In June 1905, the founder of the Salvation Army, General William Booth, visited Melbourne to fortify the adherents of his creed. Thousands attended his meetings, and many came forward to join the ranks of his church. Although threatening the lowest of hells for those former members who had ‘backslidden’,1 there was no sign of 20-year-old Jack Curtin regretting his departure from the Brunswick Nathanialites and his subsequent switch to socialism. But there was much for Curtin and his new-found comrades to be worried about regarding the prospects for their own campaign. The Labor Party was growing in parliamentary strength but socialism seemed as distant as ever. At the interstate Labor conference in July 1905, with Mann looking on as an honoured guest, the delegates adopted an objective which combined support for ‘racial purity’ and nationalism while eschewing the pursuit of socialism. Rather than seeking power in its own right, the party was content to prop up the smaller Liberal Protectionists under Alfred Deakin in return for whatever concessions it could extract.2 It was in order to stiffen the resolve of the backsliding labour movement that Mann now involved Curtin and other like-minded socialists in a new crusade for socialism.
There was no existing labour organisation through which Mann could mount his campaign. The Labor Party was wary of the possible electoral backlash from electors frightened by his revolutionary language and the existing socialist organisations lacked the fire that Mann required. Although the Social Democratic Party, which he had helped to form, had begun with much promise in 1902, it was falling apart by 1905. Its secretary, Scott Bennett, had been elected to the Victorian Parliament the previous year and the new secretary was Curtin’s close friend, Frank Hyett. Mann’s prolonged absences in Western Australia and Queensland had caused many members to lose interest in the party’s activities.3 Mann later recalled how, on his return from Queensland, the state of socialist propaganda was ‘relatively deadly’. It mainly consisted of Sunday night meetings of the SDP in Melbourne’s Queen’s Hall which were, wrote Mann dismissively, ‘chiefly in the nature of entertainments’ in which his operatic wife had often been one of the main attractions.4
Rather than reinvigorating the party, Mann began anew, taking over the Gaiety Theatre in June 1905 for a series of Sunday afternoon lectures on socialism which ‘proved a decided success’.5 The gist of these lectures was then published in the pages of Tocsin in July 1905 and later distributed by Champion in pamphlet form under the straightforward title of ‘Socialism’, as he had done in Britain with Mann’s eight-hour day pamphlet some twenty years before. According to one recent assessment, it was ‘one of the most wide-ranging, forceful and effective pieces of socialist exposition and advocacy that one can find anywhere for the early twentieth century in the English language’.6 And it marked Mann’s switch from focusing primarily on parliamentary politics, as being the surest path to socialism, to focusing instead on industrial organisation. The pamphlet was radical in other respects as well.
Mann came out in favour of women having a full role in economic, social and political life. According to Mann, the traditional form of patriarchy that marked Australian society was as redundant to human needs as industrial capitalism. He claimed that ‘all Socialists’ were ‘strongly in favour of economic, or industrial and social freedom for women’, believing that ‘all human beings . . . should be educated and trained, qualified and enabled to obtain all the essentials of a full free and healthy life’. It was for this reason, he said, that the Labor Parties were agitating for ‘equal pay for equal work for men and women’. He also called for workers to be cosmopolitan in their attitudes. Just as capitalism was racially blind, seeking the cheapest labour regardless of race, so workers should acknowledge the identity of interest between workers across national boundaries. He was careful, though, not to tread on local fears and prejudices by arguing for an identity of interest between Asian and Australian workers. Indeed, he observed how the Australian banana trade was ‘exclusively in the hands of the Chinamen’ which made ‘plenty of work to engage the attention of the Political Labor Party’.7 Even Mann’s internationalism had boundaries to its expression in Australia. With the White Australia Policy embedded in national legislation and emblazoned across the masthead of the Labor Party, it would have taken a particularly courageous person to say the unsayable.8
Mann infused his piece on socialism with a strong sense of inevitability, suggesting that human society was forced by Darwin’s laws of evolution to evolve from its current exploitative character to a new and higher phase for which socialist doctrine was best placed to provide the answers.9 A lecture that Mann gave later to the miners of Broken Hill on ‘Human Progress – the Laws that Govern It’ was typical of his attempts to link the inevitability of socialism to the ‘law of evolution’. He told them that he
honestly believed that they were on the eve of stupendous social and industrial changes. Mother Nature would tell them to go in and possess the land, and they would do it. The dominating class would disappear, and the people would be established. There was a belief before Christ came that He would come, and there was a belief now that great changes were coming.
The audience was given the words of two songs which were to be sung ‘right heartily’. The first was ‘The Hope of the Ages’ which began:
If you dam up the river of Progress -
At your peril and cost let it be!
