Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin: Their early political careers and the making of the modern Labor Party

By Liam Byrne

Before becoming the prime ministers who led Australia in moments of extraordinary crisis and transformation, John Curtin and James Scullin were two young working-class men who dreamt of changing their country for the better. Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin tells the tale of their intertwined early lives as both men became labour intellectuals and powerbrokers at the beginning of the twentieth century. It reveals the underappreciated role each man played in the events that defined the modern Australian Labor Party: its first experience of national government, the turmoil of war, the great conscription clash and party split of 1916, and the heated debates over the party’s socialist objective.

Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin shows how they became the leaders that history knows best by painting a portrait of two young men struggling to establish their identities and find their place in the world. It tells of their great friendships, loves and passions, and reminds us that these were real men, with real weaknesses, desires and dreams. It explains how their early political careers set the scene for their later prime ministerships as they honed the techniques of power that led them to the summit of Australian politics.

This is the story of two young men striving to better the world they had inherited, a story of optimism and hope with enduring relevance for today’s troubled politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780522876482

Liam Byrne

The Rt. Hon. Liam Byrne MP chairs the Global Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & International Monetary Fund and sits on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. He served in the Cabinet in 10 Downing Street and Her Majesty's Treasury. An Honorary Professor of Social Science at the University of Birmingham, Liam was a Fulbright scholar at the Harvard Business School and Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has represented Birmingham Hodge Hill, the most income-deprived community in Britain, for the last 19 years and is the author of a major history of British capitalism Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain.

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Introduction

‘Those who mould the age’

The prime minister was dead. For almost a week, a single light in a window of the Lodge had burned deep into the night. There, John Curtin had lain in his sickbed. At 4 am on 5 July 1945, just weeks before Japan’s surrender, his heart finally gave out. Prime minister for three years, nine months, and one day, Curtin had never led his country in a time of peace. Reluctantly summoned to the highest office at a time of extraordinary challenge, it was his steadfast leadership that guided Australia through its great crisis in 1942, when a Japanese invasion seemed not just possible but imminent. When the supposed guarantee of British imperial protection was proven false and the times called for someone willing to lead amid the uncertainty, Curtin was there.

But now he was gone.

The nation mourned. A pall lay over the parliament that day. Tribute was paid from all sides of politics to the man who had provided the leadership that nobody else could at the time it was needed most.¹ Frank Forde, Curtin’s deputy prime minister (whom he had beaten for the Labor leadership by a single vote ten years before) gave the defining speech of his eight-day prime ministership in tribute to his fallen leader, ‘the captain … stricken in sight of the shore’.² Soon after, Curtin’s body lay in state in the King’s Hall, in the centre of Parliament House. ‘I suppose this is the first time’, one mourner was heard to remark, ‘he has had real rest since he entered this parliament’.³ He was, editorials and headlines in major newspapers attested, one of the war’s fallen, giving his life in his country’s service.⁴

Prime ministers and generals, kings and presidents, all sent their messages of grief. Representatives of the working class Curtin had served throughout his political career spoke of the acts of kindness and generosity that had marked him out as a leader.⁵ How strange it was, those unaccustomed to Curtin’s ways noted, for a wartime prime minister to walk among his people without a bodyguard.⁶

It was clear he was loved and admired, though his leadership had not always been warm. Often, it was associated with strictness and austerity, as Curtin demanded sacrifice for the war effort. Notable themes emerged in the tributes. He had few close friends, few intimates. He often appeared cold, and distant. He eschewed social events and did not join in blokey conversation. He seemed more the frustrated scholar than the amicable people’s leader. But his steadfastness, his honesty and his humility had won him a place in the hearts of those who worked with him, and among the millions who had come to rely on him to lead them through the dark times. There was something fundamental about Curtin that was unknowable, and unknown. But he had always been there: through the terrors of war, the sacrifices, the trials and the transformations. Peace was finally almost at hand.

But he was gone.

Later that night, after a day of mourning, former Labor prime minister James Scullin took to the airwaves. In an ‘eloquent’ speech transcribed and published in full by the labour newspaper the Australian Worker, Scullin paid tribute to the man who had succeeded him as Labor leader.⁷ He spoke of Curtin’s ‘enormous capacity as a thinker and a worker’. Unlike most, he grew in ‘mental stature’ with each challenge, each crisis. Curtin was, Scullin attested, ‘a writer and an eloquent speaker and a first-rate Parliamentarian’.

