry of Jamaica’s was the Federation’s call for a customs union and freedom of movement between the member islands…some of the poorer islands tended to be overpopulated (eg, Grenada, St Kitts), so Jamaica already with population pressures and wanted to avoid the possibility of it’s island becoming a “dumping ground” for other islands’ unemployed surplus – with a resultant diminution of Jamaican quality of life [Nantambu, loc.cit.]. The T& T government was similarly concerned about the danger of it’s territory’s labour market being flooded by internal migrants. Conversely, the other economically less advanced units like Barbados (with higher employment) welcomed the free movement of labour across the various units [Vasciannie, op.cit.].
Jamaica – the West Indies ‘outlier’
Another factor in Jamaica’s failure to embrace federalism in 1958 was geography. The island’s location in the west of the Caribbean put it a long distance from the other British colonies all in the east. This sense of isolation and removal from Federal power was compounded by the WIF capital being located not in Jamaica but in Trinidad.
When individual independence did come to the West Indian islands, some like the Turks and Caicos opted to remain a British overseas territorial dependency ⇣
Geography and nationalism
This “tyranny of distance” played a role in undermining WI federalism in a general way which affected more than just Jamaica. The spread-out nature of the British group of Caribbean colonies made for difficulties of inter-island communication…before Federation West Indians didn’t have much contact with peoples from other islands. Antiguans and Dominicans and St Lucians, etc, tended to identify with their own islands rather than with the Caribbean as a whole□, this bred insularity in mindsets. Home island identity was what informed their nationalistic feeling. The populations thus never arrived at a sense of ‘oneness’ about the Anglophone Caribbean◙. Consequently, the essential prerequisite for unifying the Federation, a “substantial groundswell of popular support”, failed to materialise [ibid.].
The triumph of parochialism – self-interest rules OK!
Ultimately, this inherent disunity sowed the seeds of the Federation’s dissolution. Once it was established, no one wanted to really get behind the new structure, one’s own vested interests was paramount to most island politicians. Those who held a post in unit territorial politics at the time of Federation were faced with making a choice between seeking office in the federal parliament or retaining what they had at island level – and particularly if they were a minister in their island government, this was a lot to risk losing (Manley for instance stayed put, in part at least, because he didn’t want to afford any opportunities to the JLP under Bustamante to regain the ascendency on the island and wrest control of Jamaican politics from his party) [Coore, D. (1999). THE ROLE OF THE INTERNAL DYNAMICS OF JAMAICAN POLITICS ON THE COLLAPSE OF THE FEDERATION. Social and Economic Studies,48(4), 65-82. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27865166 ; Nantambu, loc.cit.].
⇡ WIF crest – motto refuted: a federation without unity
This duality in Caribbean politics extended to the structures of public administration. When the policy-makers formulated the new Federation constitution, the old individual constitutions of the colonies were retained in a parallel arrangement… the new federalconstitutionwas simply “fastened on tothe variousexisting structures of government territorial units” [CB Bourne, ‘The Federation of the West Indies’, University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. XIII, No 2, 1960]. Another fundamental problem for the territorial units was that, as British colonies, they held only limited legislative power under the Federation.
Shortcomings of leadership
The WIF’s central government has been described as virtually powerless and its leadership ‘timid’ [Cynthia Barrow-Giles, Introduction to Caribbean Politics ((2002)]. Infighting between island leaders (eg, Williams v Manley) was constant…the nearly four years of the Federation’s life was characterised by seemingly endless discussions of what it should be about, include, etc. (Federation premier Adams likened the task of governing to trying to build a house on shifting sand) [Hugh Wooding, ‘The Failure of the West Indies Federation’, Melbourne University Law Review, July 1966 (Vol.5), www.austlil.edu.au].
PostScript:Successor organisations to the WIF
The moribund West Indies Federation was eventually replaced initially by the Caribbean Free Trade Association (Carifta) in the Sixties which in turn was succeeded by the Caribbean Commission – known as CARICOM, founded in 1973. CARICOM was established to achieve economic integration in the region, operate a (CARICOM) single market, undertake special projects in the less developed countries, handle regional trade disputes, etc. It has 15 full and associate members including countries in Central and South America.
⇡ Grantley Adams of Barbados (Federation PM)
••➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖••
✲ the vacuum left by Manley was filled by Barbados chief minister Grantley Adams who was selected the Federation’s inaugural PM…with no consensus between the Federation’s different units, the task was a Herculean one in any light, however Adams lacked the stature and clout of Manley and was largely ineffectual in heading the WIF
❂ a frequent criticism of Manley concerned the WIF’s perceived power imbalance resulting in the “85%” (Jamaica and T & T) being dominated by the “15%” (the remainder of the territorial units). Manley was unhappy with the Federal arrangements, believing that the voting powers, the parliamentary representation and the cabinet membership did not reflect Jamaica’s larger population and economic standing [Vasciannie, op.cit.]
✥ the Jamaican capital
⌖ the constitution actually prevented WIF from imposing direct taxes on members for a period of five years
⍟ expanding tertiary education in the Caribbean by opening a second campus of the University College of the West Indies at St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago
□ trade between the islands had been sporadic [Nantambu, loc.cit.]
◙ only in one arena, on the sporting field, has this sense of ‘oneness’ ever shone through…the West Indies cricket team (and community), dominant in world cricket during the Seventies and Eighties, has been able to unify cohesively and successfully as a constructed ‘national’ identity
The 1950s was a fashionable period for forming international federations in different parts of the globe. Nineteen Fifty-Eight saw the creation of two competing federations of national groupings in the Middle East (both short-lived unions), see my previous blog post (March 2019), Competing Strands of Arab Unity During the Cold War: UAR and the Arab Federation. The British West Indies Federation (BWIF), also coming into being in 1958, was another ephemeral, unsuccessful but very different effort at a regional confederation.
An idea with a long shelf-life
The germ of the idea of a federation of Caribbean islands is far from being a recent development, even in historical terms. Proposals and discussions about Britain’s Caribbean territories coming under collective control goes back as least as far as 1671 [Glassner, Martin Ira. “CARICOM AND THE FUTURE OF THE CARIBBEAN.” Publication Series (Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers), vol. 6, 1977, pp. 111–117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25765588].
In the 19th century there were various attempts at “governor-sharing” of different British West Indian possessions, eg, the Windward and Leeward Islands had a sort of federated arrangement from the 1870s to the 1950s✲. The Crown also appointed a governor to take joint control of Jamaica and British Honduras…the same thing happened at one point with Barbados and the Windwards. These constructed entities did not necessarily have satisfactory or happy outcomes, the last of these imposed ‘unions’ was followed by the Confederation Riots of 1876 in Barbados (a protest by local black labour against the sub-par wages paid by the white planter class) [Kwame Nantambu, ‘W. I. Federation: Failure From the Start’, (art. updated 26-Oct-2014), www.tricenter.com].
In the early 1930s a conference containing “liberal and radical politicians” from Trinidad, Barbados and the Leewards and the Windwards, meeting in Dominica, resolved that federation was the best way forward. Their proposals to the West Indies Closer Union Commissions were however rejected on the grounds that “public opinion was not yet ripe for federation” [Hughes, C. (1958). ‘Experiments Towards Closer Union in the British West Indies’. The Journal of Negro History,43(2), 85-104. doi:10.2307/2715591; Nantambu, loc.cit.].
Photo: Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (bitujamaica.org)
Agrarian class conflict: Quasi-slavery and organised labour militancy
In the 1930s a wave of grass-roots disturbances, riots and strikes, emanating from a burgeoning and increasingly militant labour movement, resonated throughout the Caribbean colonies. Britain, all-too-aware of the dangers of growing antipathy to its colonial rule, a scenario also playing out dramatically in British India at the time, put out ‘feelers’ to the West Indian political elites for their interest in a federation. A 1947 conference indicated that all of the colonies (with the exceptions of the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands) were in favour of a ‘loose’ association. The British government’s stated aim at this point was “the development of a federation which would help the colonies to achieve economic self-sufficiency, as well as international status as individual states” [ibid.].
Framework of the WI Federation
The UK parliament passed the British Caribbean Federation Act in 1956 (with the Federation to come into existence beginning of ’58). The framework of the West Indian Federation (originally named the Caribbean Federation) was to have an executive comprising a (British appointed) governor-general (Lord Hailes), a prime minister and cabinet. The parliament was a bi-cameral one and the federal constitution was based principally on the Australian model, allowing for a “very large measure of internal self-government” [Statement by the Earl of Perth (UK minister of state for colonial affairs), 29-Jul-1957 (WI Federation: Order in Council 1957), Hansard1803-2005, www.api.parliament.uk].
⦽ Flag of the West Indies Federation
1958 Member states of BWIF:
Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, St Lucia, St Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago✥.
The ten constituent territories signing on to the Federation comprised a total geographical area of 20,239 km and a population of around 3.2 million.
A good theoretical idea?
On paper there was a lot to be gained from a confederation of regional islands in the Caribbean Sea✪ – seemingly for both the coloniser and the decolonised. From Britain’s position, there was the cost and efficiency angle. Federation of the parts supposed that Britain and Whitehall would deal with ONE political entity (the whole), rather than having to cope with eight to ten territories, thus also reducing costs for the parent government. A single central federation of many parts eliminated the need for duplication of services, thus it would result in more efficient economic and social planning [GANZERT, F. (1953). ‘British West Indian Federation’. World Affairs,116(4), 112-114. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20668810].
For the BWIF government, more advantageous economies of scale could secure better prices for its peoples’ commodities. Enhanced prosperity of the country would serve to head-off social unrest within the island societies. Lastly, a single political entity could foster and facilitate the desired objective of democracy more smoothly [ibid.].
Approaching Federation: Confrontational rather than consensual
Unfortunately for the prospects of the Federation venture, multiple problems quickly surfaced, not least the difficulty of finding common areas of agreement among the member states, these factors beset BWIF even before the Federation came into existence. Deciding where to locate the new Federation capital itself proved problematic. Early on there was a move to make it Grenada (St George’s Town), but Jamaica and Barbados objected to awarding it to one of the smaller islands. Jamaica and Barbados also objected to Trinidad as the site but the island was chosen in preference to either of them. Even after that was determined, there was issues…the federal capital was intended to be Chaguaramas (Trinidad) but the snag here was its availability, part of Chaguaramas housed a US naval base. Ultimately, due to this complication, the Trinidad capital Port of Spain became the de facto BWIF capital [‘West Indies Federation’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].⦽ Red arrow = de jure federal capital || White arrow = de facto federal capital
Things didn’t improve after the Federation came into effect for a host of reasons – I will explore these factors in some detail in the second part of this blog topic: The West Indies Federation: A Failed Attempt at Forging a Dominion Within the British Commonwealth (Part 2).
Footnote: The Canada/BWIF relationship
From the early, nascent rumblings of a desire for self-government in the Caribbean, the Canadian Confederation was a model examined by pro-federation West Indians. Individual islands in the Caribbean had even speculated at different times on the merits of joining Canada as a province. At least twice during the 20th century the Canadian parliament considered legally annexing the Turks and Caicos Islands however this never eventuated [‘Turks and Caicos Islands’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Aside from this particular colony, federation within Canada doesn’t seem to have been a serious proposition for either side …though relations between the Federation and Canada remained close [ibid.]. 🇨🇦
◥▅◢▅◣◥◤◢▅◣◥▅◤◢▅◣◥▅◤◥▅◤◥◤▅◤
✲ described by Hugh Springer as “weak and ineffectual” attempts at unifying the group of islands [Springer, H. (1962). Federation in the Caribbean: An Attempt that Failed. International Organization,16(4), 758-775. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2705214]
✥ the UK mainland territories of British Guiana and British Honduras declined to join the Federation
✪ for a start the various scattered island entities shared a number of commonalities – a colonial history, the English language, a familiarity with British institutions, etc.
The northern coastline of suburban Sydney, with its abundance of picturesque beaches, is a magnet in summer for many visitors from far and near. One of the less frequented of the Northern Beaches, owing to its relative inaccessibility and lack of a rock pool✲, is Bungan Beach.
What drew me to Bungan this summer was not however the pristine waters of its uncrowded beach, but one particular unusual building standing out high up on Bungan Head…Bungan Castle, which this year celebrates 100 years since it was constructed.
Situated as one later observer noted “on a bold headland of the coast, about eighteen miles from Sydney” [1] (Newport, NSW), Bungan’s castle was built at the very pinnacle of a cliff-top by Gustav Adolph Wilhelm Albers, a German-born Australian artists’ agent. Today it is hemmed in and surrounded by a raft of modern, multi-million dollar mansions which share its unparalleled breathtaking views. But when Albers built “Bungan Castle” on what is now Bungan Head Road, the imposing high dwelling was surrounded only by bush and cleared scrub and completely neighbourless!✪
∆photo (ca.1928): National Library of Australia
Albers in 1919 was considered something of a doyen of the Australian art community, he represented local artists like Sidney Long and JJ Hilder, and the castle (his abode at weekends and holidays❇) acted as a kind of 1920s arts hub, an unofficial Sydney artists’ colony. The leather-bound visitors’ book (still surviving) records the names of numerous artistic personalities of the early 20th century including the formidable and influential Norman Lindsay.
photo: NSW Archives & Records∆
Aside from creating a skyline haven for practitioners of the art community, the eccentricity of Albers’ personal taste in decor is worthy of elaboration: he furnished Bungan Castle with an idiosyncratic and vast array of collectibles, a number of which the art connoisseur acquired on his regular jaunts overseas✤. The castle interior was inundated with a phenomenal “hotch-potch” of antiquated weaponry – including Medieval armour, Saracen helmets, Viking shields, sword and daggers including a Malay kris, battle-axes, muskets, flint-lock guns, Zulu rifles; convicts’ leg-irons and Aboriginal breast-plates.
∆ photo: Fairfax Archives
In addition to the assortment of objects of a martial nature, there were numerous other oddities and curios, such as a big bell previously located at Wisemans Ferry and used to signal the carrying out of convict executions in colonial times; a human skull mounted above the hall door (washed up on Bungan Beach below the castle); a sea chest; a variety of ships’ lanterns; “tom-toms” (drums) and various items of taxidermy [2].
This home is a castle – a “Half-Monty” of a castle
From the road below, staring up at the tree-lined Bungan Castle, it does bear the countenance of something from a pre-modern time and not out of place in a rural British landscape. Constructed of rough-hewn stone (quarried from local (Pittwater) sandstone), it contains many of the castellated features associated with such a historic piece of architecture – towers and turrets, a donjon (keep), battlements, vaults, a great hall, a coat-of-arms, etc.
This said, Bungan Castle lacks other standard features – a drawbridge with a portcullis and a barbican ; visible gargoyles; and a moat (although Edinburgh Castle also lacks a moat, being built up high on bedrock it doesn’t require one for defensive purposes); and it is also bereft of a dungeon! And of course, most telling, parts of the southern and eastern facades are clearly more ‘home’ than castle! One could easily dismiss any claim to it being thought of as an authentic facsimile of the “real thing” (some early observers described it, erroneously, as a ‘Norman’ castle), but with a bit of licence we can reasonably ascribe the descriptor (small) ‘castle’ to Bungan, much as New Zealand tourism promotes the lauded Lanarch ‘Castle’ on the Otago Peninsula (also without many of those classic features).
A family concern
GAW Albers’ prominence in the Northern Beaches area and the talking point uniqueness of Bungan Castle led many locals to dub the Sydney art dealer “the Baron of Bungan Castle”. Albers died in 1959 but the ‘baronial’ castle has remained firmly in family hands. The current owners are Albers’ nephew John Webeck and his wife Pauline. John maintains the family’s artistic bent as well, having like Uncle William had a career as an art dealer.
Artists’ Mecca? museum? both?
Webeck has signalled that he would like to reprise the castle’s former mantle as an artists’ Mecca, but I can’t help feeling that with such a wealth of out-of-the-ordinary artifacts within its walls, that its future might be most apt as an historical museum. Such suggestions have been made in the past – the Avalon Beach Historical Society referred to Bungan Castle having been an “unofficial repository for many articles, (sufficient to deem it) Pittwater’s first museum”[3].
—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇹—⇹—-⇹—⇹—⇹—⇸—⇸—⇸—⇸—
✲ the close proximity of larger beaches with on-site car parks (absent from Bungan) – Newport, The Basin and Mona Vale – make them a more popular choice for beach-goers
✪ at the time there was only three other homes on the entire headland
❇ Albers’ principal family home was in Gordon, 25 km way on the North Shore of Sydney
✤ although the bulk of the castle’s collection were donated to Albers by others who thought it an appropriate home
[1] WEM Abbott, ‘Castle on a Cliff Edge’, The Scone Advocate, 25-Mar-1949, http://nla.gov.au.news-article162719685
[2] ‘Castle Turrets on Sydney’s Skyline’ (Nobody Wants them…Our Baronial Halls), The Sun (Sydney), 08-May-1927, http://nla.gov.au.news-article223623550. The author of this article goes on to lament the fact that Sydney’s castle homes had fallen out of fashion for the well-heeled “princes of commerce” in search of a suitable ancestoral mansion…in 1927 their preference was apparently for modern Californian villas with all the latest conveniences.
[3] ‘A Visit To Bungan Castle By ABHS’, Pittwater Online News, 14-20 Oct 2018, Issue 379, www.pittwatetonlinenew.com
The first Levittown housing development on a former potato farm on New York’s Long Island (1947-1951) was seen as a ‘godsend’ by GIs returning from the war. Two-bedroom homes in the suburbs at a cost of only $6,990 with a minimal amount of money down (zilch down if you were a GI), seemed an opportunity too good to miss. The only catch was you had to be White as well as a veteran to get one! William Levitt’s planned housing development was intended for Caucasians only, restrictive covenants were inserted into sales contracts barring African-American families from membership of these new, model suburban communities.
