Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SECRET HISTORY – State Surveillance in New Zealand, 1900-1956” by Richard S. Hill and Steven Loveridge (Auckland University Press, [hardback] $NZ79:99)

            I’ll begin this review of Secret History - State Surveillance in New Zealand, 1900-1956 with a very dry and matter-of-fact of description. This is the first volume of a planned two volumes. The second volume, yet to be published, will take the story from 1956 to the present. Secret History is written by two distinguished and experienced historians. Emeritus Professor Richard S. Hill is noted for his three-volume history of policing in New Zealand  and his two volumes dealing with the interaction of Maori and the Crown. Steven Loveridge is noted for his Calls to Arms , an account of New Zealanders’ response to the First World War; his editing of the collection of essays New ZealandSociety in War 1914-1918 ; and his co-authorship [with James Watson] of The Home Front – New Zealand Society and the War Effort [all reviewed on this blog]. Secret History is a scholarly work carefully noting all its sources. The 287 large and closely-printed pages are followed by 70 pages of end-notes, 30 pages of bibliography and sources and 19 double-column pages of index. Appreciate this as a very serious and informed work. 

Like any worthwhile work concerning history, it has a number of important themes. First, it concerns itself with the way policing became involved in surveillance and spying on the activities of New Zealanders; and how its organisation evolved. But second, and perhaps as important, it concerns itself with how ethical or unethical such surveillance was. Hill and Loveridge clearly have their views on these matters.  The front-cover blurb tells us that Secret History “explores a hidden and intriguing dimension of New Zealand history, one which sits uneasily with cherished national notions of an exceptionally fair and open society”. The same string is plucked 280-pages later when the “Concluding Remarks” declare “The history of surveillance over civil society sits uneasily with both the national foundational ideals and the dominant self-image which emerged over time...many of the methods of surveillance jarred with New Zealand’s sense of itself.” [pp.282-28] In brief, many New Zealanders regarded police surveillance, and especially the surveillance of people’s beliefs and the parties to which they belonged, as little more than butting unnecessarily into other people’s business. Though frequently critical of official surveillance, however, the authors concede that “while assigned members of the New Zealand Police Force (NZPF) were the major surveillers in our period, with the ability to arrest and prosecute, their work was a far cry from that of the security police of totalitarian, authoritarian or other regimes whose powers or practices have extended to torture or killing.” [Introduction, p.5]

 

            Secret History in arranged chronologically, working step by step through the decades of the first half of the 20^th century. The opening chapter, called “Surveilling Colonial New Zealand”, takes us quickly through police practice in the mid- and late-19^th century, when police were mostly concerned with the possibility of Maori uprisings, but when very few people were regarded as “subversive” and a threat to the nation. Police were largely recruited from rural (and therefore conservative) families. The Liberal government was in power in the 1890s with a programme that appealed to urban and industrial workers. But ironically it was in this decade that more left radical movements began to challenge the government and the arbitration system to resolve industrial disputes. Only in the 1890s was a specific police detective force created, and thenceforth surveillance was in the hands of the NZPF (New Zealand Police Force).

            Chapters Two and Three take us from 1900 to 1918, the end of the First World War. Only in the 1910s were New Zealand detectives professionalised according to British models.  It was clear that “… even if New Zealand had technically ceased to be a colony in 1907, [the task of New Zealand police] formed part of an Empire-wide effort to ward off challenges to British hegemony.”(Chapter 2, p.37). Thus began fear of subversion by other states – Russia, China, Japan and particularly Germany, with its interests in the Pacific (especially Samoa) and its formidable fleet now challenging Britain’s fleet. Even before war broke out, there were rumours of alien spies at work in New Zealand.

Yet far more prominent in the minds of the “political police” [as this text calls them] were the radical industrial unions and the Red Feds (Federation of Labour) as well as agitators like the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies”). When Bill Massey’s “Reform” party took over in 1912, it set out to break the unions and police stepped up surveillance of radicals and unionists who called for strikes. Notoriously, in 1912 a major strike in the mining town of Waihi was broken when a large force of police escorted non-union workers (“scabs” according to the strikers) into the town. Worse, police may have encouraged the strike-breakers to attack the union’s headquarters. At any rate, police didn’t intervene when the strike-breakers smashed up the building and in the fight one unionist was killed, Fred Evans, the only striker killed in an industrial confrontation in New Zealand’s history. “Under the umbrella of police autonomy… the state accommodated extra-legal policing methods, including those used by the  political detectives and other watchers. Such methods were most especially used in times of crises in defence of the realm, and their potential use underpinned the decision to engineer a decisive showdown with militant labour in 1913.” (Chapter 2, pp.60-61). In the major waterfront strikes in 1913, police swore in mounted deputies (mainly farmers) to break strikers demonstrations. The deputies became known as “Massey’s Cossacks” and an example of police endorsing violence to resolve an industrial dispute.

As war neared, police stepped up surveillance of pacifists and spent much time tracking down young men who had dodged compulsory military training. Intelligence sections were set up by the armed forces, including the novel use of wireless, and there were fears of German spies and saboteurs. By 1914 all foreign tourists were monitored by the police and a number of citizens of German descent were incarcerated. There was a widespread assumption that a major threat to the country overrode the customary police procedures. Very few people protested at surveillance and censorship. Even large scale “postal censorship [police opening private mail] occasioned little dissent” [Chapter 3, p.91] as the general New Zealand consensus was that these things were necessary in wartime conditions. For the first time, films were censored and, in the name of “efficiency”, pubs had to close at 6 p.m. (a law that remained in place for the next fifty years). Publications that questioned how the war was being fought were either prosecuted, shut-down or raided, as happened to the left-leaning newspaper the Maoriland Worker. The police were very busy. In the interest of religious harmony, towards the end of the war the police also monitored the activities of the Protestant Political Association which promoted propaganda against the Catholic church.