But Scullin’s purpose was more than platitudinous. He did not deny Curtin’s extraordinary exertions as wartime leader. But it was not hard work alone, ‘mental or manual, that kills’. Scullin knew, as did few others, the responsibility of being prime minister in a moment of extraordinary crisis. Just over a decade before, his own premiership had been as intimately connected to the economic devastation of the Great Depression as Curtin’s had been with the Pacific war. It was the stress of leading in such a moment that took the greatest toll, Scullin explained. He went on to describe the pressures Curtin had experienced with an intimacy that betrayed his own embittered memories of power:

There is the responsibility of making vital decisions in crises: the misunderstandings that follow such decisions, to say nothing of the misrepresentation. These are the things that torture the spirit and undermine physical endurance.

Scullin’s lament was for Curtin—and for Australian politics. Why, he asked, could those drawn to public life not do more to understand alternative perspectives? Why did they allow what divided them to override what drew them together? ‘I know’, Scullin grieved, ‘how at times the gentle spirit of John Curtin was wounded like a crushed flower under some attack’. No doubt, Scullin was referring to the barbs of Labor’s political antagonists. But more likely still, he was recalling the bitter experience of denunciation from within the party’s ranks, one that Curtin suffered deeply in a time of war, and one that had afflicted Scullin’s own fractured administration.

Scullin had suffered the ignominy of his own period in office being brought to an end when one of his Labor colleagues, Joe Lyons, led a rebellion against him. Lyons, in spectacular fashion, split from the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and joined with his erstwhile conservative opponents to break Scullin’s government. Curtin himself, then a backbench MP, had been a fierce critic of Scullin’s policy, but remained loyal to Labor. In that time of fierce debate and heated denunciation, Curtin had distinguished himself as an opponent of Scullin’s policy, but one who did not degenerate into personal attack or perfidious insult. Even in intense disagreement there was deep respect between the two men. And now, as time had passed, that respect had flourished into a strong friendship.⁸ Just as Curtin had done so often, Scullin drew on poetry—the work of Thomas Bracken—in his lament: ‘The poison shafts of falsehood and derision are oft impelled against those who mould the age’.⁹

From the very day of the prime minister’s passing, Scullin was helping to shape Curtin’s place in national lore. But while attesting to Curtin’s virtues as a leader, Scullin lay claim to a part of him that few others could. He recalled the times when Curtin would ask him to walk in the Canberra chill when ‘weighed down with many great problems’. In silence they would pace, and Curtin would unload his troubled mind. Scullin had acted as an adviser to the younger man, helping him confront the vexed difficulties that challenged his government. The friendship between them, built on shared experience, was so great that each could walk without speaking, ‘absorbed in his own thoughts, yet with a full understanding and appreciation of what was in each other’s minds’. For Curtin ‘was my friend over many years. I knew him intimately, and to know him was to love him’. He had been ‘a true mate’.

The following day, Scullin was one of the pall-bearers who bore Curtin’s plain wooden coffin on their shoulders.¹⁰ As the plane that sped Curtin west to his adopted state, and final resting place, took off from Canberra, Scullin bade his friend and leader goodbye. A fateful association that had lasted more than three decades was at an end.

1918

The delegate rose to his feet knowing that the stakes were high. It was June 1918, and activists and powerbrokers had assembled from across the country for the ALP’s first national conference in two years.¹¹ At its last meeting, in December 1916, the delegate had moved an extraordinary motion that expelled the sitting prime minister, William Morris ‘Billy’ Hughes, from the Labor Party. Hughes’s infraction had been proposing a plebiscite—commonly referred to as a referendum—to introduce conscription. This had been bitterly opposed, and defeated, by the union movement.

The 1918 conference was locked in an acrimonious debate as it dealt with the unfinished business of 1916. EJ ‘Jack’ Holloway, one of the country’s most powerful union leaders and Labor’s national president, proposed a motion on behalf of the Victorian branch to end all support for compulsory military service. Labor already opposed conscription for overseas service, and this motion would extend this opposition to all forms of military compulsion, including the training of young men for Australian defence, a policy Labor had adopted in 1908.¹²