Building comfortable White enclaves?
With Black veterans of WWII turned away from Levittown, Bill Levitt was forced to defend his exclusivist policy. Despite avowing (rather hollowly) that “as a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice”, Levitt sought to justify his position on the grounds that a White-only community was best for business. He argued that if he sold “to one Negro family, 90 to 95 per cent of White customers would not want to buy into the community”. Levitt was clearly not prepared to be an agent of social change if it meant a diminution of business profitability…self-interestedly and rather lamely he protested that it was unreasonable to saddle one builder with “the entire risk and burden of a vast social experiment” (even though the particular “one builder” in this case had been recognised by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in America) [‘When the Niggers Moved into Levittown’: Review of David Kushner’s Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 63 (Spring 2009): 80–81; Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109]. The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) was complicit with Levitt and other developers in the perpetuation of the practice of segregation, despite its clear violation of federal housing laws [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org]. Little wonder then that African-Americans saw the housing market as tainted, a “symbol of racial inequality”✱.
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/image-22.jpg”> The Myers[/capLevitt received a phalanx of criticism for the racially restrictive clause⍍…the NAACP (National Committee for the Advancement of Colored People) and the ACLU (American Civil Rights Union) campaigned against it, a Committee to End Discrimination for formed to specifically take on the task of fighting housing segregation. In 1957 a Black family moved into one of the homes in Levittown Pennsylvania⌖. After Daisy and William Myers (and their children) arrived in the Dogwood Hollow section of the estate, they were subjected to ongoing harassment and intimidation by White bigots nightly outside their home. Some Levittowners called in “professional supremacists”, the Ku Klux Klan to coordinate the protest (jeering crowds milling on the front lawn, cross burnings, Confederate flags, rocks thrown through the Myers’ windows, petitions to force the family out). After the local police failed to protect the family, the protesting crowds were eventually ended only after intervention by state troopers✫ [‘White Riot in Response to Arrival of First African American Family in Levittown, PA’, www.historyengine.richmond.edu; ’60 years later, the Levittown shame that still lingers’, (Jerry Jonas), Bucks County Courier Times, 12-Aug-2017, www.buckscountycouriertimes.com]. Desegregation of Levittown
Levitt resisted the criticism and made his third mass-produced settlement, Willingboro/Levittown in New Jersey, another Whites only community (no Blacks but it did permit White ‘ethnics’ – Hispanics/Latinos and Jews). By 1960 Willingboro had its first African-American family residing there (by 1970 it was 11 per cent Black). Only in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, did Levitt come out and announce that Levittown housing developments would no longer be racially segregated. Pointedly this occurred at the same time as the federal government enacted the Fair Housing Act into law [Kushner].
Over the years many sociological studies and much cultural criticism has focused on the Levittown housing model. An early take on Levittown described the housing project in aspirational working class terms as “the dream come true of the skilled mechanic in the blue dungarees” [‘Levittown U.S.A.’, A. Miller, Phylon Quarterly, 19(1), 1st Quarter 1958, 108-112]. Many observers have portrayed Levittown as a double-edged sword…”Levittown embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story”, some saw Levittown’s achievements symbolising America’s can do” spirit, its ingenuity and entrepreneurship, but for many liberals it symbolised violent prejudice, unthinking conformity and race-based exclusion [‘Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburb’ (C Galyean), US History Scene, www.ushistoryscene.com].
Sanitised homogeneity of Levittown
From the time of Levittown’s first outing in New York in 1947, some critics were concerned than the large-scale experiments in housing may turn into mass slums of suburban sprawl. If they weren’t thought of as slums, they were characterised as bland and unoriginal. Sociologist Lewis Mumford depicted the developments as comprising a “low-grade, uniform environment from which escape is impossible” [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com]. A common perception of Levittown from the outside looking in that has become generic is of an over-sanitised suburb consisting largely of identical housing [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Standardised houses produce standardised people was a popular view of critics at the time. Some went further and labelled Levittown a “social failure and an environmental disaster” [Steven Conn].
From an aerial or from a panoramic view, Levittown did leave itself susceptible to satire…the clear-cut “cookie-cutter” pattern of little boxes and white picket-fence wholesomeness invited comparisons with the world of the 1950s as portrayed on American television. The neighbourhood houses and their neat configurations resembled the sets of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best: images of irenic and idyllic communities of harmonious middle class suburbia…in other words, they looked like the cruel parodies of the American dream detached from realities – as depicted on the small screen [Review of Diane Harris (Ed), Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, (2010), (DR Contosa)].
Customising a Levittowner
The view of the Levittown landscape as fixed and immutable has been rejected by some observers who point out that the owners themselves were the agents of change and non-conformity…after they settled in some of the residents altered the nature of their tract-houses to suit themselves and their lifestyle – extending a standard utilitarian Cape Cod or a Rancher to express the individuality of their homes. They also converted car ports into garages or additional rooms for new children, and the like [Schuyler]. Furthermore, Richard Lacayo argues that Levitt homes were made to be customised, the original structures were basic and over time homeowners added features such as porches, dormers and new wings [Lacayo].
Un-Americanism, McCarthyism and Levitt
The formative days of the first Levittown projects coincided with the McCarthyist period of political witch-hunts aimed at exposing supposed communists within America. By a curious convergence of mutual interests, Senator Joe McCarthy joined up with fellow illiberal Bill Levitt in promoting the virtues of Levittown (“a model of the American way” McCarthy declared). In one of his incendiary speeches McCarthy equated public housing (Levitt’s competitors) with communism [‘The Levittown Legacy’, (Ellen Leopold), Monthly Review, 01-Nov-2000, www.monthlyreview.org]. Levitt returned the favour by vilifying anyone who opposed his segregationist practices as ‘communist’, linking Levittown to the McCarthyist cause, and by endorsing the Levittown way of housing as a more American and capitalist alternative to public housing [Galyean].
In 1968 Levitt sold Levitt & Sons to telecommunications goliath ITT for a cool $92M. Subsequent attempts by Levitt to replicate the glory days of Levittown in overseas housing projects (Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela) floundered, and then a big project in Orlando, Florida, also went “belly up”, with dire personal consequences for the realty developer. Levitt misused funds belonging to customers and from his charitable trust [‘Tough Times for Mr. Levittown’, (MT Kaufman), New York Times Magazine, 24-Sep-1989, www.nytimes.com]. The once great ‘King of Suburbia’ – whose multi-multi-million dollar business at its height was constructing 12 houses a day on its construction sites – died in debt, still dreaming of pulling off one more mega-housing triumph.
FN: By the late 1980s there were high taxes imposed on individual Levittown properties due to the absence of a commercial tax base. Levitt recognised, all-too belatedly, that this was a weakness of his developments (the estates were designed without adjacent industrial/commercial complexes)… which also deprived residents of a local employment source [Kaufman]. Another ironic twist for Levitt whose marketing mantra always invoked the affordability of a Levitt home, in 1988 homes in Levittown Philadelphia had a $200,000 price tag on them! [‘It Started With Levittown in 1947: Nation’s 1st Planned Community Transformed Suburbia’, (JF Peltz), Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com]
PostScript: “Little Boxes”
The period from the mid/late Fifties to the early Sixties saw a heightening of criticism of Levittown (and its clones) in literary and cultural forms. US novels of the period presented a downbeat, unappealing and even bleak view of life in a Levittown style environment, especially John C Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Social critic Keats wrote of the postwar suburban ‘solutions’, “find a box of your own in one of the fresh air slums”, Yates spoke of an era dominated by “a general lust for conformity”. The takeaway message of these works was that the tract-home buyer was entering a stultifying world of social alienation, the anonymity of suburbs, impersonal supermarkets, inane ‘mod’ gadgetry and mortgage servitude✜…bleak stuff indeed! To William H Whyte these were the “new package suburbs” whose residents (were) “transient, interchangeable cogs in the engine of corporate America” [Schuyler]. The critique of the Levitt house also extended to pop music of the day, Malvina Reynolds’ song ‘Little Boxes’ added a similar disparaging note to the Levittown commentary.
_____________________________________________ ✱ even after the removal of racial exclusion covenants in the 1960s, the 2000 Census revealed that Caucasian residents of Levittown, Bucks County, still comprised 98 per cent of the population
⍍ Kenneth Jackson has argued that the problem would have been avoided had Levitt simply made Levittown available to all from the start, he asserts that the demand for houses after the war was so great that White buyers wouldn’t have been put off by the prospect of having some Black neighbours [quoted in Schuyler]
⌖ it had been sold to the African-American couple by the home’s original owner (Levitt was legally powerless to prevent the re-selling of Levittown properties)
✫ the 2017 George Clooney movie Suburbicon is a fictionalised interpretation of the Myers Levittown incident
✜ the acerbic (other) Mr Keats followed up The Crack in the Picture Window with The Insolent Chariots (1958), a comparable hatchet job on the automobile and Americans’ problematic relationship with it
Postwar society – in America as elsewhere – was beset with a multitude of problems. Affordable housing was high on the agenda of priorities – servicemen returning from World War II and a new generation of Americans that would become known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ were about to come into the world. Due to preoccupation with the war and its drain on US domestic manpower, housing construction levels were well down at a time that birth-rate numbers were about to take off.
Into this scenario, at a most opportune time, walked the Levitt family, father Abraham and sons Bill and Alfred. Bill Levitt, who took over the family real estate development business from his father, saw a chance to meet the country’s pressing accommodation needs by mass producing houses at lower cost. Levitt and Sons, as the company was called, had already entered the field pre-war, initially successfully but had failed in its first foray into the high-volume sector✱. Venturing into postwar low-cost housing bore a certain irony for the Levitts – as they had began their career in property development during the Depression building and selling high-end, custom-made houses to upper middle class people (the Strathmore project in Manhasset, Long Island). Indeed, the years spent making and selling exclusive, upscale properties to the gentry of New York made the family rich[‘William Levitt Facts’, (Your Dictionary), www.biography.yourdictionary.com].
Levittown, New York The first mass scale suburban project, commenced in 1947, was at Island Trees, a hamlet in the town of Hempstead (Nassau County, Long Island). 1,400 tract-homes were sold in the first three hours of the opening of the Island Trees estate sales office [‘Levittown New York’, Wikipedia Republished, http://wiki2.org], within four years the Levitts had built 17,500 homes in Hempstead. The company concentrated on small two-bedroom dwellings, predominantly ‘rancher’ or Cape Cod style, seventh-of-an-acre lots (750 square foot). These tract-houses as they are known in the trade were modest structures, for the most part pretty basic (a living room, a kitchen, but no garage, an unfinished second floor) and pressed fairly close together in rows. But they were (initially anyway) very reasonably priced as well, affordable to US veterans from the World War, Levitt’s initial target market (“the Levittown house was the reduction of the American Dream to an affordable reality” as historian Barbara Kelly described it). Each Levittown housing complex was divided into distinct sections.
A revolutionary approach to housing Prior to the advent of the Levittown model, house construction was done in a unitary fashion, a building company would work on a new home until completed and then move on to the next project (the average builder had been constructing only about four to five homes a year). William and Alfred Levitt✫, building on the mass-production experience of Californian builders, devised something radically different, a totally new division of labour to speed up the process dramatically. Construction was divided into 27 separate steps or operations, each worker or specialised team of workers would complete one step and then move to the next house to repeat the step there, and so on (for example one worker’s job would be the singular task of going from house to house bolting washing machines onto the floor all day!)[Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27778531].
Everything on site was orchestrated to work seamlessly, the tradesmen were scheduled to arrive in a strictly planned sequence. Bill Levitt admired automobile tsar Henry Ford’s production methods and replicated them in what was an assembly line style of home construction. The comparison was widely noted, Time magazine called Bill Levitt “the Henry Ford of Housing” [Schuyler]. Others, only barely a little less grandly, styled him “the King of Suburbia”.
Vertical integration Key to the spectacular success of Levitt & Sons (at its peak the company was constructing homes at the staggering rate of one every 16 minutes!), and its rapid prosperity, was the way it achieved a vertical integration of the industry…the company purchased its own forests in Oregon and started its own mills to provide the lumber it needed; a lot of the parts came in prefabricated; Levitt & Sons even made its own nails. It also purchased materials in mass quantities thus avoiding markups on prices paid [Schuyler]. By buying directly from the manufacturer, Levitt’s saved through cutting out the middleman in the process. Kenneth Jackson credited the Levitt brothers with “transforming a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process” [KT Jackson, Crabtree Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)].
Integral to Bill Levitt’s cunning strategy for success was his exclusion of labour unions from his projects and his capacity to persuade lawmakers into softening industry regulations making Levittown easier to achieve [‘William Levitt Facts’]. Another huge advantage in boosting the success of Levitt’s projects was the securing of mortgage financing incentives from the federal government (veterans could buy into the estates with little or no down-payment) [‘Levittowns (Pennsylvania and New Jersey)’, (Suzanne Lashner Dayanim, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia), www.philadelphiaencyclopedia.org].
Levittown, Pa. ca.1959
Levittown, Pennsylvania
The second Levittown (commenced in 1952) was located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia. The Levitt houses built had limited exterior variations – six types: the Levittowner, the Rancher, the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial, the Country Clubber – but again they were moderately priced with low down-payments. At project’s end, 1958, a total of 17,311 homes had been built on the site [‘Levittown, Pennsylvania’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Growth and expansion of the prototype Eventually the Levittown concept of housing estates extended elsewhere – both far and wide. In Burlington County, New Jersey, Levittown Willingboro started in 1958, followed by Levittown Largo in Maryland, 1963, and two other Maryland communities, Bowie (1964) and Crofton (1970). As well, a Levittown in Puerto Rico was built in 1963, and two “Gallic Levittowns” in Northern France in the 1960s, Lésigny and Mennecy (both close to Paris)⍉. The Levitt covenants William Levitt, in the first instance at least, once he sold families a Levitt house, did not entirely leave them to their own devices. Owners had to comply with certain suburban covenants that he wrote into the contracts…the rules and regulations included no laundry to be done on Sundays and no fencing off of yards. Owners were required to keep their lawns mown and neatly hedged. Bill Levitt himself would drive around some of the communities on Saturdays to ensure that the residents complied with this edict – when he spotted properties that were non-compliant, he would despatch his own lawn-mowing team to do the job and bill the owners on the following weekday [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com].
There was another more controversial Levitt covenant, this one with grossly inequitable and far-reaching overtones. From the onset of the first Levittown, Bill Levitt refused outright to allow African-Americans to buy into the company’s housing estates. Levitt, a Jew, copped a lot of flak for his stance on excluding Black citizens, including Black veterans (see below FN re the dilemma of his Jewishness). I will detail this less edifying side of the Levittown phenomena in Part II of the blog.
Footnote: A “Gentlemen’s Agreement”:
‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a lauded film of the day
William Levitt’s discrimination against Non-Whites in Levittown was preceded by a similar policy against his own race in the earlier, North Strathmore housing project. Despite being Jewish himself (and a generous benefactor of the state of Israel and an organiser of Jewish-American funding for Israel during the Six-Day War) Levitt in his business dealings would not buck the local practice of real-estate agents refusing to sell to Jews – the unspoken “Gentlemen’s Agreement” among Gentiles to discriminate against Jews [‘William Levitt Facts’].
rꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰ
✱ building a 1,600-shack community in Norfolk, Virginia, which still had unsold units in 1950 [‘William Levitt’ Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✫ William was overall the boss of the business as the financier and promoter, whilst Alfred created the mass production techniques, designed the homes and the developments’ layouts. Father, Abraham, pretty much early on took a step back, ceding the running of the enterprise to oldest son Bill. This allowed the elder Levitt (a horticulturist by training) free rein to pursuit his pet interest, taking charge of the Levitt projects’ landscaping
⍉ Levitt designed tract-homes can be found also in Buffalo Grove and Vernon Hills (Illinois) and Fairfax (Virginia)
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𓇽 see also the October 2021 blog Lakewood Park, Ca Housing Development, the West Coast Answer to Levittownon www.7dayadventurer.com Lakewood Park, a mega-sized, rapidly constructed Californian housing development in the 1950s—the brainchild of three Jewish American developers—operated what was effectively a (unwritten) covenant discriminating against non-white prospective home-buyers.
Progressive advocates and activists for a more just and equal society in the US view the Port Chicago❈ naval disaster and mutiny in July 1944 as a crucible for the cause of civil rights. African-American seamen, the majority still in their teens, revolted against the entrenched discriminatory practices they encountered in the Navy during WWII, and although vilified and punished by White authority at the time, their stand was to be a key factor in the eventual decision to abolish segregation in the US armed forces[1].
Devastation on the PC pier after the explosion
The catalyst for the subsequent ‘mutiny’ (as the Navy and White society generally characterised it – see also the follow up blog) was a catastrophic series of explosions whilst two naval carrier vessels were being loaded at the naval dock with ammunition for transportation to the Pacific theatre of war. The mega-blast killed 320 sailors and civilians (the bulk of the sailors were African-Americans), plus a further 390 personnel were injured❧. It was the worst home front disaster of WWII (the cost included nearly $9.9m worth of damage to dock, ships and buildings). The fireball engulfing the Port could be viewed from miles away, triggering a quake felt as far away as Boulder City, Nevada. Such was the force of the explosion that one 300lb chunk of steel was ‘cannonballed’ a distance of 1.5 miles, landing in the main street of the Port township[2].
The disproportionate toll of African-American enlisted men in the disaster was the result of the Navy assigning them to the most menial, labouring jobs as stevedores, basically “pack mules” loading the munitions. The Navy made casual racist assumptions about their ‘limited’ vocational capacity, despite the fact that at the Navy boot camp the black sailors had each completed specific training for one or other of the naval rating occupations[3].