Chapters 4 and 5 are linked together under the title “Latent Cold War, 1919-1939”, as there was a strong antagonism towards the Soviet state almost as soon as it was formed. In the 1920s, the military had to yield back to the police the power to gather and analyse intelligence relating to foreign powers. In each of New Zealand’s four main cities (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin) there was stationed “a detective with a virtually full-time commitment to political surveillance.” [Chapter 4, p.108] Regarded as radical and disruptive, the New Zealand Labour Party had been shadowed by the police as soon as it was founded in 1916. But “the Labour Party was moving in a distinctively reformist direction and in 1922 affirmed that ‘Labour did not support revolution’ ” [Chapter 4, p.98] By the late 1920s, the Labour Party embraced liberal democracy, regularly denounced Communism and expelled members who promoted Communist ideology. Police turned their attention to the Ratana movement and to Irish sympathisers with Sinn Fein [seen as helping to break up the British Empire]. But more than other groups, the New Zealand Communist Party, founded in 1921, was being watched by the police. Increasingly informers were recruited to infiltrate Communist meetings and in some cases informers took positions in the Communist executive. Yet the number of active Communists in New Zealand was greatly overestimated by the police. On the files in the late 1920s “1660 names were recorded as Communists at a time when CPNZ membership totalled a mere 99.” [Chapter 4, p.125].

The impact of the Depression changed the scene considerably. With a [then] record number of people unemployed, there was much civil unrest and, in the early 1930s, there were riots in the main cities. An extreme right-wing movement sprung up, but it quickly faded away. The “police were especially concerned that militant activists, especially Communists, might be able to utilise social distress to attack the authorities and the economic system they protected – one which, in times of crisis especially, seemed to belie the New Zealand mythscape of fairness and equality of opportunity. … this had led, in the immediate post-war years, to a discrete political police operation being established at Police Headquarters  and in the detective offices, together with a secret filing system to underpin their work.” [Chapter 5, p.146]. The “political police’s” “intelligence system that had been consolidated in the 1920s continued without fundamental change in the following decade, but its level of scrutiny intensified in line with the rapidly expanding threatscape perceived by the authorities. In particular, the widespread suffering caused by the Depression was viewed as a recruiting tool for the CPNZ.” [Chapter 5, p.160] The police often assumed that Communists were uniquely behind such movements as the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and it is true that in the 1930s more people were attracted to Communism during what appeared to be the collapse of Capitalism – but even then, Communism attracted only a very few New Zealanders. The police were also able to influence university councils and suggest who could or could not be appointed to a position on the basis of how radical a candidate might be – a situation which caused much scandal as a number of very capable academics were denied the posts they were most fitted for.

A coalition government tried to balance the books and was wary of anything that looked radical. Things changed with the election of the Labour Party in 1935, but there were some ironies here. First, a number of front-bench Labour MPs, now respectable ministers with portfolios, had been fiery radicals at the time of intense industrial strife twenty years previously – the very people who had been spied upon and sometimes jailed by the police. Second, the new government’s attitude to Communists was now as hostile to Communism as the previous and more conservative government had been. Former Red-Feds were now eager to squelch Communists and they had Fintan Patrick Walsh (a former Communist) in charge of the trade-unions and able to strong-arm unions into not striking when a strike seemed imminent.

As the Second World War approached,  German clubs (including one with Nazi leanings) were observed and/or shut down.

So we come to Chapter 6 labelled “Total War 1939-1945”. Penalties for pacifists were as hard as they had been in the First World War, anti-war tracts were banned and a number of enemy aliens were interned on Somes Island and elsewhere. Once again, many eyebrows were raised by the fact that some members of the war cabinet had themselves been anti-war and anti-conscription in the earlier war. In the first two years of the war, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had their “Non-Aggression Pact” (in effect an alliance) and in those two years the Communists attempted to present the war as a fight between capitalist countries having nothing to do with the proletariat. Surprisingly the New Zealand Communist Party itself was not banned but it was closely scrutinised and largely went underground. In 1941 the situation changed. Hitler’s armies invaded Russia and suddenly Russia became an ally… but [dare I say, even if the authors don’t] the government remained justifiably wary of the CPNZ which could so easily change its allegiances. So, in the last three years of the war, such causes as the Society for Closer Relations with Russia were closely watched and reported on by the police. It was at this time that the Communist Party acquired its largest-ever membership, thanks in part to the prestige of the Red Army’s successes that were reported – though CPNZ membership rapidly faded away once the war was over.