James Scullin, attending as a delegate of the Victorian Labor Party, rose as heated debate erupted over this proposal. In him, the labour newspaper the Westralian Worker reported, the state had ‘sent the strongest man to the conference’.¹³ When Scullin spoke, others listened. He was the president of Victorian Labor, had represented Labor to the governor-general to discuss key matters of the war, and had the credibility of being a leading campaigner against conscription for overseas service in both 1916 and 1917—editing the union-aligned Evening Echo newspaper in Ballarat. He was known as a movement loyalist who had exerted ‘yeoman’s labour’ in its cause.¹⁴

Scullin attacked the Victorian proposal. Australia, he argued, was ‘our country, with all its achievements and all its possibilities’. It was a place worth defending. Could it really be said, he asked those assembled, that because they opposed conscription for service overseas that ‘home defence should be thrown overboard’? If his country should ever be threatened, Scullin explained, he ‘would not hesitate to conscript the manhood of Australia to defend the hearths and homes of this young democracy’.

This was more than a political position, it was an article of faith. Australian self-defence was paramount—a belief Scullin had held and argued for consistently over the past decade. But, he assured all those gathered, though he passionately opposed the Victorian proposal to end compulsory service for domestic defence, he would be sure to vote for it. For he was a Victorian delegate. Victoria required its delegates to vote for the motion. For Scullin, party loyalty came above all else.

Soon another delegate, John Curtin, rose to speak against Scullin’s conviction. Curtin had much in common with Scullin. He too was the editor of a newspaper—the Westralian Worker no less. He had also come to national prominence in opposition to conscription in 1916, as one of the campaign’s most visible leaders. Curtin spoke in favour of the Victorian motion. He had been, he explained, an ardent opponent of the compulsory training scheme and all forms of compulsory service since the 1908 conference. Such policies simply reproduced the oppressive ‘measures of Europe’ that had led to the carnage of war. If Australia needed to be defended, he argued, it should invest in ‘air-craft’ that could protect the continent. But he had greater faith in the ‘decisions of representative working-class congresses’, invoking the grand meetings of the Second International, the confederation of social-democratic and labour parties that had met regularly before the First World War to determine the position of the international labour movement on key questions of the day, and had declared its opposition to war.¹⁵ It was his belief that a similar body needed to be formed to ensure peace in the post-war world.¹⁶

Inspired by working-class internationalism, Curtin’s speech demonstrated the socialist convictions that defined his early political life, and he repudiated Scullin’s arguments, as he had consistently for the previous decade. But, he assured those assembled, despite these deep beliefs, he would vote against the Victorian motion. He was attending the conference as a proxy delegate for the Tasmanian branch, which could not afford to send some of its contingent. Tasmania opposed the Victorian motion and so, as party loyalty demanded, Curtin pledged his vote against his own position.

When the count was taken, Holloway’s motion was defeated, eighteen votes to nine. The following year, however, it was put again to the federal Labor Party conference, and won. The ALP’s position would officially be to end all systems of compulsory military service.¹⁷ Pledged to this in 1919, however, Labor would have a long wait until it next held the power necessary to put this reform into action.

The next Labor prime minister held true to Labor’s policy, though he personally disagreed with it. In 1929, now leading the government, James Scullin suspended the compulsory military training scheme. It was his successor to the party leadership, John Curtin, who next called upon Australian men to serve compulsorily beyond Australia’s shores, in 1943.¹⁸

Their story

John Curtin and James Scullin were friends and confidants. Each had experienced the extraordinary responsibility of leading the nation in moments of crisis and change, and this built a special bond between them. But as these two little-known episodes show, their relationship began well before their prime ministerial years, and was shaped by the peculiar customs of Labor politics. For four decades, each had been a prominent figure of power within the labour movement, and for most of that time each had competing visions for Australia, and differing views on how Labor could act to turn these visions into reality.

Scullin and Curtin occupy epochal, but drastically different, places in the national lore. Scullin is seen as a tragic figure, coming to power in a landslide in October 1929, mere weeks before the outbreak of the Great Depression. With a party that was splintering, a country that was polarising, and British lenders demanding recompense for their investments, Scullin was unable to chart a course through the political and economic tempest. His period of government left deep scars on the Australian psyche and fractured Labor nearly beyond repair. As a result, he has been diminished in our national story. A life of great repute and contribution to both his country and the labour movement has been mostly forgotten. Scullin has been the subject of only one biography, historian John Robertson’s 1974 work,¹⁹ and the political journalist Warren Denning’s elegant, but brief, account of Scullin’s administration.²⁰

The remembrance of John Curtin, as the heroic prime minister who led Australia through our greatest existential crisis, could hardly be more different. Curtin is memorialised as austere yet humble, reluctant yet decisive, the man who overcame his own demons and addiction to alcohol to lead the nation, his status as a wartime leader ‘beyond politics’ unmatched.²¹ Curtin’s stature has routinely been confirmed by Labor leaders and luminaries. The party has held orations in his name, and its former Canberra national headquarters was known as John Curtin House.