Navy double standards
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the Navy treated of the two groups of seamen involved markedly differently – the White officers and sailors were given a 30-day “survivor’s leave”, whereas all the Black sailors (despite being severely shaken and traumatised by the incident) were denied the leave – despite it being standard procedure in such instances. This proved a very sore point for the African-Americans at Port Chicago. African-American seamen enlisted in the US Navy, aside from motives of patriotism, for the promise of recognition as full American citizens – a chance to escape the South’s Jim Crow segregation policies or the North’s institutionalised “second citizenship”[4]. Unfortunately what they found, and Port Chicago was no exception to elsewhere in the military, was that they were still segregated and marginalised, despite the fact they were serving in the defence of their country.
Adding insult to injury: Compensation for African-American victims watered down
That the loss of Black lives in the Port Chicago catastrophe was of diminished importance in American society at the time was even more starkly underlined in the subject of restitution. The Navy asked for $5,000 to be paid to each of the families of the 203 dead African-American sailors. Extraordinarily, after a vigorous and forthright protest from Mississippi Democrat representative, John Rankin (a White Supremacist sympathiser) that the sum be reduced to $2,000, Congress caved in to his pressure and awarded the families $3,000 each[5] … a brazenly unequivocal acknowledgement from the authorities that Black lives in America at the time were not worth as much as White ones!
The Naval Board of Inquiry
The Inquiry into the explosion would give the surviving Black seamen (and the victims’ families) more cause for grievance. The report never established the cause of the disaster❖, but implied that an error by the enlisted men may have led to the explosions. As for the white officers and the base commander, they were all absolved of any blame for what happened[6]. The Naval Board effectively ‘white-washed’ the whole episode, choosing not to cast a critical eye over the glaring pre-conditions that contributed to the disaster. Both training and safety was lax at Port Chicago Naval Magazine. Deeply significantly, the Black assigned stevedores were not given instruction in ammunition loading. Training deficiencies were in fact common at Port Chicago – the White loading officers themselves had only minimal training in supervising enlisted personnel and in handling munitions. As well, the Port’s commander Captain Merrill Kinne himself had no training in the loading of munitions and very little experience in handling them[7].
Diagram of pier & the two cargo carriers prior to the explosion
Sowing the seeds of catastrophe
Safety requirements were not observed and unsafe practices abounded: there was a complacency about the maintenance of key operational equipment; safety regulations were not widely distributed for the staff to familiarise themselves with. The practice at Port Chicago was to force the stevedores, working around-the-clock, to load the explosive cargos[8] at a pace that would imperil safety – the rate was set at 10 short tons per hatch every hour (higher than commercial stevedores✾). Facility commander Kinne encouraged a climate of competitiveness between the different crews (which they called ‘divisions’) by keeping a tally of each crew’s hourly tonnage on a chalkboard … leading to the junior officers surreptitiously laying bets on which crew would win the “speed loading contests”[9].
PostScript: Was the explosion a nuclear detonation?
In the early 1980s investigative journalist Peter Vogel postulated the hypothesis that the explosion at Port Chicago was likely to have been a nuclear one. Vogel noted the continued secrecy surrounding the naval base site and pointed to the specific characteristics of the fireball (as described by eyewitness accounts) – a “brilliant flash of white” and the mushrooming effect of the explosion’s dispersion (ie, a Wilson condensation cloud). Vogel also asserted that the force of the actual blast was greater than the reported 1,780 tons of high explosives on board the two Liberty carriers (E.A. Bryan and Quinault)[10].
Whilst Vogel’s theory would hold obvious appeal for conspiracy theorists, it has been not gained traction among historians. Its detractors, especially nuclear historians Badash and Hewlett, point to Vogel’s lack of hard evidence to support his claim, and his inability to explain why the US Government would want to detonate a nuclear device on populated home soil. Badash and Hewlett have noted in particular the absence of any residual radioactivity and resultant harm to the local community – which suggests that only conventional weaponry was involved[11].
______________________________________________________________________
❈ the town of Port Chicago, now called Concord, is located about 30 miles north of San Francisco on the Sacramento River
❧ toll for Black Navy servicemen: 203 dead, 233 injured – representing 15% of all African-American casualties for the entire war
❖ it was a bad time for the Navy, PR wise. Just two months prior to the Port Chicago disaster, another calamitous explosion at West Loch (Pearl Harbour) resulted in the death of 163 seamen and hundreds injured … and like Port Chicago the disaster remained unexplained
✾ the quota set on the main base at Mare Island for instance was only 8.7
[1] President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order officially desegregating the American armed forced, United States of America Congressional Record (106th Congress), Vol 146-Part 4 (April 3, 2000 to April 25, 2000)
[2] 430 miles to the south, ‘Port Chicago Mutiny (1944)’, www.blackpast.org; ‘Port Chicago disaster’, Wikipedia, http://Wikipedia.en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘A Chronology of African American Military Service. From WWI through WWII.’ (U.S. Army, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. History), www.redstone.army.mil/history/integrate/chron36.htm
[3] RL Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History, (1989)
[4] ibid.
[5] M Moorehead, ‘The Port a Chicago Mutiny’, (Workers World), Feb 1995, www.hartford-hwp.com
[6] Allen, op.cit.
[7] ibid.
[8] The White officers used wilful deception to gain acquiescence, lying to the Black loaders as to the inherent dangers of the work – telling them the ammunition was not live which was catastrophically wrong, I Thompson, ‘Mare Island mutiny court-martial changed Navy racial policies, Daily Republic (Solano County), 23-Feb-2014, www.dailyrepublic.com
[9] Allen, loc.cit.
[10] Vogel, P (1982). THE LAST WAVE FROM PORT CHICAGO. The Black Scholar, 13(2/3), 30-47. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41066881
[11] L Badash & RG Hewlett, cited in ‘Port Chicago disaster’, Wikipedia, op.cit.
On 17th July 1944 a catastrophically massive explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California resulted in the loss of 320 lives, the majority African-American sailors. Less than four weeks after the worst wartime disaster on American home soil, the Navy, without regard for the sensitivity of the situation, instructed the surviving Black sailors to resume loading munitions onto the USS Sangay standing at the dock. 258 of them refused, contending that the conditions at the dock being still unsafe, and commenced a work stoppage. Threatened with court-martial (and a possible death penalty) 208 of the sailors eventually backed down. The navy authorities subsequently took punitive measures against these seamen (forfeiture of pay, pension entitlements curtailed) and they were eventually returned to service elsewhere[1].
The remaining 50 were charged by the Navy with mutiny. The defence counsel and the African-American men themselves denied this charge all through the proceedings, arguing that at no time were they attempting to seize control from the frontline commanders or overthrow the authority of the Navy (as argued by the prosecution team), but were refusing to work in what was clearly an unsafe environment, a protest against their being used as “guinea pigs”[2]. As Robert Allen explained, the mutiny charge was levelled against the defendants because the rightful description of what they were doing, striking against deleterious working conditions, only applied to the civilian sphere[3].
The trial of the “Port Chicago 50”
A court-martial was arraigned to be held on the Navy’s administrative facility at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The conduct of the trial was a travesty of equality before the law for the African-American servicemen involved … the accused black sailors were ridiculed as ‘primitive’ in their intellectual abilities, and “unreliable, emotional, lack(ing) capacity to understand or remember orders or instructions” (as the official ‘Finding of Facts’ stated[4]. The court hearings disintegrated into a shambles at times, eg, the judge fell asleep during the testimonies. After a six-week trial and a deliberation of only 60 minutes, a verdict was reached with unseemly haste – all 50 of the accused were found guilty of mutiny. The 50 convicted seamen were sentenced to between eight and 15 years imprisonment with hard labour as well as being on the receiving end of dishonourable discharges from the Navy[5].
Treasure Island court-martial site
One keen observer who attended the day-to-day court proceedings was NAACP❈’s Thurgood Marshall (later to become the first African-American judge on the US Supreme Court). Marshall was publicly critical of the trial, announcing: “This is not 50 men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy towards Negros. Negroes in the Navy don’t mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading!”[6]. In 1945 the NAACP produced a pamphlet entitled ‘Mutiny? The Real Story of How the Navy Branded 50 Fear-shocked Sailors as Mutineers’. Marshall and the NAACP focussed the issue very squarely on the racial dimension … the treatment of the convicted men was symptomatic of a broader pattern of discrimination by the Navy against African-Americans – by mid-1943 there were 100,000 Black men serving in the Navy, but not a single Black officer among them[7]. Marshall organised an appeal on behalf of the 50 prisoners, however in June 1945 the original verdict was reaffirmed by the naval authorities.
Aftermath and consequences of the mutiny trial
The Port Chicago mutiny had an immediate punitive outcome for the 50 Black sailors who were prosecuted, but in the long run it was a Pyrrhic victory for scientific (sic) racists and White supremacists (covert and overt) both inside and outside the military. The whole episode served in the long run to raise national consciousness about practices of racial discrimination within the US military forces. And it was to prove a catalyst and inspiration for the postwar Civil Rights movement[8]. For the Navy the ramifications of Port Chicago made itself felt in short time. By the end of the World War the Navy had, in piecemeal fashion, initiated its own reforms of discriminatory practices, anticipating President Truman’s official decreeing of desegregation of the American armed forces – which did not come into law until 1948. With the world war over the Navy found it untenable to justify the continuing incarceration of the Port Chicago 50 … in January 1946 all of the men were released and assigned to other details overseas. Significantly though, none received pardons for their ‘crimes’, the convictions remained on the books[9].
A dangerous job – for White servicemen!
The Port Chicago episode – a closed book reopened?
As Erika Doss has noted, “for decades the full story of the Port Chicago disaster of July 1944 was declared “classified” information and rendered virtually absent from historical narratives of the “good war”, as patriotic Americans like to call WWII[10]. The egregious treatment of African-American seamen remained an inconvenient chapter in America’s war history, one best forgotten (Port Chicago’s subsequent name change seems intended to support this objective of burying the thorny facts of the episode).
By the 1990s the whole shameful business had started to become more openly addressed … in 1994 a memorial to the Port Chicago 50 was created on the former base’s site. But in the same year these good intentions were turned on their head by a fresh Navy inquiry which found (unbelievably) that “race was not a factor” in the 1944 court case – a finding that would not be out-of-place in the annals of the “Flat Earth Society”!
Port Chicago Naval Magazine
(Photo: National Park Service)
A number of the convicted African-Americans then still alive agitated for a just resolution, a reversal of the wrongs perpetrated against them. One of “the 50”, Freddie Meeks was talked into requesting a pardon which was finally granted in 1999 by President Clinton[11]. However five others including Joe Small refused to request the same, steadfastly insisting that as they had committed no criminal act, they was no question of seeking a pardon.
PostScript: High hopes for justice with Obama
The continued denial of justice for the Port Chicago 50 led it to become a cause célèbre in the US. This remains the case in 2017 despite the fact that all of the convicted African-American sailors are now dead. Their relatives were among those calling on the Black president, Barack Obama, to exonerate “the 50” and overturn their verdicts. Disappointingly, Obama’s outgoing powers of presidential pardon, recently enacted, did not include any of the Port Chicago 50 in its number – though this was more to do with the Obama administration’s inability to find a legal mechanism to make this a reality, rather than any lack of will on the part of the president[12].
﹌﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹌
❈ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
[1] ‘Port Chicago mutiny’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[2] Joe Small, one of the survivors of the disaster and labelled as a ‘ringleader’ by the Navy, summed up the position taken by the 50 defendants,
“(we) weren’t trying to shirk work. But to go back to work under the same conditions, with no improvements, no change, the same group of officers…we thought there was a better alternative”, E Doss, “Commemorating the Port Chicago Naval Magazine Disaster of 1944: Remembering the Racial Injustices of the ‘Good War’ in Contemporary America’, American Studies Journal, Number 59 (2015), www.asjournal.org
[3] B Bergman, “War, ‘mutiny’ and civil rights: Remembering Port Chicago”, Berkeley News, 10-Jul-2014, www.berkeley.edu
[4] A Gustafson, ‘The Port Chicago Disaster: Race and the Navy in World War II’, (Turnstile Tours), 29-Aug-2014, www.turnstiletours.com
[5] Bergman, loc.cit.
[6] Marshall, quoted in NA Hamilton, ‘Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States’, (2002)
[7] Doss, loc.cit.
[8] ibid.
[9] US Secretary of the Navy James V Forrestal and Admiral Ernest King, working together, were instrumental in getting the wheels of integration in the Navy going forward, S Sundin, ‘Port Chicago – Desegregation of the US Navy’, (Sarah’s Blog), 28-Jul-2014, www.sarahsundin.com
[10] Doss, op.cit.
[11] C Nolte, ‘Clinton Pardons Wartime ‘Mutineer’ / Port Chicago black sailor of 50 in infamous case’, (SFGate), 24-Dec-1999, wwwsfgate.com
[12] ‘Full list: Obama pardons these 78 people, shortens 153 prisoners’ sentences’, (Pix 11), 19-Dec-2016, www.pix11.com
Today hardly anyone advocates the ideology and practice of eugenics, not openly anyway and certainly not using the prejudicial language of the past. Which is not to say that the notion of eugenics is a buried and long-forgotten relic❈. The vocabulary of human biology and biotechnology these days is about human gene editing, genetic engineering, genetic modification, genetic enhancement, germline gene experimentation, gene therapy, the human genome, sociobiology, reprogenetics, a Brave New World of molecular cloning, “saviour siblings”, “donor eggs” and “designer babies”.
DNA
The scientists and technocrats who enthuse about scientific progress and future technology and in particular genetic engineering[1], tend to be “gung-ho” about the desirability of genetic intervention in human life which they see as an inevitable process◙. To them it equates with and even defines progress – the curative and preventative promise of medical genetics is for breakthroughs in a host of life-threatening diseases.
Designing a better baby?
For many geneticists and parents, the latent capabilities of human genetic engineering (HGE) is an enticing prospect, a chance for the realisation of new medical therapies to prevent and treat the multitude of diseases that plague contemporary society[2]. Put in these terms, something akin to a “motherhood statement”, few would at least in principle find grounds for objection. Naturally the vast majority of parents wish for a better future for their offspring and descendants, so leaving affordability aside for a moment, using biotechnology to eliminate the risks of genetic disease would appear to have broad community if not quite universal support. But as shown below, when you take a step beyond the fixing of genetic disorders and try to use that advanced science to augment your children’s physical or intellectual attributes it opens up a myriad of complex and perplexing dilemmas, both ethical and medical.
A world of environmental, manufacturing and agricultural panaceas
Aside from the controversial question of genetic manipulation there is already a range of successful genetic applications in society. There is the environmental role – genetically engineered bacterium can and is used to clean up oil spills (and for creating insulin to treat diabetics). Genetic science can reduce the human footprint on the environment. With the population of the globe predicted to rise by 2.4 billion in the next 34 yearsΔ, its advocates argue that biotechnology and genetic engineering can help address the inevitable and critical world food shortage … growing new crops and effecting pest control of existing food sources[3].
Pre-natal counselling and screening of foetal abnormalities
Pre-natal screening for embryo defects like Down syndrome, Trisomy 18 (Edward’s disease) and spina bifida, has a seductive lure for parental planners, these are already commonplace procedures for mothers in advanced societies. Human geneticists trumpet this as a boon to parental choice, allowing the family to produce a baby free of life-threatening and restricting conditions. Preimplantation genetic screening takes this a step further.
The snowballing effect of genetic screening
IVF technology enables the screening of embryos for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease or Tay-Sachs disease … many view this as the start of a continuum which could usher in an “era of designer babies”[4]. The market in this area has created a consumer-driven demand for “eugenic services”. IVF testing for mitochondrial DHA has been exponential … in 2011 there were 580,000 medical genetic tests in Australia, a 280% jump on the 2006 figure![5]. Currently we test for Down syndrome and similar defects, next might be Parkinson’s disease, beyond that? If given the green light there is potentially no end in sight … will they test with a view to eradicating autism? Down the track it might be dwarfism, even homosexuality?[6]. This may sound alarmist to some, but unchecked, it is plausible that gene tampering could ultimately infiltrate these areas.
This is the perspective of many detractors of genetic testing who question what the limits are and even if there are any limits to the relentless juggernaut of genetic research and experimentation. Some opponents of screening for genetic defects have described its ultimate purpose as “race cleansing”, echoing the fanatical purification goals of the discredited eugenics movements of the past. Human geneticists for their part proffer the reassurance that HGE has built-in safeguards that prevent excesses from occurring, that the entire process is highly regulated and intensely scrutinised to precisely stop it going too far[7]. Opponents refute this, highlighting the dangers and uncertainties of risky human experimentation … unpredictable effects of gene transfer, the effects of gene insertion on other genes, the chance of off-target mutations (unintentional edits to genomes such as occurred in recent Chinese CRISPR-Cas9 experiments on the genome), and other unknowns, all not properly understood at this time[8].
Genetic enhancement and the danger of a perfectibility fixation
Genetic engineering to detect embryonic abnormalities and erase them is widely accepted in the West, genetic enhancement (practiced as a matter of course in agriculture) for humans remains a much harder sell. Genetically modifying your future child to prevent, say, a detected autoimmune disease, is one thing, but screening with the purpose of altering your child’s appearance, eye colour, etc, making him or her taller, more intelligent, more athletic, etc. … the imperative of achieving a Stepford Wives world of perfectibility could take over. This would propel medical genetics into a whole different realm, a techno-eugenic future fraught with menace and worrying ethical implications[9].
The ethical or moral dimension
Ethical or moral objectors to HGE seem to divide along religious and non-religious lines. Many professing a religious faith argue that the practice runs counter to the “will of God”, whilst those of a secular disposition might view it as “tinkering with nature”. The genetic engineering detractors argue that humans are inviolable, endowed with individual rights, and that such interventions are unnatural and trample all over those rights[10]. Some academics with an interest in science ethics however dispute the merit of the ‘naturalness’ argument[11].