Arising in the war, there was “the struggle between two models of security intelligence: the ethos of police-based surveillance versus a military-style operation falling outside the criminal justice system…” [Chapter 6, p.211] An attempt was made to produce an intelligence bureau as a completely separate agency from the police… but the attempt ended in farce. This story has often been told. Briefly, an arrogant English army officer called Kenneth Folkes was recruited to create a Security Intelligence Bureau (SIB) to deal with foreign spies and saboteurs and to monitor signals coming from enemy forces. The police were annoyed that they had been supplanted in this work. Alas, Kenneth Folkes proved to have little spycraft of his own and to be supremely gullible. Sydney Ross, a con-man just out of jail, managed to persuade Folkes that he had discovered a huge network of fifth-columnists and he alone would be able to contact them and report on them. Folkes gave Ross the money and wherewithal to carry out his investigations… and Ross merrily lived a life of ease while concocting nonsensical reports for Folkes. When this time-wasting was finally revealed, Folkes lost all credibility and crawled back to England while the SIB was dissolved and intelligence gathering went back to the police and armed forces.

            Although the authors clearly criticise much of the surveillance that was actioned during the war, they do make this important concession: “The general constraints on freedom, and the authorities’ acts of repression through 1939-45, cannot of course be examined outside the context of total war and a cause which almost all New Zealanders regarded as necessary in view of the nature of the Axis powers. Thus, when hints of covert surveillance measures occasionally surfaced, they seemed to be at least tacitly approved by the great majority of the population. Had most people been asked, they would no doubt have agreed with the government that severe measures in the short term were necessary in the long-term interests of the sought-after ideal society.” [Chapter 6, p.211]

            Finally we reach Chapter 7, labelled “Early Cold War, 1945-56”. In those eleven years of the Cold War, New Zealand became as much influenced by the United States as by the United Kingdom. The Korean War and Britain’s “emergency” in Malaya were both focused on pushing back Communist forces, and this was the era of McCarthyism in the U.S.A. In late 1949, with a conservative National government elected, the “political police” within the general police force, were centralised and formalised as the Special Branch. In 1951, an Official Secrets Act was passed.  Prime Minister Sid Holland  took a very aggressive attitude to trade unions and refused to bargain in 1951 when there was a major lockout on the wharves. Instead, Holland called in the army to unload goods from waiting ships, and then brought in non-union workers. Once again, though the most charismatic union man, Jock Barnes, was not a Communist, it was Communists who were held to account by the government. Disturbed by much official surveillance, a New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties was set up in 1952. Sophisticated intelligence made it clear that there really were Soviet spies in New Zealand – especially in the Russian embassy – and suspicion fell on some civil servants with leftist leanings.  Suspicion also fell on some eminent people like Paddy Costello and Bill Sutch. One memoirist labelled this era as “a New Zealand McCarthyism” (quoted in Chapter 7, p. 274). Finally in 1956, the cabinet minister John Marshall pushed for the idea of a security service separated from the police force and partly modelled on American and British lines. Sid Holland gradually warmed to the idea and Brigadier Bill Gilbert was sent off to train in intelligence-craft with Britain’s MI5. The Security Service was set up and in 1957 the Special Branch was dissolved. For the first time, surveillance and the gathering of foreign intelligence was no longer in the hands of the police.

            What I have given you in this review is a very simplified version of a detailed and nuanced book. The question of the ethics of surveillance is raised again and again. The authors are implicitly critical of many operations carried out by the “political police”. At the same time, context has to be considered. The era in which criticised operations were carried out is not our era and the consensus of 1912 or even 1956 is not the same as the consensus of the present age. It's up to the reader to decide what can be endorsed and what can be condemned in this chronicle of surveillance.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“THE HOME FRONT – New Zealand Society and the war effort, 1914-1919” by Steven Loveridge and James Watson (Massey University Press, $NZ65)

 

            On this blog, “Something New” usually deals with books that are fresh off the press. The Home Front - New Zealand Society and the war effort, 1914-1919 is an exception. This scholarly and very detailed book is one volume of the series researched and written for the First World War Centenary History Programme, and published by Massey University Press. Collectively, the series constitutes a new history of New Zealand’s part in the First World War, drawing on newly-available sources and superseding the inadequate 4-volume “official history” that was published in the 1920s. Along with other volumes in the series, The Home Front - New Zealand Society and the war effort, 1914-1919 was published at the end of 2019.

So why am I now reviewing The Home Front 20 months after publication? Two reasons (a.) I was asked to; but more important (b.) because this book and others in the series were largely overlooked by the popular press and general-interest magazines, or at best noticed only briefly. The only real reviews appeared in specialist and academic publications.

First, a few bibliographic features. The Home Front is a handsome, beribboned hardback. Its 440 large pages of text are followed by 63 double-columned pages of endnotes, scrupulously documenting sources. The index runs to 18 triple-columned pages of fine print. The text is well-illustrated, and one could easily get lost in the many images of New Zealanders in New Zealand over one hundred years ago; but images have the great merit of illustrating topics being discussed on adjacent pages.

The Home Front is more-or-less structured in chronological order. Its Introduction gives a very general history of New Zealand up to 1914, but emphasising the fact that while New Zealand was gaining more autonomy, New Zealanders were still very attached to Britain and very supportive of British preparations for war. Thence successive chapters work their way from the outbreak of war in 1914 to armistice and aftermath, 1918-19. Steven Loveridge and James Watson are not mere chroniclers, however. What emerges are some dominant themes in their account of life in New Zealand during the war.

 

One major theme is the gradual change of attitudes towards the war from the optimism of the first two years of war to the stress and desperation of the last two years, and especially in 1918.