That river must seawards despite you -
‘Twill break down your dams and be free!10
This confident dogma, with its faith in socialism’s inevitable success combined with a belief that it would happen soon, proved compelling to people such as Curtin. What would prove even more attractive was the establishment by Mann of a new organisation designed to propagate this faith within the labour movement. In an appendix to his socialism pamphlet, Mann had set out a proposal for a socialist Labor Party to steel the movement for the ‘prolonged warfare’ which he predicted would occur before the collapse of capitalism was assured. For those worried at such a prospect, Mann soothed them with the argument that it was ‘nothing more than the natural evolutionary development and therefore is in the most perfect order. Humanity cannot by any possibility remain in its present chaotic condition . . .’11 The success of Mann’s Sunday afternoon lectures at the Gaiety led to the establishment of a new organisation for propagating his views within the labour movement, and to a wider working-class audience.
At the suggestion of the socialist tailor, Percy Jones, who was busily amassing a small fortune selling suits on time-payment, a meeting of 76 supporters gathered in the Furlong Music Studio of Melbourne’s Royal Arcade on 1 September 1905 to establish the Social Questions Committee (SQC). The name apparently came at the suggestion of Champion, who was elected vice-president, while Jones was elected president and Mann the secretary. In his memoirs, Mann claimed that the objects of the group were ‘the collection and utilisation of information bearing upon social questions, with special reference to the proper feeding of children, the advocacy of the claims of the unemployed, the housing question, etc’. Such a strategy drew upon his English experience where groups such as the Fabians and the Salvation Army had carried out studies which had been influential in exposing the depths of deprivation in industrial Britain. The grander plan with the formation of the SQC, as with the earlier SDP, was to win converts for socialism, to have the Labor Party and trade unions pledge themselves to socialism and thereby to hasten the inevitable collapse of capitalism. ‘All the time,’ wrote Mann, ‘we avowed ourselves straight-out International Revolutionary Socialists.’12
The immediate impetus for the SQC came from an apparent upsurge of unemployment caused by a temporary recession in business.13 With little provision for government involvement, much of the unemployment remained hidden behind the battered doors of inner-city slums where families huddled in the cold gloom of the Melbourne winter. Mann and his supporters sought to expose their plight to the public gaze by surveying door to door so that the extent of the problem could be quantified and the injustices inherent in capitalism revealed. Curtin was among approximately seventy members of the SQC who were involved in this survey of Melbourne’s poor. He later recalled how they came across ‘examples of the suffering that comes to families of the working class when the breadwinner is idle for a long time’. Although the financial position of his own family was precarious enough, Curtin seemed unprepared for what he and his colleagues found in Melbourne’s slum suburbs: ‘It was winter. Homes were visited, that were without furniture; in many cases rags and bags served as bedding; food was lacking; and invariably the hearth was fireless for want of fuel. The experience was sorrowful and maddening.’14 It was also important in giving a tragic human face to the socialist theorising that he had been ingesting from the books in the public library and from his Sunday discussions with Frank Anstey’s circle.
What the Salvationists had been in the 1880s, the socialists became in the early 1900s. While the Salvationists scoured the sinners from the slums, the socialists scoured the labour movement of its backsliders and self-seekers while they propagated the true faith of working-class advancement. As the political arm of the labour movement, the Labor Party was meant to achieve the socialist measures that trade unionism had failed to achieve in the bitter strikes of the 1890s. But its more ardent supporters noticed a disturbing tendency for their elected representatives to have the fire in their bellies quenched by the champagne of office. As the historian of the Labor Party, Ross McMullin, observed, when Labor MPs walked through the portals of parliament armed with the demands of the workers, they entered ‘a comfortable club which seduced Labor members with facilities way beyond the reach of a typical toiler – higher wages, comfortable leather chairs, billiard tables, dining room, well-stocked library, free rail travel and invitations to lavish functions. Close contact with Labor’s adversaries could be disarming too.’15 The Social Democratic Party, and now the Social Questions Committee, would be the repository of the true faith and would aim to remind Labor representatives of its strictures.