Geneticists and biotechnologists would characterise a call for a blanket ban on human genetic experimentation as a conservative, “knee-jerk” reaction which seeks to close off the door to scientific inquiry and medical advancement, but the obverse, an open slather, unchecked approach to genetic intervention seems an imprudent one, given the unknown consequences of gene editing and of venturing too deeply into a genetic minefield that is almost certainly irreversible.
Concerns with non-therapeutic abuse in genetics has a wide ambit: another peripheral issue pointing to likely future genetic manipulation lies in the realm of sport, an area already plagued by the increasingly widespread use of steroids for performance enhancement. The development of gene therapy has elevated the disturbing likelihood of gene doping – inserting or modifying DNA for the purpose of enhancing the performance of athletes. Gene doping is still in an experimental phase but is particularly concerning both to doctors and to Olympic administrators because it is hard to detect and it’s nature is unpredictable and potentially dangerous[12].
Whilst the possibility of misuse and harm of gene editing technology is a barrier for many, others opposing genetic manipulation from a humanist viewpoint and have called out the human genetics industry for discriminating against and undermining the dignity of the disabled and the mentally ill. Opponents say that there is a common element at the core of both eugenics and human genetic engineering – the devaluing of (some) human life. Contemporary geneticists, they say, start from the same philosophical standpoint as the old-style eugenicists: a view of the disabled and other “genetically challenged” people that is essentially negative and pessimistic, conveying the idea that they are extraneous and to be done away with. Many critics see these advocates of HGE as intolerant of those with genetic impairment, refusing to accept the disabled in particular for how they are (which is part of the diversity of the human condition)[13]. These detractors believe that the normalisation of human genetic modification would lead to an erosion of respect for the disabled.
A fundamental shift in the parent/child relationship?
Another objection to human gene policy revolves around its perceived adverse effect on the traditional bond between child and parent. Brendan Foht, from a conservative perspective, has hypothesised that in a situation where parents decide to dip into the gene pool to create the kind of offspring they want, the child becomes a product of his or her parents’ desires and wishes … their acceptance of and love for the child is provisional upon the child stacking up to that ‘wish-list’. This, Foht points out, upturns the optimal relationship in which the child is the beneficiary of his or her parents’ unconditional love[14].
Some opposed to the genetic engineering of humans have emphasised the absence of consent by future descendants, ie, the ethical issues raised by “altering the germline in a way that affects the next generation without their consent” (Francis Collins, US National Institute of Health). This objection has been dismissed as a nonsense by John Harris who contends that parents “have literally no choice but to make decisions for future people without considering their consent”, this happens every day, without it life would not function properly [15].
Proponents of HGE have made attempts to salvage the reputation of the new eugenics, eg, Nicholas Agar’s concept of Liberal eugenics which leaves the decision to the consumer (ie, the parents) rather than to public health authorities, thus avoiding (argues Agar) the repugnant consequences of past eugenics practices. But as Robert Sparrow has noted, any emphasis “on pre-determined genetics of future persons leads to assumptions about the relative worth of different life plans”[16].
The politics and economics of HME
Some opponents of HGE have focussed on the political and economic element: their argument runs, if genetic engineering was given free rein to intervene into the human sphere, the result would be free market eugenics, so that access to genetic modification or enhancement would come down to the ability to pay and inequalities within society would exacerbate. The fear is that in this scenario the elites of society would have a monopoly of both biological and financial control[17].
The thorny issue of genetic engineering of humans, especially with its uncomfortable link with the pernicious effects of the eugenics movement of last century, remains a highly controversial one. Scientific advancements in biotechnology has created a receptive market for genetic screening for defective embryos, but the genetic enhancement of humans, with its Frankenstein-ish overtones, remains a bridge too far for most people in western democracies✥.
PostScript: Genetic Enhancement – Ask an expert
In December 2015 Washington DC hosted the ‘International Summit on Human Gene Editing’ in which scientists, bioethicists and other stakeholders from the US, the UK and China debated issues around the use of the human gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. The summit’s committee adopted a “precautionary principle” re the technology and resolved to avoid any unknown, unintended consequences. It acknowledged the value of CRISPR gene editing research as an aiding the knowledge of basic biology but advocated a cautious approach in its utilisation. It called for more research to be completed on the technology before any more ambitious applications were considered[18]. To date 40 countries have rejected human germline modification using gametes (genetically altered embryos)[19].
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
❈ which is not to say that there is no one today who advocates eugenics, eg, some elements of contemporary society couch their ideology in terms like ‘humanitarian’ eugenics, see ‘Future Generations’ (www.eugenics.net) which reproduces the work of pro-eugenics scientists such as Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton. Similar sentiments are also apparent in the published work of Helmuth Nyborg
◙ this is at the core of the transhumanism philosophy, the belief that “the human species in its current form does not represent the end of (it’s) development”, and posits that continuous, radical change in science and technology will lead to that future (‘What is Transhumanism?’, www.whatistranshumanism.org) Δ according to a 2015 United Nations DESA report
✥ cloning in particular remains the greatest taboo in medical genetics. A recent Pew study in the US found that the overwhelming number of its respondents oppose brain chip implants; surveys and polls in various western countries over the last 25 to 30 years have echoed this rejection of human cloning, G O Schaefer, ‘The future of Genetic Engineering is not in the West’, The Conversation, 2-Aug-2016, www.theconversation.com
[1] the science of altering living things by changing the information encoded in their DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), ‘Genetic Engineering’, (A Guide to the Future by Christopher Barnett), www.explainigthefuture.com
[2] human germline editing will decrease and even eliminate many serious genetic diseases, reducing human suffering worldwide, (Emeritus Prof. Harris), J Harris, ‘Pro: Research on Gene Editing in Humans must continue’, in ‘Pro and Con: Should Gene Editing be Performed on Human Embryos?’, National Geographic, www.nationalgeographic.com
[3] D Koepsell, ‘The Ethics of Genetic Engineering’ (A position paper from the Center for Inquiry, Office of Public Policy, Washington D.C.) August 2007, www.centerforinquiry.net
[4] F Nelson, ‘The return of eugenics’, The Spectator, 02-Apr-2016, www.thespectator.com.au
[5] S Saulter, ‘Trusting the Future? Ethics of Human Genetic Modification’ (Op-Ed), 6-May-2014, Live Science, www.livescience.com; R Gebelhoff, ‘What’s the difference between genetic engineering and eugenics?’, Washington Post, 22-Feb-2016, www.washingtonpost.com
[6] it is a matter of trust, their argument runs, Saulter, loc.cit. Proponents place much faith in the new, cutting edge gene-editing technology, CRIPR-Cas9, which is reputed to have a lower error rate than other technologies
[7] ‘Q & A about Techno-eugenics’, (HG Alert), www.hgalert.org; B P Foht, ‘The Case against HG Editing’, Nation Review, 4-Dec-2015, www.nationreview.com
[8] M Darnovsky, ‘Con: Do Not Open the Door to Editing Genes in Future Humans’ in ‘Pro and Con’, op.cit.; HG Alert, loc.cit.
[9] Moreover opponents of HGE see such modifications as unnecessary, C J Epstein, ‘Is medical genetics the new eugenics?’, Genetics in Medicine, (2003) 5, www.nature.com. A 36-nation survey by D C Wertz in the 1990s found that both patients and health care professionals held a pessimistic view of the disabled, D C Wertz, ‘Eugenics is alive and well: a survey of genetic professionals around the world’, Sci Context, 1998 Aut-Wint. 11(3-4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[10] HG Alert, loc.cit.
[11] Prof. Harris contends that what is ‘natural’ is not inherently good, diseases for example are natural with millions dying prematurely from them. Gene editing therapies, he says, could prevent these illnesses and deaths, Harris, op.cit.
[12] L A Pray, ‘Sport, Gene Doping, and WADA’, Scitable Mobile, (2008), www.nature.com; T Franks, ‘Gene doping: Sport’s biggest battle?’, BBC News, 12-Jan-2014,www.bbc.com
[13] HG Alert, loc.cit.
[14] Foht, op.cit.
[15] Harris, loc.cit.
[16] R Sparrow, ‘Liberalism and eugenics’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(3) 2011,www.philpapers.org
[17] David Koepsell has speculated that a monopolisation of power and wealth on the mechanisms of genetics could eventuate in a science fiction-esque future in which the human race is divided into two species, comprising ‘super-humans’ and ‘sub-humans’, Koepsell, op.cit.
[18] it concluded that editing the human germline would be ‘irresponsible’ without resolving the safety and efficacy issues, and without obtaining a “broad social consensus” on the technology’s use, T Lewis, ‘Hundreds of scientists just met in DC and had heated discussions about whether or not they should alter genes in human babies’, Business Insider Australia, 05-Dec-2015, www.businessinsider.com.au
[19] Darnovsky, loc.cit.
By the mid 1930s the allure of “scientific racism” was on the wane in advanced western countries❈. Although scientists were in the thick of the movement both as eugenicists and as propagandists, significant numbers of scientists and politicians never bought the shonky scientific approach of the eugenics movement☫. Many in the science community never accepted the methodology for the eugenicists’ grand schemes[1]. Information on heredity was far from comprehensive in that era, the science was misguided and there was a vastly imperfect understanding of genetics, at best rudimentary, at the time. Eugenic hygiene organisations were unable to produce reliable statistics. As John Averell pointed out, “proof’ of research” in the field comprised “primarily statistical correlation within conveniently constructed ‘races’ rather than individual case studies to see if the desirable characteristics were actually inherited”[2].
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/image-8.jpg”> Mendel’s schema[/The scientific genesis of the 20th century eugenics movement was located in the rediscovered research of 19th century Austrian monk Gregor Mendel. Mendel experimented in plant hybridisation and his laws of inheritance based on the crossing of garden peas✥ were the foundation for the theories of eugenicists like American Charles Davenport. Davenport et al applied the Mendelian method to human traits such as eye colour which he argued was inherited (as the colour of Mendel’s pea plants were). The eugenicists employed an overly simplified dominant/recessive scheme to account for complex behaviours and mental illnesses, this was a fundamental flaw in their thinking (derived from ‘pedigrees’ based on Mendelian inheritance), a single-gene explanation of human characteristics and conditions. Contemporary science unequivocally accepts that these traits are in fact shaped by (many, many) multiple genes, ie, the existence of polygenic traits[3].
Although eugenics was portrayed by its adherents in the early 20th century as a “mathematical science”, a clinical method of predicting traits and behaviours and controlling human breeding, its drew criticism from scientific quarters on a number of levels. The ‘evidence’ was typically shoddy, such as the research into determining just who was to be classified as being ‘feeble’ and ‘unfit’ in society. The eugenicists relied often on subjectivity, second-hand accounts and hearsay to establish the lineages of the ‘undesirable’ gene pool (see PostScript 1), or on visible observable (physical) features (the resort to phrenology and the like). The theories of eugenics did not seem adequate to explain some traits, such as shyness – rather than being an immutable genetic condition, this could be subject to change over time (ie, some people grow out of shyness!). In addition eugenicists took no account of factors external to a person’s gene makeup in the categorisation of the ‘unfit’, such as his or her contracting a transmissible disease such as syphilis[4].
The scrutiny on eugenics, its growing characterisation as a pseudoscience unable to stand up to academic scientific rigour, prompted some proselytisers of eugenics to claim that eugenics was more than merely science, that it was tantamount to a new religion or moral code[5]. One of the eugenics practitioners who typified this was Alexis Carrel, an American-based French surgeon and Nobel Laurette biologist. Carrel’s eugenics was a strange mix of science, religion, clairvoyance and ultra right-wing politics … his extreme ideas were infused with an anti-materialist, holistic spiritual mysticism. In his 1935 international best-seller, Man, the Unknown, Carrel warned against the degenerative effect of modernity and outlined his notion of an autocratic utopia in which the dysgenic elements were eradicated from society[6].
The eugenics scene in Australasia mirrored Europe and America in questioning the correctness of the ‘science’. The scientific community although entrenched in the vanguard of the eugenic movement threw up its share of dissenters from within its ranks. One such was geographer Griffith Taylor who championed “racial hybridity” and cast serious doubts on the goal of race purity and its assumptions that underpinned eugenics. Moreover there was a lack of cohesion and camaraderie among the individual eugenicists who are often rivals of each other … this of itself did not make for a strong, lasting movement in Australia[7].
J B Watson, Behaviourist (image: Practical Psychology)
The Behaviourist counterpoint:
The rise of behaviourism in the West as a valid analytical tool for explaining human nature was a counterweight to the biological determinism of eugenics whose advocates preached that biology was destiny. The behaviourist backlash against the persuasive eugenics ideology was led by pioneering American psychologist John B Watson▣ around the time of the Great War. Watson, rejecting Freudian concepts of the unconscious mind, or that mental states or ‘instincts’ were significant, arguing instead that observable behaviour was the key to explaining human traits and complex mental states. In doing so, Watson was also refuting the view that heredity played a role in this construct. For Watson, and for B F Skinner who later took up his mantle as a radical behaviourist, the environment, modelled behaviour, was the source of human change. The work of Watson and Skinner and other behaviourists undercut the eugenics movement’s singular reliance on nature by shifting the debate to the significance of nurture in the process[8].
PostScript 1: ‘Feeble’ family studies template
The belief of eugenicists that all social ills – poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, criminality, venereal disease, epilepsy – could be traced back to one genetic flaw, and that intelligence was determined by heredity, was shaped by seminal pioneering studies in the field. One of the most influential was by psychologist Henry Goddard (1912) who analysed the genetic pattern of one man’s lineage (known as “Martin Kallikak” – fabricated name derived from the conjunction of ‘kallos’ beauty and ‘kakos’ bad). ‘Kallikak’ produced two widely divergent types of families (one ‘good’, one ‘bad’), which despite being nurtured in two radically different environments, the patterns of which Goddard concluded was solely the result of heredity[9].
PostScript 2: Polygenism debunked
The polygenists accepted that the species had more than one origin (cf. monogenism – deriving from one, common ancestor). Morton (see FN 2 below) believed that races were arranged in order of intelligence … the fairer the skin the more intelligent. DNA evidence, tracing human markers, has disproved the theory by proving that all Eurasians, Americans, Austronesians, Oceanians and Africans, share the same, common ancestor[10].
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❈ Scientific racism uses ostensibly scientific or pseudoscientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify racial inferiority or superiority, Scientific racism’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
☫ Scientific racism was denounced by UNESCO in a 1950 statement on race
✥ for what Mendel described as ‘factors’ (the “heredity unit”), the early eugenicists substituted the word ‘genes’
▣ Watson’s life reads like some kind of early 20th century Mad Men persona (influential ad man, marital infidelities, monumental falls from grace, self-exile, etc)
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[1] for instance in the interwar period, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a Noble Prize winning evolutionary biologist, rejected the eugenicists’ inadequate methodology, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[2] this view prescribed a hierarchical order of races, an Anglo-Saxon ‘race’, a Nordic ‘race’, and so on down the line. Polygenists in the 19th century like Samuel G Morton contended that different races were in fact different species, each with separate origins, ‘Science: 1770s-1850s: One Race or Several Species’, RACE, www.understandingrace.org; J Averell, ‘The End of Eugenics … or is it?’, Melrose Mirror, www.melrosemirror.media.mit.edu
[3] ‘Mendelian genetics cannot fully explain human health and behaviour’, DNA from the beginning, www.dnaftb.org; ‘Rocky Road: Charles Davenport’, www.strangescience.net
[4] Eugenics and scientific racism had been described as “folk knowledge validated by scientific inference”, S A Farber, ‘U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement
(1907-39): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective’, Zebrafish, 2008: December; 5(4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[5] A H Reggiani, ‘Drilling Eugenics into People’s Minds’, in S Currell [Ed.], Popular Eugenics, National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
[6] ibid
[7] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’ (Unpub. PhD, Dept of History, University of Sydney, July 1996), www.kooriweb.org
[8] ‘Eugenics movement reaches its height 1923’, A Science Odyssey (PBS), www.pbs.org; ‘John B. Watson’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
Decline of eugenics in Australasia Unlike the US the eugenics movements in Australasia failed to even make legislative inroads, let alone implement their theories with any measure of success. Mandatory sterilisation did have genuine community support – from eugenicists, the medical profession, the health bureaucracy, racial hygiene and feminist organisations – but its extreme agenda did not secure the acquiescence of the general public behind it. Moreover, Claudia Thame concluded in her 1974 paper that only a “small minority of zealots” in Australia (some members of the BMA – British Medical Association) held an extreme position on sterilisation[1]. Most practitioners of eugenics in the country tended towards the segregation approach.
Eugenics ideas continued to have some credence after World War II – although not legislated by state authorities, sterilisations continued to be performed on the disabled, especially those with an intellectual disability. Commonly in rural Australia this was done without proper consent (or only with the consent of a third party). Girls from impoverished backgrounds unfortunate enough to be chosen for sterilisation often were told they were having appendectomies. In an era of deinstitutionalisation the eugenic motive for sterilisation tended to be overridden by that of contraception. It was an easier alternative for medical authorities to resort to hysterectomies and tubal ligations than to spend money on educating disadvantaged parents on how to handle their children’s sexuality[2]. There remains a continuity with present practices❃.
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/image-7.jpg”> 1928 Mental Defectives Bill: New Zealand[/capIn New Zealand the 1928 Mental Defectives Amendment Bill was the eugenicists’ best legislative hope for Aeotearoa. It provided for the establishment of a national eugenics board and its sterilisation clauses came close to being law but failed to pass due to a combination of government doubts about the public support for sterilisation and the concerted political opposition to it from Peter Fraser and the Labour Party and intellectuals like university professors Thomas Hunter and Arthur Fitt[3]. Subsequently, the Act’s provision for the registration of mental ‘defectives’ was pursued by the state “without enthusiasm or notable result”[4].