On the whole, there was widespread public support for New Zealand’s participation in the war in 1914. It was commonly assumed that the combined forces of France, Britain and Russia would easily defeat Germany and its allies and the war would be over in a matter of months at most. There were only a few dissenters from this view. But the authors note that even in 1914 “…beneath all this congregating, cheering, singing and marching… were more complex intellectual and emotional reactions. Generally, the significant contrast was between those who saw the war as a great adventure and those who saw it a a terrible duty.” (p.52)

Initial idealism turned to scepticism. In 1915, most accepted the newspapers’ patriotic version of the botched and poorly-planned Gallipoli campaign as a matter of “splendid gallantry”. In a memorial speech, prime minister William Ferguson Massey described it as “heroic self-sacrifice and endurance….one of the finest and most memorable feats of arms ever accomplshed by men of the British race.” (p.184) Then harder reality hit, with casualty lists in newspapers and the return of wounded soldiers with less upbeat tales to tell. By 1916 “romantic conceptions of combat were viciously challenged by newspapers reproducing frontline correspondence, which could include graphic accounts.” (p.155). For many, the process of grieving began at this point, feeding into the cult of Anzac Day.

So the depressing news continued as the war dragged on. The authors note how society was under stress in the last two years of the war when “… the dynamics of social commitment were shifting. Most wartime societies demonstrated remarkable unity over the first two years of the war. From then on, most became keenly aware that unity and commitment could no longer be taken for granted as protracted mobilisation frayed societies’ moral and material bonds.” (p.263)

The February Revolution in Russia in 1917 at first suggested that this huge ally would now have a real democray. Given that France and Britain were puportedly waging a war on behalf of democracy, it had been a source of embarrassment that one of the Allies was a non-democratic autocracy. Then came the Bolshevik coup in November 1917, Russia withdrew from the war and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty meant that Germany had more than achieved its aims on the Eastern Front. There was the cheer of the United States having joined the Allies. Even so, Germany’s last major offensive in the West seemed to be making huge gains and the war continued to be a meat-grinder until the armistice. And to provide an especially sour end to the war, the influenza pandemic struck the country, killing an estimated 8573 New Zealanders in two months – nearly half the number of soldiers who had been killed in four years of war.

Another major focus of The Home Front is the changing political structure of New Zealand during the war. There were debates in parliament over holding elections in wartime. Bill Massey’s Reform Party won by a whisker of the popular vote in the election of December 1914 and lost many seats. This meant that, in August 1915, it was almost inevitable that  Reform and Sir Joseph Ward’s Liberal Party formed a coalition government for the duration of the war. After much bargaining, the Liberals were able secure an equal number of places in the cabinet with Reform. Massey and Ward became, in effect, a double act, making long visits to Britain and to soldiers on the Western Front and being out of the country for many months. Incidentally, Loveridge and Watson squelch the legend that these two political leaders were greeted sourly and with jeers on their last visit to the front in 1918. At the same time, having been shuffled and re-shuffled in a number of attempts to form a viable political party, the new Labour Party at last gained some traction in parliament, even if some of its leaders were opposed to New Zealand’s participation in the war, or at least opposed to conscription (Harry Holland, Paddy Webb, Peter Fraser et al.)

Apart from the obvious matter of supporting Britain, New Zealand’s ultimate war aims were poorly articulated. Early in the war, the New Zealand government was determined to take from Germany control of Samoa. This it did, with many negative results in later years. Like Australia, New Zealand also wanted to block further expansion of Japan into the Pacific – even though Japan was then an ally and had on one occasion deployed a warship to escort New Zealand troopships. Only at war’s end, when the treaties were being signed, were New Zealand diplomats shocked to discover how different New Zealand’s war aims were from Britain’s (see page 400).

The government in those years was preoccupied with organisation for war for which the Minister of Defence James Allen assumed great responsibility and had to make many hard, and sometimes unpopular, decisions. At first, there were plans for munitions to be manufactured in New Zealand; but this proved to be impracticable and New Zealand remained dependent on Britain for weapons, bullets, field-guns, shells etc. Uniforms could be made in New Zealand; but early in the war there were some scandals when tailors and textile factories produced inferior garments or outsourced what they claimed to be producing.

Most fractious were debates over conscription.

At first, New Zealand forces relied on voluntary enlistment, which meant mass recruitment in the more optimistic early years of the war. Loveridge and Watson note that those who enlisted were young. The mean age of early recruits was 25.9 years and they were “largely men with few responsibilities to hold them back and with sociological, temperamental, and potentially economic enticements to go. From the beginning, men in manual work, often casual, remained the backbone of enlistments.” (p.81) With the war dragging on and fewer voluntary recruits stepping forward, conscription loomed But it ran up against the question that the labour movement often posed – if there was to be conscription of men, why wasn’t there also conscription of wealth? Shouldn’t profiteers and the wealthy be taxed to support the war effort? In other words, why wasn’t there what socialists called equality of sacrifice. Over in Australia, two referenda had rejected conscription, which was never imposed there. In New Zealand, the labour movement was split. Some industrial workers supported conscription in the belief that it would mean “more cockies’ sons” would have to go to war. Returned soldiers were also more likely to support conscription, in the belief that without more men volunteering, they themselves might be sent to the front again. After much controversy and debate, conscription was imposed in late 1916. There was still much anti-conscription agitation, and many men who had been balloted simply failed to turn up for registration. Yet this didn’t necessarily mean a sudden lack of commitment. Even in 1917-18, when the war still seemed to be going badly, 20,000 New Zealand men enlisted voluntarily. This did not mean New Zealand was able to raise a second division, which Britain had requested, but it did mean that there was still a large cohort willing to fight.