From its original Fabian-like investigation of Melbourne’s social conditions, the SQC quickly broadened out to include aims and activities that had been pursued by its predecessor, the SDP. It took over the organisation of Mann’s public lectures, organised regular street corner meetings at various inner-city locations, conducted a speakers’ class for its aspiring orators and even set up its own choir, as well as an orchestra, a dramatic society, a boys band and a socialist Sunday school.16 Like the Salvationists, it sought converts on street corners and had an all-embracing faith and a church-like atmosphere to offer them. But the committee’s success was limited. Despite its survey of the slums indicating that there were approximately thirteen thousand unemployed in Victoria, it proved difficult to focus public attention upon it. Jones finally convinced several politicians to see for themselves the extent of the problem but, as Mann later conceded, ‘no cure of unemployment was achieved’.17 The committee’s activity, though, had attracted hundreds of sympathisers to the socialist ranks, and it supplemented its Sunday afternoon lectures at the Gaiety Theatre with Sunday evening lectures at Queen’s Hall in Bourke Street where it also established an office.18
As spring gave way to summer, the committee relinquished the Gaiety lectures and began outdoor meetings on the Yarra Bank. So successful had it become that the committee was able to establish its own rooms at 117 Collins Street where its Socialist Institute conducted classes and provided reading rooms where socialist literature from around the world was made available for members. A joining fee of sixpence was levied on members together with an ongoing fee of threepence a month. As an additional fund-raiser, packets of Red Flag tea were sold from the new headquarters, boldly displaying on its wrapper the ‘sentiments of Socialism’. Other funds came from the regular street corner meetings where collections were made and from the Sunday night lectures where admission was charged. The rooms were officially opened at the end of November 1905 when 250 comrades sat down to a cold collation before being regaled with stirring speeches and fortified with radical songs.19
Although Mann still remained a member of his local Labor Party branch, his resignation as Labor Party organiser and his switch to socialist agitator freed him from political constraints on his speechifying, something that alarmed some of his former Labor colleagues as well as the bourgeois objects of his agitation. After a lecture entitled ‘The Class War’ in late November 1905, Mann faced a fusillade of criticism directed at him from the pages of the Age newspaper. Mann had based his lecture on a recently published book by the American socialist writer and novelist Jack London, who had pointed to the basic conflict of interest under capitalism between the working class and the employing class in the United States. Mann had argued that such a conflict, or class war, also existed in Australia. This was like a red rag to the bourgeois bull. Claiming that Mann had a ‘preference for the methods of violence’, the Age likened Mann to the European anarchists who had diverged from the socialist path some twenty-five years before and who were associated with assassinations and bombings. Rather than seeking a war between the classes, the ‘more advanced Socialistic ideal now is to promote the co-operation of the classes’, claimed the Age writer.20
This was a potentially damaging attack that threatened to undercut Mann’s new-found success in Melbourne by portraying him as a violent revolutionary. In fact, it seems that Mann could envisage, and even accept, that the collapse of capitalism might involve and even necessitate some violence to ensure success for socialism. But this was not something that he could concede publicly for fear of driving away potential supporters anxious that the upright figure of the socialist lecturer, with his waxed moustache, might conceal the swarthy figure of a bomb-throwing anarchist. So, when Mann sprang to defend his position, rather than disavowing violence he simply ignored that aspect of the attack. Instead, he tried to blur the distinction between revolutionary and evolutionary socialism. Such a distinction was used by those seeking to separate reformist Laborites, who favoured gradual change through the evolution of existing institutions, from revolutionary socialists, who sought the overthrow of such institutions. Mann denied the distinction, claiming to be both. He was a revolutionary, because the change from capitalism to socialism would involve a complete revolution of social and economic relations, while he was also an evolutionary socialist, because the change to socialism would occur gradually and inevitably through the evolution of human society. According to Mann, evolution was simply the process and revolution its ultimate and inevitable end point.21
This exchange over the question of how socialism was to be achieved, in which Mann studiously avoided the central issue of violence, pointed to the dilemma of socialists trying to transform a society that already was widely regarded by socialists elsewhere as a social laboratory of the world. Australia was a place of universal suffrage, at least for the white race, at a time when women and many men were still denied the vote in Britain; it was a place of regulated wage rates and old age pensions (for white people), of free state education and of bounteous land for farms (for white people); and a place where meat was often on the table three times a day. In short, and despite considerable poverty, Australia remained a land of opportunity. While not exactly a ‘paradise for workers’, Australians enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world. Indeed, one of the reasons why Mann had come to Australia was precisely this, to observe the workers’ existing political and industrial achievements.22
Without the deprivation that might drive people to take up arms against the state, how was socialism to be achieved in Australia? Instead of establishing a revolutionary party of workers and peasants designed to seize power by force, Mann’s answer was to establish a socialist ‘church’ with himself at its head preaching the one true faith and conjuring up a vision of the earthly paradise to come. By early 1906, as other socialist organisations wilted before the SQC challenge, it was time to transform the misnamed committee into the Victorian Socialist Party so that it could build on the tremendous success that it already had achieved. Curtin, already a committed socialist, would be one of the new party’s strongest pillars.