As with Australia and other western countries the lack of legislative support for sterilisation did not prevent its continued ad hoc practice in NZ. Data on involuntary sterilisations of the disabled in postwar New Zealand is sketchy but the numbers of women involved are thought to be significant … like elsewhere, the eugenic motives of the prewar period have a diminished importance, in their place the demand for sterilisation is driven by the priority of managing the sexuality and reproductive capacity of disabled girls and women (also as “an adjunct to the management of bodily hygiene”)[5].
Many churches went along with the eugenics orthodoxy and some Protestant clergymen actually advocated eugenics✥. The Catholic Church however, with its large Irish-Catholic working class following in Australia as well as New Zealand, staunchly opposed eugenics on theological (moral) grounds (the Vatican condemned artificial methods of birth control which interfered with “natural reproduction”)✦. Another formidable institution with class-based objections to the goals of eugenics was the trade union movement. Although not operating as a unified opposition against the spread of eugenics, there were significant sections of organised labour who were concerned that laws affecting mental defectives would heavily target working class children and withheld their support for it[6]. There was considerable skepticism within the Australian and New Zealand working classes about eugenics, many on the left saw it as espousing “elitist definitions of unfitness”[7].
IQ tests continued to be fashionable in the 1950s & beyond: giving ‘scientific’ credence to the stigmatising of those in society labelled as “less intelligent” (Source: The Creativity Post)
By the 1950s in Australasia eugenics had become unfashionable and had fallen out of favour with the public at large … biologists and other scientists, distancing themselves from the discredited eugenics tag, were shifting their focus and energies to working in the dynamic and burgeoning field of human genetics.
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❃ incapacity for parenthood is still used as a valid justification by the Australian judiciary to authorise sterilisations – eg, the ‘burden’ of parents having to deal with the menstrual management of their disabled daughters, even in some cases where the girl was pre-menstrual!, ‘Fact Sheet: Forced Sterilisation – People With Disabilities Australia’, (C Frohmader, Women With Disabilities Australia, submission, 53rd Session of the Committee Against Torture, Geneva, Nov 2014)
✥ non-Catholic church support for eugenic aims in Australia and New Zealand was not as powerfully concentrated as it was in the United States
✦ practicing Catholics as a block tended to oppose eugenics, including writers of the faith such as G K Chesterton, Graham Greene and James Joyce
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[1] C Thame, ‘Health and the State: the Development of Collective Responsibility for Health Care in Australia in the first half of the Twentieth Century’, (PhD dissertation, ANU, 1974)
[2] J Goldhar, ‘The Sterilisation of Women with an intellectual disability’, ‘Law and Society Conference’ (Brisbane, December 1990), www.austlit.edu.au
[3] T Taylor, ‘Thomas Hunter and the Campaign Against Eugenics, NZJH, 39(2) 2005
[4] M Finnane, ‘From dangerous lunatic to human rights?: the law and mental illness in Australian history’ in C Coleborne [Ed.], Madness in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum
[5] C Hamilton, ‘Sterilisation and intellectual disabled people in New Zealand – still on the agenda’, Kōtuitui: the New Zealand Journal Social Sciences Online, 7(2), Nov 2012
[6] S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[7] ibid.
Australia’s “impure origins” as a convict colony in 1788 cast a shadow over the country’s European inhabitants which stayed with them long after transportation to the colonies was halted (with the exception of South Australia whose citizens have take a perhaps inflated self-satisfaction from its status as the sole free colony from its foundation)[1]. The deep imprint of the “convict stain” was a difficult burden to throw off but as Australia became more involved in world events especially external wars, this dubious tag started to recede and a new, more estimable self-identity started to take shape in the consciousness of Australians. A catalyst for this gradual change of self-perception was the roll-call of British Empire wars in which valiant Australians distinguished themselves on the field of battle – South African War, WWI (Gallipoli, the Western Front, Palestine). The feats of Australian soldiers in war worked as an antidote to the lingering convict inferiority complex[2].
Geo. Wood, “Convict Stain” debunker
The ‘stain’ of colonial Australia continued into the Federation era but in 1922 the intervention of a Sydney University history professor into this debate presented a new (positive) perspective for Australians to build on. George Arnold Wood in his highly influential book, The Discovery of Australia, reassessed the early colonial era, repudiating the “convict stain” and argued that Australia’s convict legacy should elicit admiration rather than being the enduring object of shame for Australians. Wood tapped into a powerful Antipodean undercurrent of the time, by exulting the convict heritage and raising up the current generation of their descendants, he was emphasising a (superior) point of difference with the character of Britons back in the mother country. Wood contended that Australians were free of the environmental drawbacks that was sapping the vitality of the working class Briton (industrial grime, overcrowded tenements in cities, etc). From the late 19th century some observers had started to view the Australian and New Zealand “White Dominions” as being the region of “the coming man” vis-à-vis the mother country[3].
New Zealand, unlike Australia, did not have the stigma of a convict society to overcome, but New Zealanders had been cultivating their own distinctive image of the country which set it apart from Britain. New Zealanders nourished a national myth that NZ was peopled by highly selected stock, “Better Britons” or “Britain of the South”❈ as New Zealanders described themselves and the country that they inhabited (the claim to possess exclusive racial stock was referenced in NZ medical journals of the time)[4].
The “coming man” hypothesis bought into a number of prevailing Antipodean myths of the period. The 1850s phenomenon of the gold-rushes in Eastern Australia led some to conclude that only the best men from Britain migrated to Australian goldfields, having what it took to make the journey and prosper … the thinking was that Australia had attracted the “pick of Britain’s stock” and therefore it was somehow better than Britain[5]. Immigration patterns have contributed to the modified sense of Australian identity. With migrants being drawn predominately from the British Isles and Ireland until the 1950s, James Jupp has argued that a belief has persisted that Australians (especially native-born ones) were both of British racial and cultural descent and “superior to the British”. The ‘ordinary’ English working and lower-middle classes were often seen as “dirty, servile, unhealthy, inferior” and held in low regard by Australians[6].
Conditions in Australia were often cited as a building block for the construction of a ‘superior’ cut of British man. Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race'[7]. W K Hancock (Australia, 1930) described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) … breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”, endorsing a view of environmental determinism[8]. A sense of ‘racial vigour’ was a recurring motif in contemporary references to the coming or ‘new’ man in Australasia✤.
South African Boer War – coming crisis in British Manhood?
Imperial Britain’s performance in the Boer War (especially early on) against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of Britain’s fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. Britain’s sudden reverses in the war required reinforcements from home, leading to a manpower dilemma – unhealthy British cities and slums, from where the foot soldiers were drawn, churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men[9]. The average British soldier in 1900 was shorter than that of 1845 and over three-fourths of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for service[10]. This crisis gave further credence to the idea of Australia and New Zealand as embodying the coming man. Whilst British soldiery seemed to struggle and its martial supremacy stumbled (albeit temporarily), the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. The Boer War reversals only accentuated anxieties about the racial deterioration of working class Britons[11]. A report conducted in 1904, with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration”, confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested.
The “proof” of Gallipoli
The valour and skill exhibited by Australian and New Zealand soldiers in WWI vis-à-vis the perception of the British troops, reinforced the coming man stereotype[12]. Even English social Darwinists such as Randolf Bedford (London Times, 1915) described the ANZAC troops as a “race of athletes”. These ‘athletes’, it was claimed, were scientifically superior to their British cousins. Prominent in the myth-making was Great War correspondent C E W Bean who attributed Australian achievements on the battlefield to a sense of mateship and the democratic culture bred in the Australian bush[13]. Regeneration of the white stock was only achievable through the “new Anglos” to be found in Australasia amongst its soldiers and athletes, so this myth went.
Depletion of racial stock
The Great War, and specifically the Gallipoli campaign, was a “defining moment” for New Zealanders and Australians, a “global test that proved the manhood” of those “representatives of the ‘coming man'”[14]. The war was also a devastating loss of that same manhood … both countries lost a “chunk of their tallest and healthiest A1 stock” with New Zealand suffering casualties of 59% of its entire forces¤. In a talk in Australia NZ eugenicist-physician Truby King, lamenting the loss of manhood, implored white women to “repair the war wastage” by producing more babies from good stock and preventing infant deaths[15].
⍗ The 1905 champion All Blacks (“the Originals”)
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)
This Antipodean sporting life … demonstrating superior prowess through sport
Manhood through the testing experience of war – imperial and global – helped shape Australians and New Zealanders’ sense of their own national identities, another definer of character was sport. The dominant performance of the 1905 All Blacks (New Zealand rugby team) in the UK, with its formidable physical power and skill proving too much for the best of the British Isles and Irish rugby … the Kiwis’ display of “muscular manhood” on tour made an unmistakeable impression at home. For many the All Blacks’ triumph was confirmation that NZ was “the best place to build strong bodies”. Prime Minister Richard (‘King Dick’) Seddon attributed the team’s dominance to the country’s “natural and healthy conditions of colonial life (which produced such) “stalwart and athletic sons” as the NZ players in the rugby touring team[16].
The following year, 1906, the South African tour of the British Isles saw the South African ‘Springboks’ triumph over the rugby home countries as well (two years after that the Australian ‘Wallabies’ toured Britain and Ireland, also winning the great bulk of games it played). As rugby was considered in Britain as “a sport of the elite” (played by gentlemen), defeat at the hands of these ‘colonial’ teams was a savage blow to British pride and another indicator for many of the home nation’s racial decline[17].
Not all contemporary observers accepted the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of the ‘new’ Australian and New Zealander as espoused by Wood and Bean et al. John Fraser, a visitor from Britain, observed in Australia: the Making of a Nation (1910), that the native-born Australian lacked vim and vigour, and would degenerate without “infusion of British blood”. Fraser concluded that Australians were “just transplanted British people”, albeit “modified by the influence of climate” and social environment[18].
The race card: immigration and border control
Backers of the eugenics movements and believers in the notion of the “coming man” in Australia and New Zealand tended to view new immigrants as suspect. In the reasoning of the authorities it was imperative that the numbers of the ‘unfit’, the “social undesirables” already in Australasia do not swell further. A watertight immigration control, determining who is ‘fit’ and appropriate to enter the country, would compliment the eugenic measures of sterilisation and segregation. Accordingly in 1899 New Zealand, and 1901 Australia, passed Immigration Restriction Acts. Australia’s legislation barred permanent entry for non-white people. The White Australian Policy reflected Australian fears of invasion from the north … Australia’s sense of isolation and vulnerability at the proximity of what racists depicted as “teeming hordes of Asiatics” (concerns intensified by Japan’s population spurt coinciding with a trend towards low rates of birth for Australia)[19].
In a work breaking new ground Alison Bashford in Imperial Hygiene has focused attention on the function of quarantine in Australia’s racially motivated immigration policies that came into force after Federation. Positioning quarantine as an integral part of the White Australia Policy, Bashford argues that the quarantine line on Australia’s border was also a “racialised immigration restriction line”, and together with the immigration restriction measures, part of an “international hygiene”. In an effort to block so-called “racially impure” and “unfit” immigrants from entering the country, Australia wrote mental health and hygiene criteria into its immigration laws and regulations (as did other western nations including Britain, the US and Canada)[20].
PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia
DH (Bert) Lawrence in his novel Kangaroo, written entirely with the exception of the final chapter while the peripatetic English novelist was in Australia (1922), fleetingly entertained the possibility of Australia becoming a new and uncorrupted Britain. One of Lawrence’s enduring preoccupations, informed by his readings of Herbert Spencer and other early eugenics proponents, was the degeneration of western industrial society. In other works also Lawrence subscribed to the notion of the coming man, eg, in Aaron’s Rod (written before his visit to Australia) Lawrence described an Australian character as a “new and vital version of an English man”[21].
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❈ with such fidelity did New Zealand uphold the notion of being (better) Britons, that it wasn’t until 1948 that New Zealanders ceased to be British citizens and became “New Zealand citizens”
✤ the idea of the common or new man in society and its association with eugenics was not confined to Australasia, the Southern Hemisphere or even to the Anglo-Saxon world, for an account of the Italian eugenics movement see F Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy
¤ this was an imperial anxiety for the British and the Dominions, the loss of the best or fittest elements killed on the battlefield, a diminution of the “pool of fit white stock”, J M Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010
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[1] J Hirst, ‘An Oddity from the Start: Convicts and National Character’, The Monthly, July 2008, www.themonthly.com.au
[2] D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[3] S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’ in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[4] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. thesis, MA in History, 2001 (University of Canterbury, NZ)
[5] J Jupp, quoted in A Jamrozik, Chains of Colonial Inheritance: Searching for an Identity in an Subservient Nation
[6] ibid.
[7] Walker, op.cit.
[8] Walker, op.cit.
[9] C Hitchens, ‘Young Men in Shorts’, (The Atlantic Monthly, June 2004), www.theatlantic.com
[10] P Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800,
[11] S Dubow, ‘Placing Race in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed], Historical Controversies and Historians
[12] the Great War in Bean’s vision was the fulfilment and defining feature of Australia’s manhood – shaper of the nation’s character, S Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’, JAS, 22:56 (1998)
[13] Garton, ibid
[14] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (2nd ed. 2011)
[15] ibid.
[16] the British press noted that the All Blacks rugby players (the ‘Originals’) possessed superior fitness (and utilised professional training techniques), T Weir, ‘Professionals, Cheats and Superior “Muscular Madhood”: British Domestic Responses to the 1905 New Zealand “All Blacks” Rugby’, (University of York, 2011), www.academic.edu; P M Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[17] ‘The Boer War: British Fears of Physical Deterioration and the Build up to World War I’, www.boerwar.weebly.com
[18] Fraser noted as further evidence of decay the country’s birth-rate decline from 1901, Walker, op.cit (Fn: Although according to Statistique Internationale the downward trend in Australia, NZ and GB began in the 1870s)
[19] Garton, ‘Eugenics in Aust & NZ’, op.cit.. As David Walker has noted, from the 1880s on there emerged a “powerful, masculinising and racialising impulse in Australian nationalism” which coincided with the advent of a “geo-political threat (from an) awakening Asia”, D R Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (1999)
[20] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health
[21] D Game, D.H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire (2015)
The period in the first part of the 20th century when advocates of eugenics solutions ran rampant, “playing God” with the lives of society’s powerless unfortunates, was an abomination on many levels. Deeply flawed by racial and class biases, self-righteous eugenicists categorised a typology of ‘lesser’ humans. They then arbitrarily assigned certain of their country’s citizens to this ‘underclass’ of ‘unworthies’, trampling all over their human rights and liberties in the name of an allegedly ‘scientifically’ determined inferiority. The inequity of individuals being singled out for ‘special’ treatment based on perceived racial stereotypes, mental or physical capacity or because of ‘inherited'(sic) criminality, and the denial of their basic human rights, cannot be overstated, nor can the devastating consequences for its victims (segregation, removal from birth family, sterilisation, even liquidation in extreme cases).
The harm and wrong-headedness of eugenics ideology with its ‘scattergun’ approach lies fully exposed to scrutiny today, and is viewed with the opprobrium it deserves. The eugenicists in all countries practicing eugenics were offering nothing less than a recipe for racial cleansing. Notwithstanding the ‘bad'(sic) eugenic applications of that era, it is important to note that the phenomenon paradoxically did lead to changes in Australian and New Zealand health practices that were significant, progressive and far-reaching to society. As cogently argued by Diana Wyndham, putting aside eugenics’ alarming consequences for a moment, the movement in Australia also involved a genuine attempt to “increase national efficiency and vitality through enlightened state intervention programs” in areas such as “sanitation (eg, cleaning up or eradicating slums) town planning and quarantine” … and of course in health[1]. The Queenslander in 1914 praised its state health authorities for pursuing what it called “practical eugenics”, vital pre-natal and after-birth care for the infant, a pre-condition for a “strong and healthy race”[2].
Eugenics as preventative care
Those who enthusiastically took up the banner of eugenics in the early 20th century were in the main well-meaning if ill-conceived in their reasoning. The scientist-eugenicists genuinely saw themselves as engaging in science for the benefit of “social efficiency”, and what they were doing, targeting the “unfit and feeble-minded”, was in accordance with Benthamite principles of the greater good of society. They believed that breeding a higher calibre of person was ‘proof’ of rational, social progress and civilisation … eugenics was just such a simplistically enticing blueprint for society’s ills and problems, eliciting the support of social reformers as well as leading international intellectuals including J Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell☼, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence and the Fabian socialists H G Wells, G B Shaw and the Webbs, as well as businessmen and politicians, eg, Alexander Graham Bell, the Rockefellers, Teddy Roosevelt (see PostScript) and Winston Churchill[3].
Dr Cumpston: advocated making Australia “a paradise of physical perfection”
The Australian and New Zealand medical practitioners who sought to introduce eugenic programs (such as Dr. John Cumpston, first director-general of the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health) believed that by stopping the ‘unfit’ from breeding they were in fact practicing preventative medicine (or that’s at least how they rationalised it)[4]. Eugenics in Australasia was the domain of scientific experimenters and social reformers as well as the governors[5], and touched areas which included child welfare, birth control, sex education, moral purity, temperance advocacy and urban planning.
1930s Australian poster warning against VD
° National fitness and advances in health care
Emphasising one of the eugenics movement’s objectives as national fitness, Wyndham identifies a number of positive spin-offs of in Australia – it put the focus on maternal care and on the care of the child❈; it played a part in the fight against both VD and TB; in the provision of sex education and birth control; it stimulated the study of genetics (before 1938 not part of the university training of Australian doctors). Eugenics influenced the advancement of Australian health services, especially in family planning and public health (introduction of baby health centres, child endowment schemes, a national health bureaucracy, etc.)[6]. New Zealand eugenicist and health reformer Dr Truby King established the Plunket Society (pioneering early childhood health and development service) as well as introducing innovative child-rearing techniques.