            How the war developed had major effects on another matter emphasised by Loveridge and Watson, viz. the effects of war on New Zealand’s economy. There were many debates over the rising prices for food, especially in a country that was economically based on primary produce. There were regular rumours about profiteering speculators, some of them substantiated. Most important, there was the gradual imposition of the “commandeer” economy whereby the government intervened more than it had before, including filing with companies orders for war necessities. For farmers, there was an economic boom in 1915 because of massive government spending and Britain’s need for food. But by 1917, German unrestricted submarine warfare meant that much New Zealand produce bound for Britain didn’t reach its market and many British goods didn’t reach New Zealand. Hence those who had profited in primary produce now faced a slump. By 1916, New Zealand had already burned through a two-million pound loan from Britain, and the matter of taxation became a major controversy: “The Liberals tended to favour progressive taxation, especially on the war-related profits of wealthier farmers, which vexed Reform. Conversely, the possibility of more extensive income tax or higher customs duties, which would further raise the cost of living, made Liberals anxious about potential losses of their working class support.” (pp.245-246)

            Changing attitudes to the war, government manouevring, war aims, conscription and the economy are major themes in The Home Front, but this study also considers in detail the general ethos of New Zealand society. In one sense, this is the portrait of a very narrow-minded, even vindictive, (Pakeha) society. Certainly there were strong suspicions about people of non-British origin, especially “enemy aliens”. Hence the mania for expunging Germanic-sounding names of streets, businesses and locations and replacing them with English-sounding names.  Rowdy crowds sometimes smashed up German-owned businesses and some German nationals were interned at places like Somes Island. Croats (then commonly called “Dalmatians”) were regularly assumed to sympathise with the enemy as they were offically from part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They loudly protested their loyalty to New Zealand. Conscientious objectors were treated badly, as were those who spoke out against the war. Maori who claimed to support the enemy were dealt with harshly – hence the armed police raid on the community of Rua Kenana, who was jailed. Maori who opposed conscription were suspect, especially Waikato Maori and their most forceful spokesperson Te Puea Herangi (sometimes knwn as Princess Te Puea). Irish Catholics were under suspicion too, especially in the wake of Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916, seen by some as a treacherous blow against beleaguered Britain in wartime. This fed into the intense and rowdy sectarianism of the last two years of the war, when the demagogic preacher Howard Elliott was able to stir up resentment against Catholics and set up his Protestant Political Association, with the aim of preventing Catholics from taking public office. The PPA was, briefly, a mass movement, but it faded away rapidly after the war. Indeed there was a rapid cooling of many passions after the war.

If much of this sounds reprehensible, however, the authors make it clear that even during the war, in both the press and on public platforms, there was much reasonable push-back against extremer anti-foreigner suspicion and sectarianism. On the whole, more moderate voices prevailed.

As in Britain and elsewhere, the war did much to change the public status of women. More New Zealand women moved into factory work and out of domestic service. Yet given that New Zealand women – enfranchised since 1893 – had already been moving steadily into paid employment, the war did not alter their status as drastically as it did in other countries.

There is no question that New Zealand made a huge sacrifice in its war effort. One tenth of the population was under arms – about 100,000 men out of a total population that was only about one million. The New Zealand Division was the most-regularly reinforced on the Western Front. New Zealand forces suffered 59,483 casualties, of whom about 18,000 were killed. Despite one legend, it is not true that per capita New Zealand suffered the greatest loss of life in the First World War. The authors note (on p.412) that 1.6 % New Zealanders were killed, a little more than Britain’s 1.5%; but the score was 2.5% for Austria-Hungary; 3% for Germany; 3.5% for France; and an horrendous 25% for Serbia .

Yet despite everything, for those who remained in New Zealand, this country was an easier berth than most combatant countries. There was greater political stability than in most allied nations. There was a secure food supply despite rising prices; rationing was not imposed ; and the country was far from any battlefront. Also, although it has been denigrated by some revisionist historians, the rehabilitation of returned soldiers was largely successful.

            Among many other merits, The Home Front - New Zealand Society and the war effort, 1914-1919 is always aware of the historical era it is addressing – in other words, aware of how people saw things a century ago as opposed to how we see them now. The very last words of book acknowledge that after 1945, and with the decline of British power and changed social attitudes “One result is a modern gulf in understanding the New Zealand society of 1914-18, its commitment to defend what was, but no longer is, and its involvement in what was now sometimes deemed to be ‘someone else’s war’ ” (p.440) Reading this, one immediately thinks of smug and ahistorical books like Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s The Great Wrong War [reviewed on this blog] which basically berated our ancestors for not having exactly the same outlook and values as we have in the early 21^st century. The Home Front concerns history as it was. Not as we would like it to have been.

 

Footnote: Steven Loveridge is an expert on New Zealand’s role in the First World War. Already reviewed in this blog are his Calls to Arms (2015) on New Zealand’s organisation and preparedness for the war; and the volume of essays which he edited New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918 (2017).

 

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“NEW ZEALAND SOCIETY AT WAR 1914-1918” edited by Steven Loveridge (Victoria University Press, $40)

           

Four months ago (October 2016), I reviewed on this blog Malcolm McKinnon’s excellent and detailed history of the Great Depression years in New Zealand, The Broken Decade. I said, as I so often have, that revisionism is absolutely essential in the writing of history – especially the need to challenge popular and unexamined myths about the past, by presenting factual detail. This is what McKinnon did. I was even more willing to share this idea when I reviewed Steven Loveridge’s equally excellent Calls to Arms in mid-2015. With scrupulous adherence to detail and the factual record, Loveridge succeeded in showing that, alien though it may be to our values one century later, the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders supported participation in the First World War and thought of themselves as British. Effectively, Loveridge disproved the post-war legend that the unwilling masses were pushed into war by unscrupulous capitalists, exploiters and so forth. For New Zealand, despite tragedies, tensions and losses, the war was “popular”.