Outside the political arena Curtin has also been well remembered. His name adorns a university, a prime ministerial library, a medical research institute, a public policy think-tank and research school, and a famed Melbourne pub. Eager students of Curtin’s life can read his collected letters, and excerpts from his writings and speeches, in volumes collated by the historian David Black.²² The defining decisions of his early prime ministership have been dramatised in an ABC television series starring William McInness. The popular GQ magazine has anointed him our ‘coolest’ prime minister.²³ International audiences have had Curtin brought into their virtual lives—he now appears in one of the world’s most popular video games, Civilisation VI. If Scullin has largely been forgotten, Curtin is lauded and cherished.

But who was the person behind this idealised image? It is notable that the avatar that represents Curtin in Civilisation neither looks nor sounds like the man himself. Curtin’s period of government has been chronicled with greater generosity than Scullin’s. Historian Caryn Coatney has studied the ex-editor’s masterful management of the media while in office.²⁴ John Edwards, economist and former adviser to Paul Keating, has attributed the alteration in state–federal power, postwar reconstruction and the engagement with international financial institutions to Curtin’s guidance, and dedicated two volumes to the study of his wartime prime ministership.²⁵ Scholar of foreign relations, James Curran, more critically, has attributed to Curtin a rethinking of Australia’s place in the British Empire.²⁶

Curtin’s life has been chronicled by Lloyd Ross, the trade union leader and educator, and the popular writer David Day, in two substantial biographies.²⁷ These accounts, unsurprisingly, focus overwhelmingly on Curtin’s time in office, and are more effective in describing Curtin in power than identifying the man behind the title. Neither detail the substantial political contribution Curtin made before rising to Labor’s leadership, nor explain how this period formed the man that history knows best. For Ross, the time between Curtin’s birth and his departure for Perth in 1917 was a youthful flirtation with the ‘impossible’ ideal of socialism. Day’s main emphasis is on the young Curtin’s burgeoning love life, expressed predominantly through the letters collected by David Black and materials from Ross’s accumulated archive.

Curtin and Scullin risk being overshadowed by their contrasting fates as prime minister. Scullin is threatened with being dismissed as a tragic and ill-fated figure, a victim of circumstance who could not stand up to the great decisions required of his moment in power. Curtin risks sanctification—his time of stoic leadership obscuring the real man who bore the nation’s burdens and suffered the cost. If the popular image of their prime ministerships is all that remains of Scullin and Curtin, then their true selves are lost to us. We lose touch with the remarkable stories of how two young working-class men, autodidacts from provincial Victoria, introverted, scholarly, often uneasy and reserved in the company of others, managed to overcome their personal limitations to emerge as figures of power and intellectual standing in Australian politics. Through the great crises of their time—war, conscription, economic catastrophe—each used the skills learnt in their early years to rise to a position of power, and once there, sought to implement the outlooks forged over decades of struggle and development to govern the nation, and change Australia in fundamental ways.

The task of this book is to excavate these pre-histories, to complete the picture of these two men—who they were, what they achieved, and what they believed. It reveals how their early political careers set the scene for their later prime ministerships. In the first two decades after Federation each man came to act as an intellectual and powerbroker in the labour movement. Gradually amassing influence as they developed their skills in writing, speaking, arguing and counting the numbers, in these early years they honed the techniques of power that would lead them to the summit of the Australian political system. Though much of their early years has been lost to us, we can see their personalities emerge: fragile, aloof, disconnected, but incessantly drawn into the company of others due to their desire to change Australia for the better.