Bjelke-Petersen School of Physical Culture, exercise demonstration(Syd) during WWII (Source: Nat Lib of Aust)
° Embracing physical culture in Australia
Stephen Garton has noted other positive developments that grew out of the eugenics movement, most prominently a push for citizens to engage in more outdoors, healthy activities. As an antidote to the confining and often unhealthy milieú of urban life, eugenics encouraged people to take to the outdoors and to partake in physical exercise. Bush-walking and hiking clubs were formed, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides associations were encouraged and Police Citizens Boys Clubs sprang up. The establishment of gymnasiums and fitness centres (especially in NSW and Tasmania by the Bjelke-Petersen brothers) extended the emphasis on physical culture, allegedly important to maintain eugenic health[7]. An emphasis on physical culture as the method of attaining good genes also flourished in New Zealand, largely inspired by one German eugenicist.
Sandow the Strongman’s ‘System‘
° Environmental eugenics and physical culture in New Zealand
Eugenics is commonly described as “the belief in the power of nature over that of nurture”, reducing it to a question of a person’s character being shaped by heredity[8], this is the eugenics orthodoxy. But environmental eugenicists like Eugen Sandow sought to improve the human condition by improving the external factors of one’s environment✤. Sandow, a Prussian-born strongman based in London from the turn of the 20th century, was a eugenicist who believed that the flagging racial stock of the white race could be improved by nurture, which would overcome any natural flaws in a person[9]. He pioneered the art of body-building, developing his own training regime involving repetition and barbells (which he called the “Sandow System”) which he sold to the public by mail order. Sandow toured the world giving “artistic performances” in music halls, including an extended stint in Australasia in 1902-1903. Sandow was principally responsible for popularising the physical culture movement and giving it a kick-start in New Zealand. After his successful tour of NZ Sandow-inspired gymnasiums and physical culture institutes sprang up all over the country[10].
°
As elsewhere in the advanced western nations, New Zealanders were plagued by the notion of their supposed physical inadequacies (especially after the Anglo-Boer War in 1899-1902). The disclosure that half of the young NZ men seeking to serve in the British navy were rejected as medically unfit reinforced the view that New Zealanders had poor physiques. Physical culture was presented as a panacea, a remedy to ward off the possibility of physical and mental infirmity. As Caroline Daley has shown, the potentiality of Sandow’s exercise program led to shifts in the way New Zealanders viewed their bodies. Men, with the correct dedicated training, could achieve the “He-man” physique of Sandow. The Sandow technique also pitched its message to middle class NZ women, in line with the eugenic goal of increased procreation by the elite, mothers-to-be could be trained to develop the right muscles for childbirth. After the passage of the Physical Welfare and Recreation Act in 1937 physical culture became “a state sanctioned leisure activity” in New Zealand. The Act was a boost to sport for adults, and with the outbreak of WWII the government promoted the idea that New Zealanders had “a duty to be fit”, it was now patriotic. From its initial eugenic wellspring physical fitness and culture had become firmly entrenched in the mainstream of NZ life[11].
The physical underdevelopment of the nation’s young was much in the mind of New Zealand eugenicists in the early 20th century. In this milieú school physician Elizabeth Gunn pioneered the health camp movement for school age children. An avowed eugenicist, Gunn was instrumental in getting schoolchildren out of indoors, either into active camp life or into classes conducted in the open air [12].
PostScript: Racial fitness in America – ERO Again, like the British eugenicists’ pronouncements, new ideas from America fell on receptive ears in Australasia. The centre of the American eugenics movement revolved around biologist Charles Davenport and his Eugenics Records Office whose activities reached eugenicists worldwide. Davenport and his ERO eugenicist associate Harry Laughlin were both chicken breeders illustrate the link of agriculture to eugenics[13]. Race reinvigoration in the US was championed from the very highest quarters. At the turn of the century soon-to-be president, Teddy Roosevelt, appealed to his country’s citizens to take up “the strenuous life” (his message was aimed primarily at native-born Americans of good Anglo-Saxon stock). And Americans did heed his words: many took up sports for the first time, American (college) football became popular as the ultimate physical test of manhood, competitive athletics and cycling were taken up in the quest to demonstrate masculine physical strength and endurance. Roosevelt’s urgings led to the popularity of hiking, hunting and mountain climbing among Americans. Behind all of these feats of physical exertion lurked the same self-doubts of the dominant white race as elsewhere. The depression of the 1890s and the enervating affects of industrial society accentuated these anxieties. The US was experiencing a shift in immigration patterns at this time which had started to favour especially Southern and Central Europe over immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe⚀. The more affluent, native-born Americans predictably called for a halt to immigration[14] with the purpose of stopping the ‘poorer’ stock of immigrants coming into America (Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc). The pattern of restricting particular ethnic groupings was duplicated concurrently in other western countries (eg, the WAP in Australia).
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☼ Nietzsche was another leading philosopher who earlier embraced the theory of eugenics as a panacea
❈ in New Zealand as well, “national efficiency” was high on the agenda … degeneracy anxieties (c.1920 NZ had the world’s 2nd highest mortality rate for mothers, much worse than its (Pākehā) infant mortality rate) prompted a safe maternity campaign in NZ. Eugenic concerns led the state to intervene in maternity services (P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand)
⚀ immigration from the British Isles, Ireland, Scandinavia and Germany fell dramatically from 1900, replaced by immigration surges from Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and the Baltics
✤ Known as the science of euthenics (AKA “the science of controllable environment” (Ellen H Richards) – cf. eugenics “the science of controllable heredity”)
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[1] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’ (Unpub. PhD, Dept of History, University of Sydney, July 1996), www.kooriweb.org
[2] The Queenslander (Bris,), 11-Apr-1914, quoted in E Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, (Unpub. PhD, Dept. of History, University of Queensland) www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[3] in a memo to the prime minister in 1910 Churchill said: “The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”, V Brignell, ‘The eugenic movement Britain wants to forget’, New Statesmen, 9-Dec-2010,www.newsratesmen.com. Churchill is on public record for even more unequivocal and explicit statements of pro-eugenics sentiments, eg, “I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race… has come in and taken its place” (1937)
[4] Wyndham, op.cit
[5] as well as that of socialists, feminists and other radicals, S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: laboratories of racial science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[6] Wyndham, op.cit
[7] Garton op.cit.; the physical culture school founder, Lt-Col. H C Bjelke-Petersen, exploited the anxieties around eugenics at the time to promote the B-J brothers’ physical fitness schools, E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, (Unpub. PhD, Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003), www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[8] C Daley, Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body, 1900-1960
[9] the emerging physical culture movement dovetailed neatly into eugenics thinking at the time. Latching on to the prevailing perception that the “racial stock” of white settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand had become “soft and weak”, the tangible positive benefits of an active exercise plan (as illustrated by Sandow) presented itself as the obvious counter to this growing ‘feebleness’ on a national level. The popularisation of the Japanese self-defence skills, judo and ju-jutsu, for women in Australasia early in the 20th century also grew out of the ‘race’ anxieties (athlete and entertainer Florence LeMar toured Australasia with a ju-jutsu vaudeville act in the 1910s), C Macdonald, Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935-1960
[10] Sandow inspired a generation of home-grown NZ bodybuilders who opened gyms, such as Fred Hornibrook and Dick Jarrett, Daley, op.cit.
[11] ibid.
[12] M Tennant, ‘Gunn, Elizabeth Catherine’, TEARA – The Encylopedia of New Zealand, (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume 3 1996), www.teara.govt.nz
[13] S A Farber, ‘U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907-39): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective’, Zebrafish, 2008: December; 5(4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[14] J Murrin, P Johnson, J McPherson, A Fahs, G Gerstle, Liberty, Equality, Power: Volume II: Since 1863 (Enhanced Concise Edition)
Probably the most iniquitous part of the eugenics movements’ social engineering, certainly in Australia and New Zealand, was the policies and practices of state governments towards their indigenous populations in the first half of the 20th century. The measures against aboriginals and Māori are the most manifest examples of the premise, the assumption, on which eugenics sits, that “some human life is of more value than other human life”[1].
The systematic discrimination and abuses of native Australians was conducted in the main by paternalistic, middle class white men who believed, or convinced themselves that they believed, they were doing the right thing, the humane thing, for the black people of the continent who were thought to be “irreconcilably backward”.
The perception of the “aboriginal issue” in Australia was fed by the prevailing eugenics ideologies at the time, and the treatment of aborigines was typified by the approach adopted in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. All chief protectors of aborigines in Queensland during the years 1900-1942 advocated a policy of racial segregation❈. Whilst governments and administrators emphasised that this was a ‘protective’ measure for the ‘good’ of the aboriginals themselves, the self-serving eugenic motives of the power wielders was always very close to the surface of public policy.
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image-6.jpg”> Orphanage of removed children, WA c1930[/captThe perimeters of white Australia’s assimilation policy for indigenous peoples was set in the 1937 Commonwealth and states conference which agreed on the policy objective of absorbing at least “the natives of Aboriginal origin but not the full blood”[2]. Australian political leaders and administrators generally followed an assimilation approach which had two planks to it – a mandatory biological assimilation (to ‘outbreed’ the blackness of aborigines), and a cultural assimilation aimed at “half-caste” aboriginals (removing them as children from their indigenous familial environment and nurturing them into the white ways of Australian society and ‘civilisation'[3].
Emily Wilson has shown the extent to which miscegenation and racial contamination was an overriding concern for decision-makers in Queensland✤. There was an inordinate and obsessive fear of “half-castes” whose numbers many thought were on the rise◈. Queensland eugenicists believed this imbalance’ threatened the supposed “inviolate purity” of the White Australian Policy. Marriages or unions between other coloured minorities, such as the Chinese, and aborigines was also frowned upon by the Queensland authorities. Governments went sometimes to extreme lengths to keep whites and blacks separate to spare whites from the dangers of supposed aboriginal degeneration. This meant moving indigenous people out of the cities and into rural reserves where they could be better controlled.
Apprehension of miscegenation played on white minds constantly … fears were voiced on the street and in parliament about that worst of all fates, the mixing of different racial blood, be it black-on-white or coloured-on-white. The political class in Australia, left, right, protectionist or free trader, were all on a unity ticket in the debates on the necessity of achieving a White Australia, eg, (John) Chris Watson, Labor Party leader of the house, vented against the mixing of the coloured and white peoples (resulting in) “the possibility and probability of racial contamination” [Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6-Sep-1901]; as did Issac Issacs, high court judge and future governor-general, warning of the need to avoid “the contamination and the degrading influence of inferior races”[Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12-Sep-1901].
With Aboriginal protectors like these …
Colonial attitudes of “white supremacy” of the protectors(sic) were at best transparently disguised under the thinnest of veneers … Cecil Cook, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for the Northern Territory, called for authorities to “breed out the colour” of aborigines – making a mockery of his job title![4] Cook also endorsed segregation of black Australians, favouring forcible institutionalisation of aboriginals … Cook argued this was integral to public health policy, describing it as “a prophylactic measure” for white health.[5]. Cook as chief medical officer of NT had a great fear that blacks would with the aid of health interventions come to outnumber the white population in NT. Accordingly his view on aboriginal women with gonorrhoea was to leave them untreated and leave them to die out, putting a hold on aboriginal numbers in the Territory[6].
“Smoothing the dying pillow”
The white majorities in both countries believed that the “full-blood” tribal aborigines and the Māori people were racially inferior and destined to die out[7], and that the country should be inhabited by “good white stock” who would be capable of defending the Empire. The European elite pursued assimilation policies towards its indigenous minorities, the plan was to ‘absorb’ and ‘uplift’ the “half-castes” in society. The indigenous population bore the brunt of policies of eugenics ideology enacted by the government. In Australia A O Neville, an avid proponent of eugenics and Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia for 25 years from 1915, was responsible for the controversial policy of removing aboriginal children from their families (the “stolen generation”). Neville’s two-pronged approach to ‘controlling’ the indigenous population involved “biological absorption” – deciding just who aboriginals under his control could marry, and by ‘assimilating’ the offspring of those marriages into white society.
Neville, like Cook in the Northern Territory, was haunted by the prospect of aborigines eventually swamping Western Australia with their numbers … his master-plan for realising an “all-white” WA involved the diluting of the skin colour of aborigines – a deliberate but controlled (‘progressive’) miscegenation, so that each succeeding generation would have lighter skin. After two or three generations the result would be an appearance acceptable to the non-indigenous community, aboriginals would be “perceived as white” and the indigenous settlements could be closed … the process would eradicate all aboriginal characteristics from white society. Neville’s scheme was thwarted by the hostile opposition of racist white people in WA who refused to countenance the planned mixed marriages[8].
Early 20th century Maori village
In New Zealand the race planners crafted a fail-safe policy to deal with the Māori ‘issue’ – assimilation was proposed for those Māoris who did not succumb to what polygenists thought would be their ultimate destiny, extinction. NZ’s Taranaki Herald of 1852 proclaimed almost triumphantly, “The Maori race is doomed wherever the Anglo-Saxon appears”. The perception of the Māori in NZ as transitory was underlined by the fact that in NZ ‘Official Yearbooks’ prior to 1940 the national population figure was given “exclusive of Māori”. Even after demographic trends had demonstrated that the Māori birth rate was again on the ascent (Māori population rose from 40,000 in 1896 to 50,000 in 1911), many white eugenicists clung on to this prejudicial and outdated notion of ultimate extinction of the race[9].
PostScript: Pākehā Pseudo-medicine, Craniology
The New Zealand eugenicists assumed that the Māori would be fully absorbed into the dominant and supposedly superior Pākehā culture[10]. The dominant Pākehā society accepted the untested conventional wisdom that the Māori had inferior mental capacity, and army surgeon Dr A S Thomson ‘proved’ this in reaching the conclusion after random testing that Maori heads were smaller than European heads![11]
❈ in the 1940s the Queensland absorption policy on aborigines gave way to one of assimilation
✤ the eugenics preoccupations of the governing class in Queensland were further exacerbated by climate conditions. The tropics of Northern Queensland were widely thought unsuitable for white men and women, whereas they were believed to suit the “different constitution” of aboriginal and other coloured peoples (eg, Kanaks) … thus raising another source of anxiety for whites already fearing that their potency was waning
◈ the white elite enunciated this concern whilst completely sidestepping the uncomfortable reality that it was white men who brought about any such increase in “half-castes” by raping and impregnating black women
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[1] be the value of that preferred life to the state, the nation, the race, or to future generations, Levine and Bashford described this as the “evaluative logic” at eugenics’ core, A Bashford & P Levine, ‘Introduction’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[2] ‘No 3. Aboriginal Societies: The Experience of Contact. Changing Policies Towards Aboriginal People’, (Australian Law Reform Commission), www.alrc.gov.au
[3] What Stefan Haderer accurately if somewhat dramatically calls “the white supremacist biological and cultural assimilation project of the twentieth century”, S Haderer, ‘Biopower, whiteness and the Stolen Generations: The arbitrary power of racial classification’, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 9(2) 2013, www.acrawsa.org.au
[4] E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis, (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003), www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[5] Cook in 1930 government report, quoted in A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, National and Public Health
[6] ibid.
[7] this myth lingered on far past its use-by-date, in Queensland still maintaining some currency as late as 1949, Wilson, ibid.. The white colonialists in both countries (Aust. & NZ) subscribed to the notion of “smoothing the dying pillow” (a term popularised by anthropologists Daisy Bates and A P Elkin). To the European mindset aborigines and Māori were assumed to be doomed races and the ‘best’ thing was to facilitate their demise, a miscegenation solution resulting in a hybrid race but one dominated by the “biologically superior” white stock, ‘Smoothing the Pillow of a Dying Race. A.A. Grace’, Maoriland : NZ Literature 1872-1914 (NZ Electronic Text Collection), www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz
[8] ‘Bring them home – chapter 7’, Australian Humans Rights Commission, www.humanrights.gov.au; G R Robertson, ‘Well-intentioned Genocide’, www.geoffreyrobinson.com
[9] ‘Page 2 – Overview of Māori and Pākehā relations in the twentieth century’, New Zealand Race Relations, NZ History, www.nzhistory.govt.nz;
C Leung, ‘Australia’, 24-Feb-2014, (Eugenics Archive Aust). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/530b8d09acea8cf99a0000000001, J Stenhouse, ‘The Darwinian Enlightenment and New Zealand Politics’, in R M MacLeod & P F Rehbock [Eds.], Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific
[10] J Belich, ‘European ideas about Māori – the dying Māori and Social Darwinism’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/European-ideas-about-maori/page-4 (assessed 6-November-2016)
[11] Stenhouse, op.cit.
Melbourne: Hub of the Australian Eugenics Movement
Melbourne, and more precisely, the University of Melbourne, played a pivotal role in eugenics before WWI and especially during the interwar years. Melbourne University was in the forefront of the academic dissemination of eugenics ideology, its academics persuasive in their efforts to shape public policy on health❈. With professor of anatomy Richard Berry the principal advocate of the racial ‘purification’ cause on campus, the university spawned the Eugenics Education Society (EES). According to Ross Jones the EES “eugenicists operated primarily as a pressure group within the university, the education department and various government agencies and committees”[1]. Later the society morphed into the Eugenics Society of Victoria (1936). The obsessive skull-measurer Berry declared war on “rotten heredity”, calling for mandatory sterilisation and segregation of aborigines, the poor, homosexuals, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, people with small heads and those with low IQs. Berry also advocated for a “lethal chamber” to euthanise “the grosser types of our mental defectives” as he described them (including Australian aborigines)[2].