With all this in mind, I leapt at the chance to review New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918, a collection of eighteen academic essays edited by Steven Loveridge, who also wrote the extensive introduction and collaborated with other writers on three of the essays.

I knew I would be in safe hands.

Hew Strachan’s Foreword judiciously notes that in many areas, the essayists who contributed to this book are not “overthrow[ing] received wisdom”, because there has been “far too little wisdom to receive”. (p.10). In other words, many of the essayists are covering aspects of New Zealand life during the First World War that have simply not been examined methodically before. Strachan does note, however, that New Zealand’s popular memory has sometimes conflated New Zealand experience of the war with Australian experience, as in our adoption (as late as 1939) of the Australian “dawn ceremony” on Anzac Day, which has nothing to do with New Zealand soldiers’ experience at Gallipoli.  In considerably more detail Steven Loveridge’s Introduction gives an overview of New Zealand society before and during the war. He elaborates on the concept that New Zealand – recently declared a “dominion” – was “born modern”, having relative stability and basic social cohesion as well as a comparatively advanced welfare system. But during the war, there were tensions concerning Maori, the Irish-New Zealanders’ views of the war, conscription, exemptions from military service, and some protests about the lack of “equality of sacrifice”.

This worthwhile introduction over, we launch into the eighteen essays, and here I am going to adopt the unbelievably boring and cloth-eared procedure of commenting on each in turn.

John Crawford’s essay on the Defence Department has the singular merit of not patronising bureaucratic procedures from one century ago, and basically comes to the conclusion that the department was very efficient in gearing the country up for war.

James Watson’s essay on parliamentarians during the war (ironically called “The Continuation of Politics”) presents the basic argument that despite the wartime coalition of Joseph Ward’s Liberal Party and prime minister Bill Massey’s Reform Party, and despite the postponement of elections for the duration, political issues piled up and were debated fiercely in the house, especially when the matter of the conscription of married men cropped up late in the war. There was also the irony (noted on p.53) that while Ward was the deputy prime minister for the duration, he was also (and incongruously) still the official leader of the opposition.

Peter Cooke’s essay on the territorial soldiers and cadets emphasizes their “citizen soldier” status, as they became part of the social fabric of certain towns and communities.

Regrettably I found Roger Openshaw’s essay on New Zealand Education during the First World War to be unsatisfactory. Openshaw tells us about the shifts of personnel in schools; about the struggles university colleges had to maintain their international connections; and about the “patriotic” spirit that was encouraged in schools. But he appears not to have heard of private or church-run schools (he doesn’t mention them) and he speaks of the “triumph of progressive education”. I am always wary when educationists use the term “progressive”. I also note that he erroneously assumes that the University of Otago was part of the University of New Zealand (p.78).

Richard Hill’s essay on wartime policing is to be praised for its straightforward prose and clarity of expression. Hill basically argues that by the time war broke out, the New Zealand police force had evolved away from overtly coercive and quasi-military “frontier” style of policing, and adopted a more “velvet glove” community-based consensus style. However the war (and the depletion in numbers of the police force, with officers going off on military service) meant a return to some overt coercion. This was especially true in the matters of restraining militant “patriots” who rioted or wanted harmless aliens punished; and in tracking down and prosecuting those who had defaulted from military service. Their hand also fell heavily of socialists who circulated anti-war literature.

David Littlewood’s essay on Military Service Boards is an excellent piece of myth-busting. He argues (a.) that military service boards bent to the will of central government in tending to lenience when it came to men who objected to, or wished to be exempted from, military service; (b.) that boards were made up of a real cross-section of the community from farmers to trade-unionists; and (c.) that while there were controversies over whether watersiders or Catholic seminarians should serve in the military, boards either approved of exemptions or postponed appeals in such a way as to exempt applicants anyway. Littlewood is able to prove his claims statistically.

Ian F. Grant’s account of New Zealand newspapers in the war shows that newspapers largely supported the war, the only mild dissenters being the scandal-sheet Truth (which did much advocacy reporting on soldiers’ complaints) and the socialist Maoriland Worker (which wanted Capital to be conscripted). But, notes Grant, in sheer column space, the war itself did not dominate newspapers. Dependence on cable news from Britain and the failure to get accredited New Zealand correspondents to the battlefronts meant there were great delays in important news reaching New Zealand and there was also heavy censorship.

Erik Olssen’s essay on the union movement shows that the great majority of unionists supported the war, but many opposed conscription or were susceptible to calls for equality of sacrifice and the conscription of wealth. Olssen paints a picture of “moderates” having taken over most of the union movement after the defeat of the Red Feds and “Wobblies’ in 1912-13; but the militants gradually clawed their way back in, which means that by 1917-18 there was a great rise in industrial action. Olssen notes that the coalition government prevented much strife, and took the wind out of the militant’ sails, by exempting from conscription many of the categories of worker who had been most militant – such as miners, watersiders and seamen.