A biography of Scullin and Curtin is, inevitably, a study of the Australian Labor Party. Labor was, for both men, the vehicle through which they sought social change. The extent of this change, and how Labor should act to realise it, were the core points of the political rivalry that emerged between them. Labor was defined through creative contestation. In the early years of the Australian Federation, socialist and moderate intellectuals, and powerbrokers of the labour movement competed to stamp Labor with their project. In so doing, they forged Labor’s culture and honed its worldview. Through the process of debate over Labor’s meaning and purpose—what it should intend to achieve and how—socialists and moderates gave the party its enduring form and ideological outlook. Contrary to received wisdom that factionalism and a lack of unity are innately bad for a political party, the division between Labor’s two sections in its early years spurred the development of its policies and programs. Socialists and moderates alike were forced by the competition from the other to hone their ideas, respond to objections and find a way to persuade a working-class audience of their project. Through such ideological contest modern Labor was made; and in a manner not yet recognised, Scullin and Curtin were important contributors to this process.

Scullin was a moderate, connected to the Australian Workers Union, Australia’s largest and most powerful union. His project was that of the transformation of capitalism through peaceable reform—substantive transformation of the system—but not its overthrow. This was a constitutional approach to reform that privileged parliament, the arbitration court and the gradual process of education over strikes, strife and revolution. The contours of his premiership were shaped in the early years of his political career, and their traces can be identified through his writings, public statements and interventions in the period when the party itself was taking shape.

There are clearer differences between Curtin’s political outlook as a young man, and as prime minister, though significant continuities remain. Not only was Curtin labelled a socialist in his early days, he proudly proclaimed the title. From 1906 until he left Victoria in 1917, Curtin was a member of the Victorian Socialist Party as well as the Labor Party. The outlook cultivated throughout these years—that the government should use its powers not to wage war but to eliminate poverty—was echoed during Curtin’s prime ministerial tenure, and his government’s plans for postwar reconstruction, the creation of a more equitable nation once the conflict was over.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century these young men rose from obscurity to positions of influence in the labour movement. Their life stories provide a means to examine the Labor Party’s development in these crucial years from the grass roots up to its leadership. Both were key figures in the two defining events that gave Labor its character and purpose: the 1916 battle over conscription and the ALP split, where the trade union movement asserted its control over the parliamentary party; and the socialisation objective of 1921, where Labor declared parliamentary socialism its aim, and defined its ideological boundaries—moments from a seemingly distant past that retain an enduring relevance to the ALP today.

After a century of tradition, myth-making and familiarity, it is easy to forget just how young Labor once was. The ALP formed in 1901 in response to Federation, when previously separate colonial organisations joined to create a national party. The experiences of these organisations differed vastly. In Queensland, the colonial Labor Party had earned the distinction of being the first workers’ party in the world to hold office, albeit briefly, in 1899. In Victoria, successive attempts to create an independent political identity for the labour movement had failed. Many of the state’s union leaders, coming together at its Trades Hall Council, preferred a continued alliance with the established liberal parties. Federation gave labour organisation in the state a new impetus—the party needed a presence in Melbourne, then Australia’s capital, so in 1901 the Political Labor Council (PLC) was formed. This was the Victorian branch of the ALP, though it was not officially known as such until 1917.

Following Scullin and Curtin as they came to power offers unique insight into Australian politics and the nature of the Labor Party. Theirs is the story of how ‘ordinary’ people lived the politics of the time, and elevated themselves through the ranks to become figures of influence. Through this, we can see the party in a new way, not as a ‘thing’, but as a network of people who dreamed, and laboured, and plotted to realise social change.²⁸ It provides insight as to how people lived within the party, how they thought, spoke, wrote and interacted as part of the network of activists, intellectuals, power-brokers and leaders, who together made up this incredible and idiosyncratic political machine.

Curtin and Scullin came of age at a time when critiques of capitalism were rife. It was widely believed within the labour movement that the capitalist system had little more to offer the working class than penury and oppression. But what could be done about it? Was there an alternative to the status quo and how could it best be achieved? As intellectuals of the labour movement Curtin and Scullin debated these issues, and through this debate, developed far-reaching plans for social change. They rose to prominence as intellectuals and powerbrokers because of these long-term visions for Australia’s future, not in spite of them.

In the twenty-first century, the sustained crisis of neoliberal capitalism has posed these questions of transformation again. On the one hand, right-wing leaders have risen to prominence promising a return to the supposed certainties of a mythical past. On the other, a new generation is embracing and reinterpreting old theories of radical change. Socialism has become popular once more, not as a philosophy of historical interest, but as a realistic alternative to the contemporary status quo. Socialist leaders backed by substantial social movements have shaken up political systems. In the United States, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has rebelled against the Democratic Party establishment under the banner of democratic