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image-3.jpg”> Prof Berry [/cBerry was the zealous “campaign director” for the dissemination of egregious ideas about race and the advocacy of eugenic interventions in Victoria, but he had plenty of other willing collaborators at Parkville (the university). Other Melbourne U professors up to their elbows in the eugenics movement included educationalist Frank Tate¤, biologist Baldwin Spencer and one-time vice-chancellor John Medley. Zoologist Wilfred Agar, like the others also honoured with an eponymous building at the university[3], was at one time “chief protector” of Aborigines(sic) in Darwin where he vilified aborigines and happily oversaw the removal of indigenous children from their families[4]. Another influential proponent of eugenics was Berry’s friend, the psychiatrist William Ernest Jones. Jones railed against “low-class Roman Catholic Irish” in whom he detected an “inherent lunacy”[5]
The campaign driven by the Victorian Eugenics Society resulted in mental deficiency legislation passing through Victorian parliament in 1939 but the eugenics policies were never implemented¤ ※ initially because of the onset of war (and later on after shocking revelations about the Holocaust came to light)[6]. Meanwhile, over the border in NSW, eugenicist doctor and minister for health Richard Arthur met similar difficulties with his 1930 mental defectives bill which failed to be passed. The so-called ‘reform’ eugenicists whilst still intent on denying sectors of the community some of the fundamental rights of citizenship (including the right to marry and to reproduce), also undertook interventions aimed at societal improvement (slum clearance, health reforms, educational reforms)[7]. Despite the wholesale discrediting of the eugenics movement from the 1940s the Eugenics Society of Victoria lingered on until 1961, having steered a course away from outright endorsement of eugenic measures.
Other pillars of Victorian society also firmly entrenched in the eugenics camp included newspaperman Sir Keith Murdoch (Rupert’s father), the CEO of the organisation that became CSIRO, Sir David Rivett, and the founder of ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) Kenneth Cunningham. The involvement of many of the eminent has not received the scrutiny that Berry has … academic Ross Jones suggests a “conscious cover up” of prominent Melburnians took place post-war with the whole subject of eugenics becoming taboo[8] (there seems to be a pattern of excising the unsavoury activities of eugenicists from biographies to ensure reputation preservation for many implicated in the Australasian movements – see also PostScript).
http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image-4.jpg”> RHA[/captionFeminist-Eugenists and the Racial Hygienists
The progressive circles of Australasian society with an interest in eugenics included middle class women’s groups. Several prominent feminists, for the most part well-educated, were in the vanguard of the eugenics movement. Their agenda was focused very much on birth control for poorer, working class women. In Australia the NSW Racial Hygiene Association (RHA), founded by Lillie Goodisson, Marion Piddington (an early advocate of artificial insemination) and Ruby Rich in 1926, endorsed selective breeding to end hereditary disease and defects, and campaigned without success for the “mentally handicapped” to be segregated and sterilised. The Sydney-based RHA started the first birth control clinic in Australia in 1933✤. As the practice of eugenics became increasingly stigmatised the RHA shifted its focus to family planning with an organisational name-change in 1960 reflecting this change.
The RHA were instrumental in campaigning for pre-marital safeguards to ‘purify’ the White stock … hygiene clinics, mental and physical tests and the issuing of certificates of approval to engaged couples who tick all the right boxes for ‘purity’. In a similar vein south of the Murray the Eugenics Society of Victoria were demanding compulsory pre-nuptials health checks for couples as late as 1947[9]. The New Zealand bureaucracy had matrimonial ‘purity’ checks as well … those couples who obtained an official Eugenic Certificate received a piece of paper affirming that they had been adjudged to possess “a perfect physical and mental balance and unusually strong Eugenic Love possibilities (necessary for) “the future welfare of the race”.
New Zealand women for “race improvement”: organised volunteers and ‘femocrats’
Across the Tasman various NZ elite women’s groups were active in combating what they saw as the degeneracy of society. As noted by Angela Wanhalla, “New Zealand women’s organisations were among the most vocal supporters of eugenic attempts at race betterment”[9]. These middle-class dominated groups included the National Council of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Farmers’ Union (Women’s Division)[10]. As well as the volunteer organisations! many ‘femocrats’ in the professions and government bureaucracies added their voices to the chorus advocating eugenics as the way forward to a better New Zealand[11].
‘Grass roots’ racial fitness in NZ
New Zealand’s quest for ongoing, nationwide improvements in the eugenic fabric of the country included the periodical measurement of Pākehā schoolchildren. In 1927 bureaucrats delighted to announce that New Zealand children were taller and heavier than their English counterparts (and than Australian as well!)◘. These findings reinforced the belief that New Zealand was the ideal nursery for British stock. Agricultural-based New Zealand missed no opportunity to promote itself as “Britain’s farm”, the exporter of primary products to the ‘Mother’ country[12].
PostScript: No retrospective … the iniquitous past practice that dare not speak its name
Devotees of conspiracy theories would revel in the apparent hush-up subsequently of the involvement of many prominent Australasians in eugenics. A cursory thumb-through of ADB and DNZB✡ biographies of Australasian public figures (especially medical practitioners, scientists and educationalists), largely written before the 1990s, is very revealing. In the mini-bios of figures who were significant and even integral in some cases to the eugenics movements in Australia and New Zealand, eg, Richard Berry, Frank Tate, Kenneth Cunningham, Raphael Cilento, Harvey Sutton, Elizabeth Gunn, Truby King and Duncan MacGregor, eugenics doesn’t rate a mention – any reference to their key historic roles in eugenic causes have been discreetly omitted (or if mentioned at all their eugenics careers have been swiftly glossed over). By the 1950s most eugenicists still practicing in Australia and New Zealand had, as elsewhere, sought to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the eugenics title by adopting new designations such as “human geneticist”, ‘sociologist’ or ‘demographer'[13].
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❈ the University of Melbourne’s counterpart in the US was the University of Virginia, a stronghold of the belief and practice where a “eugenics mania” existed (see also ‘The Eugenics Movement in Australasia IV’)
¤ one of Tate’s pet projects as director of education was aimed at excluding working class kids from secondary and tertiary education, in sharp contrast to his NSW counterpart Peter Board’s equality of opportunity approach
※ compare with the success of eugenics legislation in the US – in the 1920s and ’30s sterilisation laws were passed in 24 of the (then) 48 states
✤ the RHA and other elite other women’s groups were undoubtedly inspired and enlightened by the international trail-blazers in the birth control field … British palaeobotanist Marie Stopes and American nurse and sex educator Margaret Sanger, both strongly committed eugenics ideologists
◘ measurement to determine physical fitness became a pastime of state officials on both sides of the Tasman. In Australia, welfare worker Dr Mary Booth was a consistent advocate for even more anthropometry, as was eugenicist Dr Harvey Sutton. Many of the anthropometrically-inclined like fitness expert H C Bjelke-Petersen were perturbed to discover that the chest-girth of the typical white schoolboy in Australia was “distressingly small”, W Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny. All of the eugenic emphasis on measurement did have a utilitarian purpose in encouraging statistics-gathering by the state
✡ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University; Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, NZ Ministry for Culture & Heritage)
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[1] R L Jones, ‘Eugenics in Australia: The Secret of Melbourne’s Elite’, The Conversation, 21-Sep-2011, www.theconversation.com
[2] Australasian politicians were pretty much in synch with the eugenicist-scientists, certainly in regard to craniometry – in 1911 Australian PM Andrew Fisher urged the state premiers to regularly measure the heads of state schoolchildren, Walker, op.cit. Craniology – examining the human skull to ascertain supposed racial differentiation, harks back to the earlier (19th century) pseudo-science of phrenology which purported to divine(sic) character and mental capacity by also examining the skull; E Cervini, ‘A theory out of darkness’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13-Sep-2011, www.smh.com.au
[3] community disquiet about the retention of eugenicist nomenclature at Melbourne University is a topic that is gaining heat, E Cervini, ‘Its time Melbourne Uni stopping honouring eugenicist Richard Berry’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6-March-2016. The focus remains on the unapologetic Berry who never recanted his eugenicist beliefs and maintained a collection of aboriginal ancestral remains in the Anatomy building on campus
[4] M Dobbin, ‘Heart of darkness: Melbourne University’s racist professors’, The Age (Melbourne), 30-Nov-2015,www.theage.com.au
[5] S G Foster, ‘Jones, William Ernest (1867–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/jones-william-ernest-6882/text11929, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 19 November 2016
[6] Jones, ‘Secret of Melbourne’s elite’, op.cit.
[7] R L Jones, ‘The master potter and the rejected pots: Eugenic legislation in Victoria, 1918-1939’, Australian Historical Studies, 1999; 30(113)
[8] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. Thesis for MA in History, (University of Canterbury, NZ, 2001)
[9] Cervini, ‘Theory out of darkness’, op.cit.
[9] Wanhalla, op.cit.
[10] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, National and Public Health
[11] A Rees, ‘The Quality and not only the Quantity of Australia’s People. Ruby Rich and the Racial Hygiene Association of NSW’, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol 27 2012 – Issue 71, http://dex.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2012.648262, pub. online: 07-Mar-2012; ‘The Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales’, (Wikipedia), http://en.m.wikipedia.org; A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, race and colonial identity : women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, (CORE, University of Canterbury 2001), www.core.ac.uk
[12] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[13] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’, (Unpub. PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney, July 1996)
The belief in eugenics, the science (or as modern eyes would see it — the pseudoscience) of “improving the quality of the human race, especially by selective breeding”❈, had a powerful hold on societal thinking in Australia and New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century, as it did elsewhere in the world, predominantly in western countries or western-implant societies.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image.jpg”> Sir F Galton[/The term “eugenics” itself was coined in the latter 19th century by English polymath and statistician Francis Galton, whose views had been informed by the theories on “the preservation of favoured races” (Origins of the Species) of his second cousin Charles Darwin (coincidentally Darwin’s son, Leonard, was a leading eugenicist in Britain)⍍. Galton linked heredity to Social Darwinism. Sometimes called “race science” or more euphemistically “racial hygiene”, eugenics ideology in its day had a duality to its basis that was inherently contradictory. On the one hand it assumed the natural superiority of the white race (because of its ‘good’ genes), on the other, that same ‘superior’ stock was being assailed by a countervailing threat of physical, psychological and moral degeneration of the race coming from those elements of society labelled as ‘inferior’ (the dysgenic or cacogenic sections of society).
A cycle of low fertility rates in the West commencing in the late 19th century together with rising levels of crime and the emergence of welfare state dependency provoked concerns of moral and physical degeneracy of the white race[1]. In Australia this concern prompted a Royal Commission into the Decline of the Birth Rate in NSW in 1904. The widespread perception in Western countries was that the decline was hitting the “good stock” hardest, as a consequence ‘inferior’ people of “low racial stock” were out-breeding the ‘superior’ stock of the country❇.
White societies like Britain and the Dominions were viewed as becoming ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ and the foundations being laid for the welfare state in the UK were attacked as contributing to this ‘decay’ – the survival and multiplication of the poor, the deranged and other “social undesirables” was a financial burden on the state, driving up the welfare costs. Even the man who later provided the blueprint for the British welfare state post-WWII, pursued a strong eugenics agenda. William Beveridge in 1909 called for the ‘defectives’ within society to be denied their “citizen rights” – “the franchise … civil freedom and fatherhood”[2].
Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia and other countries were informed by ‘scientific’ notions of eugenics and sought to implement policies and practices which remedied this trendஐ. This was a two-fold process, the first involving so-called positive eugenics – elevating or ‘purifying’ the racial stock by encouraging the so-called ‘fit’ people in society to procreate more (in New Zealand the act of providing literature on contraceptives was proscribed in the 1900s). Simultaneously the states sought to deal with negative eugenics (or more precisely ‘dysgenics’¤), identifying those members of society thought to be ‘unfit’ for procreation (people of unsound mind, of physical deformity, the intellectually-handicapped, the epileptic, the criminal classes including prostitutes, slum dwellers, homosexuals, dipsomaniacs, the indigenous non-white population and other marginalised sections) and either segregating them, preventing them from marrying or having them sterilised to stop their sexual reproduction[3].
The E tree
Some of the contemporary popular fiction produced in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc. played on the anxieties of a “race war” which put the supremacy of the white European in peril. Influential writers such as Charles H Pearson in Australia, helped to shape these perceptions with books like National Life and Character: a Forecast which argued that it was the “racially defiled” non-white races with their higher birth-rates, not the white race with its relentless imperial juggernaut, that was on the ascendency[4].
What sectors and groups of society were in the Vanguard of the Eugenics Movements in Australasia?
The eugenicists and fellow travellers of the eugenics movement were drawn from the elite circles of Australian and New Zealand society§ – including politicians, scientists, medical practitioners, educators, academics, social workers, women’s groups, churches and clergymen (excluding the Catholic Church). Other professionals such as psychiatrists, anthropologists and magistrates aided and abetted the work of the movement. Eugenics was not a left /right thing, support for it came from across the political spectrum – from socialists and conservatives both.
Opponents of Eugenics in Australasia
Although eugenic thought was accepted as the normative approach to tackling social problems in the interwar period, it was not universally countenanced by all sectors of Australian and New Zealand society. Opposition to eugenics came from organised working class elements, ie, the trade unions, as well as from the Catholic Church, from moral campaigners (concerned that sterilisation might lead to increased promiscuity), from some medical practitioners (also concerned that the poorly educated sterilised would be sexually indiscriminate and spread VD[5], plus wary of the legal ramifications of sterilising citizens), and from public intellectuals and scientific dissenters.
The eugenics movement in Aeotearoa
New Zealand in the first 40 years of the 20th century presents a similar story to its large trans-Tasman neighbour. The New Zealand Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1910, led the call for eugenic measures necessary it claimed to manage the population and ensure a healthy country. Grass roots pressure prompted a government investigation in 1924 which concluded that there was a birth-rate disparity distorting the population’s genetic balance – “the ‘fit’ were being swamped by the ‘unfit'”. It informed a view that NZ was in racial decline as a consequence of growing numbers of the feeble-minded and social defectives which eugenicists argued posed a social menace[6].
PM Stout (Picture: www.digitslnz.org)
Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout was one of the leading figures in NZ eugenics in the first half of the century. Stout, in a discursive and often anecdotal lecture to the Wellington Eugenics Society in 1912, espoused the standard eugenicist position. Stout linked heredity to fatal diseases, condemned high levels of alcohol consumption and cigarette-smoking, and warned that “the peerage” was committing “race suicide”, “the best blood” was being “enervated” and supplanted by the “second best”, “the extinction of the race was being seen everywhere”, etc[7]. Chief Justice Stout’s race views carried even more weight because he had previously been premier of NZ in the late 19th century. William Chapple was another leading NZ eugenicist who was influential in the NZ movement through his dual roles as medical practitioner and Liberal Party politician. His book Fertility of the Unfit advocated enforced sterilisation in certain circumstances.
In touch with the latest currents in eugenics thinking in Britain and the US, eugenicists in Australia and New Zealand whole-heartedly set about rejuvenating the racial ‘fitness’ of Australians. This would be achieved they believed by encouraging the elite in society to procreate, whilst at the same time, with the aid of legislators, denying those they labelled as “social misfits” or ‘degenerates’ that same right to reproduce[8].
RBP – the Scoutmaster-General (Source: www.bbc.com)
PostScript 1: British Models
The Australian and New Zealand eugenics movements took impetus from the larger and more advanced movements in Britain and the US. The leading British eugenicists themselves acknowledged a debt to Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement. Baden-Powell’s emphasis on the traits of character[9], discipline, citizenship and patriotism were appealing to eugenicists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby. Dr Saleeby wrote in ‘The progress of eugenics’: “If national eugenics is ever achieved in Great Britain, it will come through the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides”[10].
PostScript 2: Eugenics, an agricultural template
Sidestepping the moral and ethical considerations, some contemporary eugenics enthusiasts made the argument for efficacy based on agricultural models. They advocated the utilisation of the successful principles of selective stock and plant breeding, applying them to the reproduction of humans to improve the quality of future generations. One US agricultural society member in 1911 summed it up in a straightforward, no nonsense sort of way, “better horses, better cattle, better hogs …. (why not) … better babies?”[11] The agriculture/eugenics nexus has a further dimension in the US … two of America’s foremost eugenicists, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, had been chicken breeders.
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❈ some basic definitions to begin with – the etymology of the word ‘eugenics’ is Greek, from eugenes, root derivation: eu-, ‘good’ or ‘well’, + -genos, ‘birth’ or ‘stock’ … contrast with dysgenics, dys (‘bad’ or ‘ill’) + -genos, Collins Concise Dictionary (Australian Edition, 1995)
ஐ the US in particular was a hotspot of the eugenics movement, producing pro-eugenic films like The Black Stork (1917) which preached a chilling message of “Kill defectives, Save the Nation”
¤ this dysgenic sensibility, that race disintegration was occurring was so universally pervasive in the early 1900s that even black intellectuals in America led by W E B DuBois advocated that the ‘Negro race’ guard against racial decay by elevating up the “talented tenth” of the black community
⍍ Charles Darwin himself was ahead of the movement expressing elitist eugenics views in 1871 in The Descent of Man, “We civilised men…. do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick.. . thus the weak members of society propagate their kind.”