Steven Loveridge’s and James Watson’s essay on business interests during the war argues that under the “commandeer” economy, primary industries (dairy, meat, wool) and their service industries (shipping) and their investors profited greatly. This meant that there were great tensions in society between those who saw these enterprises as profiteering. This tension, he contends, stands behind the rise of industrial action later in the war.

Greg Ryan’s essay on sport may at first seem to be the essay dealing with the most frivolous topic, but it has a strong sociological point to make. Ryan notes the divide between those who saw sport as promoting the martial skills necessary in war; and those who complained that organised sport was a distraction and misuse of resources in wartime. Horse racing was most often criticised and condemned. In most codes (rugby, cricket etc.), the main clubs limited their activities or closed down for the duration of the war. However, schoolboy sport flourished as never before.

Peter Lineham’s contribution on the churches in wartime (called ironically “The Rising Price of Rendering Unto Caesar”) shows that on the whole, mainstream Christian churches in New Zealand stood behind the war effort, and vied with each other to show their loyalty by the number of members of each denomination who had volunteered for service. There were tensions over how many chaplains of each denomination were allocated to the fighting forces. Some more marginal churches had apocalyptic visions of the war bringing about a great revival of religion in a society that was secularising. This didn’t happen. And then, in the later part of the war, there was the rise of a virulent sectarianism with the Protestant Political Association. This is a good survey essay, but I do have one query. Did the Catholic Bishop Cleary actually lecture an Anglican group on their duties in war, as reported on p.196? He may have done so (for his times, Cleary was proto-ecumenical), but it still surprises me.

One area of New Zealand life during the war, which I had never considered before, is covered capably in Margaret Tennant’s essay on charities. She paints a picture of great and dedicated industry among those who raised funds patriotically for assistance to soldiers and for relief to refugees from the occupied areas of France and Belgium. It is amusing to read of the extent to which people had to be reminded of what it was appropriate to send soldiers overseas. It is also sobering to note that some people, even at the time, were aware that there was a certain “glamour” in contributing to charities supporting servicemen overseas, which meant that contributions to charities supporting New Zealand’s own poor and needy sometimes fell off.

I enjoyed very much David Grant’s essay on pacifists, whom he calls jocularly “peacemongers”. His is a very nuanced argument, showing that even in “militant” (and certainly in “moderate”) wings of the labour movement, previous anti-war sentiment faded away after war was declared in August 1914. Society – including unionised labour - became overwhelmingly pro-war. Grant deals with real pacifists – that is, not with those who simply opposed conscription when it was introduced in 1916, but those who opposed armed conflict of any sort. Hence, as he deals with cases of socialist and Christian and other pacifists, Grant is aware that he is dealing with a very small minority. (The same was true in the Second World War – see my review of The Prison Diary of A. C. Barrington.)

I take no issue with Brad Patterson’s essay on the Protestant Political Association – the group under Howard Elliott that, late in the war, stirred up sectarian strife with its violently anti-Catholic rhetoric. Patterson looks impartially and intelligently at the extreme claims that were stirred up and provides a good overview of a group that ran out of steam in the 1920s and deflated into extinction by about 1930. Personally, my only problem with this article is that it deals with matters in which I am already well versed from previous research. Hence it told me little that was new to me – but it is an excellent introduction to the topic.

Then there are the two essays that would now cause most unease. Graham Hucker deals with the “Woman’s Anti-German League”, as rabid a bunch of harpies as has ever been assembled in New Zealand, who spent their time vilifying people with German names, sometimes stirring men up to “anti-German” action, and generally doing little for the good of the community. Such things one can do in “patriotic” times! Steven Loveridge’s and Rolf W. Brednich’s essay on Germans in New Zealand gives a more sober view of the more notorious cases of victimisation of Germans.

We conclude with Steven Loveridge’s and Basil Keane’s account of the Maori connection with the Great War – how some iwi were willing to participate, some were opposed, and one prophet preached opposition – and Jeanine Graham’s muted account of New Zealand children during the war, mainly concerned with welfare and the growing influence of the Plunket Society.

No real historian would be so foolish as to claim that a history book is “definitive” and final. There are always new resources to be found, and new perspectives to explore. Even as I read New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918, I was aware that currently a new multi-volume official history of New Zealand in the First Wold War is being prepared under the editorship of Glyn Harper. It will include a very capacious volume on the Home Front.

Until that volume appears, however, New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918 gives as broad an account of New Zealand’s Home Front in the First World War as we yet have. 

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“CALLS TO ARMS – New Zealand Society and Commitment to the Great War” by Steven Loveridge (Victoria University Press, $NZ40)

This is probably a very bad way to begin a book review, but I am going to begin it this way anyway.

For me, it is a delight to read a new book, which endorses and confirms something I have long believed.

From the perspective of 2015, we all know (or think we know) that the First World War was bloody, murderous, wasteful of human life, waged on all sides for very mixed motives and, in short, what 1066 and All That would call “a Bad Thing”. The First World War has virtually become the paradigm of the pointless war, and it is the war to which novelists and film-makers still resort when they want to connect the words “futility” and “war”.