❇ the offspring of “low stock” were characterised as “the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the criminal” who were “swamping civilisation”, R Waddell, (Preface) The Fertility of the Unfit, cited in E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003), www.espace.library.uq.edu.au § pointedly, many of the top figures (especially the medical doctors) in the Aust/NZ eugenics movements were born in Britain and migrated to the Antipodes
[1] the self-doubt harboured by Britons and by colonials in other dominions of the Empire was accentuated by a further sense of diminution after the Anglo-Boer War felt by the British professional classes, resulting what has been described by C L Bacchi as a “gloomy heredity determinism”, C L Bacchi, ‘The Nature-Nurture Debate in Australia, 1900-1914, Historical Studies, (19) 1980, quoted in M Cawte, ‘Craniometry and Eugenics in Australia: R.J.A. Berry and the Quest for Social Efficiency, Historical Studies, (22) 1986
[2] D Sewell, ‘How eugenics poisoned the welfare state’, The Spectator, 25-Nov-2009, www.spectator.co.uk
[3] ‘Story: Contraception and sterilisation Page 5 – Information about contraceptives’ Encyclopedia ; ‘Eugenics – Positive And Negative Eugenics’, http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2210/Eugenics-Positive-Negative-Eugenics.html; some eugenicists, driven by fear of miscegenation, advocated complete segregation of races, especially prominent in South Africa and the USA; S Dubow, ‘Placing “Race” in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed.], Historical Controversies and Historians, (1998),www.disciplinas.stoa.usp.br
[4] ‘Charles Henry Pearson’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org. The race war notion – especially in regard to Japan’s emerging Pacific presence – found a fervid home in the Australian and New Zealand press and literature in the early century, eg, ‘The Commonwealth Crisis’, published in The Lone Hand, presents a fantasy scenario of a Japanese invasion of the Northern Territory, D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[5] Venereal disease was exceptionally virulent during the Great War, and in the prevailing eugenics environment in Australia, an indicator of what constituted racial ‘unfitness’ … the dilemma for society’s ruling elite as the war went on was that ‘respectable’ citizens also found themselves victims of the disease!, M Larson, ‘The iconography
[6] A Wanhalla, ‘New Zealand’, 23-Oct-2014, (Eugenics Archive NZ). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/544873c7d861fb0000000001
[6] ‘Eugenics – Problem of the Race – a lecture by Sir Robert Stout’, Evening Post (Wellington), 6-Aug-1912 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19120806.2.53
[7] Neo-Malthusian ideas informed eugenics thinking, especially regarding fertility control, R A Soloway, ‘Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England, 1900-1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978)
[8] Baden-Powell declared in 1911: “Our business is to … pass as many boys through our character factory as we possibly can”, M Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scout movement
[9] M A Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought
[10] C Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History
Visionary thinkers in the 19th Century such as Robert Owen, Comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, provided the impetus for a whole host of attempts to create new communities which aspired to an ideal or utopian existence. Old Europe looked towards to the ‘New World’, the Americas, as the optimal location for the realisation of an ideal society. Many transplanted “would-be” utopian communities ended up in the United States (with bucolic names like New Harmony, Icaria, Fountain Grove and Altruria), but increasingly many seekers of a better life looked optimistically to the less developed reaches of South America as fertile ground for a model community (the US National Parks Service on its website www.nps.gov identifies literally hundreds of communal utopian experiments in the early period of the United States – article “The Amana Colonies: Utopias in America”).
In this piece I want to focus on two late 19th Century Paraguayan utopian experiments, the colonies of Nueva Germania and Nueva Australia. The German and the Australian colonies were both spectacularly unsuccessful in their aims, hardly surprising perhaps considering how unrealistically high they had set the bar, and how incredibly idealistic were their aims. On the surface the German and the Australian utopian experiments seem very different beasts, one a haven for Nordic exclusionists and the other for disillusioned Antipodean agrarian labourers, ideologically though, as I will attempt to show below, the two colonies had much in common in their character and aspirations.
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The remnants of Neuva Germania today
Neu Deutschland im Amerika: Germany’s “would-be” Aryan colony in the Americas
New Germany in Paraguay was the brainchild of Elizabeth Nietzsche and Bernhard Förster, the sister and brother-in-law of the great German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche. Förster had been prominent in the far right German People’s League, known for its extreme anti-Semitic nationalism. His big idea, supported by his wife, Elizabeth, was to create a model German community in the Americas which embodied Aryan racial purity, free from what the Försters believed to be the “virulent contamination of Europe by Jews”. In the febrile minds of the anti-Semitic couple, the virgin ground of depopulated rural Paraguay held the promise of creating an exclusively Aryan society.
In 1886 Förster and Nietzsche organised the emigration of a small number of select families from Saxony (who were characteristically Nordic in appearance) to South America. The scheme of the Försters was to build the foundations of a supreme Aryan ‘New World’ colony in the Paraguayan jungle. Förster’s hopes initially were high for Nueva Germania, envisaging an “idyllic Naumburg on the Aguarya-umi” River [Ben MacIntyre, Forgotten Fatherland]. In addition to the racial dimension, Förster and Frau Förster-Nietzsche’s Aryan utopia was based on the pillars of German nationalism, Lutheranism and vegetarianism [JF Williams, Daniela Krause & Harry Knowles “Flights from Modernity: German and Australian Utopian Colonies in Paraguay 1886-1896?”, Journal of Australian Studies (1 Sept 2001)].
The dreams of a German-South American Paráiso en Tierra very soon came to dust as the colony abjectly failed to establish any cohesion or viability. A combination of factors contributed to this including disease affecting the colonists, crop failure and infighting among the migrants from Saxony [Simon Romero, “German Outpost Born of Racism in 1887 Blends into Paraguay”, New York Times, 6 May 2013]. The fact that only a small proportion of the settlers were actually farmers was a factor in the colony’s inability to yield sufficient crops on their land [James Brooke, “Nueva Germania Journal; from a Bigot’s Planting, a Garden Assimilation”, NYT, 18 March 1991].
San Pedro (site of the Germany colony): in the middle of the country, south of Concepción
The elitist personal behaviour of the Försters in Nueva Germania affected the colony’s cohesion and disaffected its members. This manifested itself in displays of megalomania by Förster and the Försters’ demonstrably obvious social and economic advantage which markedly set them apart from the other colonists who were for the large part fairly impoverished families. For example, the Försters built themselves an elegant mansion in the San Pedro wilderness called ‘Försterhof‘, in stark contrast to the meagre and pitiful living conditions of the other settlers; the commune’s farmers in the fields were forced to stop work and submissively bow to Förster every time the overbearing leader rode past! [Romero, op.cit].
Other factors (including biological) undermined any prospect the colony of Nueva Germania ever had of flourishing. A community of only 14 families (as it was originally) would almost inevitably be vulnerable to the likelihood of some degree of inbreeding, especially given the racial homogeneity doctrine on which the commune was based [MacIntyre, op.cit.]. This only served to undermine harmony in the commune and exacerbated tensions among the settlers.
Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]
Cassava, stable crop of NG
Following Elizabeth’s departure from Paraguay, the San Pedro-based colony of German farmers did not disappear altogether but limped on, surviving by scrimping together a bit of income from the growth of yerba mate and other subsistence crops. Nueva Germania (NG) still exists today in San Pedro – as far as ever from being remotely anything like a utopian community. With the bursting of the racial purity myth, the small group of German settlers intermarried with the local Mestizo–Guaraní-Spanish people, and as a result are not conspicuous from the rest of the Paraguayan population. They tend to speak Guaraní, the widely-spoken native language, in preference to German, and are set apart from other Paraguayans only by the retention of German family names (Fischer, Küch, Haudenschild, Stern, and so on).
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Australian economic and labour woes in the 1890s: Seeking a socialist paradise new start
The colony of ‘New Australia’ had its origins in the economic conditions and labour relations in pre-Federation Australia, especially in eastern Australia. In the early 1890s the onset of a crippling financial depression and a series of shearers’ and dock strikes in Queensland suppressed heavy-handedly by British troops fostered widespread disillusionment among bush workers. An idealistic English socialist journalist, William Lane, a maverick of the Australian labour movement, formed the New Australia Cooperation Settlement Association (NACSA) with the aim of establishing a “workers’ paradise” in South America.
The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].
Consequently the Paraguayan Government freely granted NACSA an ample tract of grasslands near Villarica (in the modern-day Caaguazú Department),south-east of the capital, Asuncíon, to the new settlers. Lane brought over 200 colonists to Paraguay including the famous Australian socialist poet, Mary Gilmore, who was the colony’s schoolteacher. The settlement which became known as Colonía Nueva Australia met with formidable obstacles right from the outset.
Benign dictator of Nueva Australia?
A big part of the problem was the leadership itself. William Lane imposed strict rules on the community which alienated many who had followed him on the venture. Members of the colony were forbidden to drink, which given the combination of the oppressive heat and the plentiful supply of cheap caña (sugar cane rum) in Paraguay, was not a realistic proposition. Lane banned the male colonists from having sexual liaisons with the local Guaraní women, who given that they were 80 per cent of the population, was also an impractical notion. He also displayed a puritan streak by insisting that all members of the commune marry for life. In Lane’s own words, the colony was “a commonhold of English speaking whites, who accept among their principles, Life marriages, Teetotalism and the Colour Line.” [Cosme Monthly, Sept 1896].
‘Commandant’ Lane – a left-wing “Captain Bligh”
William Lane was by nature “autocratic, under pressure his simplistic communism and mateship developed a non-denominational but distinctly religious tinge” [Gavin Souter, ‘William Lane’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9, (MUP), 1983]. Lane’s leadership style, like Föster’s, clearly inclined towards millenarianism and the messianic [John Kellett, “William Lane and ‘New Australia’, Labour History, 72 (May 1997)]
Racism was always a key feature of Lane’s credo of utopian socialism and his overall philosophy. Back in Australia, this had already shown itself in his race novel, White or Yellow? and in his strident opposition to the introduction of Polynesian labour in Australia. Lane’s vision of utopian socialism put great store on the exalted nature of ‘mateship‘, but as the South Australian Register reported on 1 January 1895, many of the settlers thought the leader impractical, “there was too much talk about mateship and not enough of crops and cattle” [Kellett, ibid.].
El Chaco Austral
Added to this, the conditions under which the Nueva Australinos found themselves were very harsh, the climate was inhospitable, the land was not as arable as had been hoped (less like outback Queensland than initially thought); mosquito and parasite infestation plagued them, tigrés or jaguarés prowled around the camps at night [Ben Stubbs, “The New Australians of South America”, www.australiangeographic.com.au]
Nueva Australia was established on the basis of a socialist cooperative enterprise, the colonists were compelled to commit all of their personal savings to a communal fund. Once underway, all cash in the colony was held collectively. Inevitably, this lead to bickering which was ongoing. Some members were accused of withholding money from the collective ‘kitty'[The West Australian, 29 December 1893, The Brisbane Courier, 9 July 1894]. Harmony within the colony by now was already strained.
Things only deteriorated, an anti-Lane faction developed and Lane expelled some of these dissenters from the commune. At the same time Lane was accused of favouring a friend of his who had transgressed the colony rules [JB Henderson, William Lane, the prophet of Socialism”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 8(3) 1968]. Inevitably there was a backlash against Lane’s ‘Law’ by the majority of the settlers. Ideological disputes and personality clashes intensified to the point where Lane was forced to break away from the original settlement and start a new community (he called Colonía Cosme) which adhered to his over-the-top brand of puritanism. The rebels under trade unionist Gilbert Casey maintained the original settlement, Nueva Australia, but disbanded the communistic methods in favour of a more individual approach to financial arrangements.
Banknote from ‘Colonía Neuva Australia‘
Both colonies continued to struggle for viability. The Australian newspapers of the day regularly reported entreaties to the authorities from individual families for assisted passage back to Australia owing to their destitution [Brisbane Courier, 12 February 1896, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 20 January 1897]. Lane tried to recruit new members to Cosme from England but was only at best marginally successfully. By 1899 Lane himself had abandoned his own utopian project and returned to Australasia, eventually to do a political volte-face, becoming a conservative journalist in New Zealand.
By the end of the 1890s it was transparent to all that both utopian experiments were abject failures and the Paraguayan Government stepped in and ended the communal nature of the colonies, offering the remaining members (such as there were) individual plots of land to work. In this transformed fashion the settlements stumbled on, sans communism. Today the remnants of Lane’s idealist vision remain in two townships, one called Nueva Australia and the other (somewhat curiously), Nueva Londres.
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“Eugenically-pure”(sic) New Australia
One of the most pervasive and influential ideas in Western thinking in the late 19th Century was the notion of eugenics. This pseudo-scientific belief underpinned the theoretical framework of both Paraguayan utopian societies. The practice of strict racial separation, whether that be white/native American or German/Jew, was an essential tenet of Nuevo Germania and New Australia, based on the supposed inherent superiority of people of English/German stock. The widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism at that time fed into that self-perception of superiority. Lane envisaged a new type of Australian man of pure English (Anglo-Saxon) stock forged out of the South American jungle, an antidote to racial decay of the white man…the theoretical underpinnings of Lane’s ‘New Australia’ brought him uncomfortably close to Förster’s vision for Nueva Germania – an Australian colony in the wilderness providing the breeding ground for a new, higher and purer ‘race’ (sic) of Saxon stock [MacIntyre, op.cit; Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].
As indicated above, there were a number of distinct similarities between the leaders of the German and the Australian aspirational utopian colonies in their beliefs and prejudices. Both were religious fanatics imbued with peculiar forms of Agrarian Christian Socialism. Both were wowsers and racists harbouring a deep fear of miscegenation [Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].
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Remnants of Nueva Australia
PostScript: Inflexible, impractical, headstrong leadership and a failure to adapt to Paraguayan conditions
The Australian and German colonies in Paraguay in practice were neither utopian or viable. They failed, partly because, on both counts, there was a sense of unreality about the entire project. Poor leadership retarded the communes’ development. Lane and Förster’s fantastically dreamy visions were not rooted in anything concrete. “Authoritarianism for authoritarianism’s sake” succeeded only in alienating the settlement members. Both leaders were unrealistic in expecting them to blithely accept unreasonable demands that they abstain from drink, from meat, from physical contact with the local women, forgo money, and so on. In addition to all of this, the harshness of conditions in the jungle and wilderness of Paraguay tested the new settlers and repeated crop failures prevented them from making a decent economic livelihood from the land, condemning those that remained to a life of subsistence agriculture.
The clothing company was started in Metzingen (southern Germany) in 1924 by the eponymous Hugo (Ferdinand) Boss…it commenced supplying the NSDAP (National-Socialist Workers Party) with their brown military uniforms, according to the company’s own claim, in 1924 (the year in which Hugo Boss was founded)
(Map: Lonely Planet)
So, after a very short bargaining session, in exchange for a handful of wrinkled RSA rand notes
Yes, I had heard about Zimbabwe’s notorious mega-inflation. Back in high school history classes I had learnt about the troubled Weimar Republic in the 1920s and it’s crazy, runaway hyperinflation which led to workers being paid every day, twice a day (morning and afternoon) and having to cart away their ‘soft’ mark currency notes in wheelbarrows! But I didn’t appreciate the full dimensions of Zimbabwe’s economic calamity until I came here. In 2008 the country’s insouciant and haphazard economic mismanagement had resulted in a tsunami of hyper-inflationary escalation which peaked at a staggering 231 Million percent. At its year’s worse, prices were doubling every 24 hours [‘Where is the next Fiat Currency Revaluation?’, (Andrew Henderson), Nomad Capitalist, Upd. 28-Dec-2019, 
As well as adding naughts to the money denominations at an alarming rate of knots, Zimbabwe in a currency-printing frenzy went paper money crazy – they started issuing notes for all the coin denominations too. At one point they even had a one cent note! In the hyper-inflationary swampland that is Zimbabwe, imagine the lunacy of printing a 1₵ note! Then again, perhaps we are underestimating the government’s capacity for irony…or maybe it was an artistic statement, theatre of the absurd, surreal farce, that sort of thing!
Manley as chief minister of the colony of Jamaica and founder of the Jamaican People’s National Party (PNP) at the onset of the Caribbean Federation was in a position to exert a centrally prominent role and even a guiding influence over the shaping of the new multi-island federation. Manley however chose not to put himself forward as candidate for the WIF’s prime ministership✲, or even to stand for election to the new parliament as an MP. And given that Manley was revered within Jamaica as a national hero/father figure, his non-participation in the fledgling WIF, certainly would have dissuaded other Jamaicans from embracing the cause of union [Kwame Nantambu, ‘W. I. Federation: Failure From the Start’, (art. updated 26-Oct-2014), www.tricenter.com].
Federalism as an essential stage to independence
⇡ Eric Williams, 1st PM of independent Trinidad & Tobago 
All of the eastern Caribbean islands advocated a strong role for the central authority, but T & T chief minister Williams was the WIF’s strongest voice. Seeking dominion status for the British Caribbean islands Williams in 1956 laid out the predicament for its small countries: “The units of government are getting larger and larger…federation is inescapable if the British Caribbean territories are to cease to parade themselves to the twentieth-century world as eighteenth-century anachronisms” [Vasciannie, op.cit.]. This echoed the UK’s position at the time of the 1947 Montego Bay Conference: union was the only way the “small and isolated, separate communities could achieve and maintain full self-government” [Narkine, loc.cit.].
⇡ Kingston 🇯🇲 (1960s)
⇡ WIF crest – motto refuted: a federation without unity
Enduring West Indian unity – the WI cricket flag
In the 19th century there were various attempts at “governor-sharing” of different British West Indian possessions, eg, the Windward and Leeward Islands had a sort of federated arrangement from the 1870s to the 1950s✲. The Crown also appointed a governor to take joint control of Jamaica and British Honduras…the same thing happened at one point with Barbados and the Windwards. These constructed entities did not necessarily have satisfactory or happy outcomes, the last of these imposed ‘unions’ was followed by the Confederation Riots of 1876 in Barbados (a protest by local black labour against the sub-par wages paid by the white planter class) [Kwame Nantambu, ‘W. I. Federation: Failure From the Start’, (art. updated 26-Oct-2014), www.tricenter.com].
Photo: Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (bitujamaica.org)
⦽ Red arrow = de jure federal capital 
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The disproportionate toll of African-American enlisted men in the disaster was the result of the Navy assigning them to the most menial, labouring jobs as stevedores, basically “pack mules” loading the munitions. The Navy made casual racist assumptions about their ‘limited’ vocational capacity, despite the fact that at the Navy boot camp the black sailors had each completed specific training for one or other of the naval rating occupations[3].
(Photo: National Park Service)
IQ tests continued to be fashionable in the 1950s & beyond: giving ‘scientific’ credence to the stigmatising of those in society labelled as “less intelligent” (Source: The Creativity Post)
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)
PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia
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The E tree
Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]
The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].