But out of this knowledge (or what we think is knowledge) there has grown a set of assumptions, which simply do not hold up to real historical scrutiny. It is assumed that no general population in any belligerent nation could have possibly wished to enter into such a war, and that therefore populations must have been coerced and propagandised by powerful, self-interested political forces into participating. It is further assumed that the post-war pacifist and anti-war representations of the war (from All Quiet on the Western Front onwards) represent what the mass of people were really thinking during the war. Emphasis is laid on those war poets who conveyed the “pity of war”, and on Christian or socialist or humanitarian pacifists, as if their views mirrored those of society at large. So what amounts to a great conspiracy theory has developed. Hapless and unsuspecting soldier boys are pushed off to war by cunning and manipulative politicians. Mr Fat and capitalist war profiteers rub their hands in glee as the lads get killed. And all this against the real wishes of the population.

Now let’s clearly separate a couple of concepts here. Looking back on the war from a century later, it is perfectly valid for us to say that it was wasteful, futile and so forth. It is perfectly understandable that we will laud those pacifists whose views we now endorse. But it is simply unhistorical to assume that the mass of society in any belligerent country was not in favour of the war. Let’s remember that people whom we admire in history are often people who went against what were once massively popular beliefs and assumptions, and therefore against what the mass of society thought. That, after all, is why we often think of them as heroes. Let’s also remember that to see populations as only being coerced and propagandised into war is to rob those populations of what is now commonly called “agency”. So roll on those conspiracy theories, which see people in the past as mere dupes for not believing what we believe.

Steven Loveridge’s admirable Calls to Arms – New Zealand Society and Commitment to the Great War is a systematic study of what Loveridge (borrowing a phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald) often calls the “sentimental equipment” of New Zealanders before and during the First World War. Lamenting the lack of real social histories of New Zealand one hundred years ago, Loveridge’s Introduction politely rejects the notion that New Zealanders were manipulated into support for the war by Machiavellian politicians, as was suggested by Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s profoundly silly and unbalanced book The Great Wrong War [look it up on the index at right]. Rather, says Loveridge, New Zealanders’ general support for the war grew from widespread attitudes and values that were well-entrenched in New Zealand society before a shot was fired. Inter alia, Loveridge’s Introduction notes that Military Boards, which accepted or rejected men’s petitions not to go to war, were run by representatives of local communities, not by the nation’s central government. They very much reflected popular opinion. Likewise, there were three times as many volunteers as conscripts in New Zealand’s armed forces, even after conscription was introduced in 1916. Were they all duped, deceived and propagandised into going? If we assume this, we of course assume that they were infinitely stupider than we are.

In the six chapters that follow, Loveridge examines six levels of New Zealand’s commitment to the war.

First, he refutes the “nationalist” interpretation of the war that has been overplayed by some historians. Unpalatable though it may seem to us now, most New Zealanders in 1914 still thought of themselves as British. They did not have to be persuaded into supporting Britain’s war. A very large part of the non-Maori population then was British by birth, and those who were not were either the children or grandchildren of British immigrants. Britain was still “Home” for many. Trade ties and cultural ties with Britain were dominant. There was still a widespread desire for an “imperial parliament” in London that would represent all the colonies and dominions of the British Empire. Of course there was the widespread belief among New Zealanders that they were more egalitarian than those snooty, class-bound “homeys”; and that New Zealand was what James Belich has called a “Better Britain”. This has often been mistaken for an emergent nationalism (see any work by the late Keith Sinclair for this attitude). This essentially British self-identification was not universal, just as approval of the war was not universal. There were indeed members of the labour movement, Maori separatists, pacifists, Irish nationalists and others who were not fully committed to the war. But the dominant fact is that they were a very small minority in comparison with the mass of the population, no matter how much we may now endorse their attitudes. As for one of the major myths of the war – the Gallipoli myth – Loveridge remarks:“… the conception of the First World War as New Zealand’s national ‘coming of age’ story, marking a distinct break from pre-war habits and arrangements, has serious limitations. To begin with, it is a rerun of earlier ideas of awakening national consciousness…” (p.65). He goes on to note similar claims made for Dominion Day, the 1905 All Blacks tour of Britain, participation in the Boer War, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee etc. New Zealand did not suddenly become an independent nation in outlook because of the First World War any more than it became divorced from overwhelmingly British sentiment.

Second, Loveridge does not accept the view that anti-“alien” thought, and specifically wartime anti-German thought, was a creation of powerful propagandists during the war. There was a long-standing tradition, encouraged by “biological racism”, of New Zealanders framing anyone who was “non-British” as alien. Most often these common racist attitudes were directed against Asians and particularly Chinese, but even Australians could be judged as “non-British” when they behaved in ways that New Zealanders saw as loutish. Apparently, according to popular New Zealand mythology, Australians were not as “British” as New Zealanders were. At certain times, there had been the tendency to see Germans in a favourable light, as the North European, Saxon, Protestant cousins of the English, industrious and hard-working unlike those barbarous Southern European Catholics. But well before the First World War, New Zealanders were already seeing Germans in a more negative light as Germany became a trade rival and naval rival to Mother England. Apart from the fact of genuine German atrocities during the war (the ones that Eldred-Grigg pretends didn’t happen), it was no “top-down” manufacturing of stereotypes that led to anti-German feeling in New Zealand between 1914 and 1918. Loveridge notes:

“One of the foremost attributes of wartime constructions of Germans is the tendency to present the subject in monolithic terms. Total war had broken out in an age when the notion of ‘racial character’ was a conventional idea. Thus the war was frequently framed as one against a people, race or nation – rather than a regime, army or ideology. Whilst Kaiser and Prussian militarism became focal points of condemnation, and were sometimes tagged as being at the heart of German bellicosity, there was often little effort made to distinguish them from wider German civilisation.” (pp. 86-87)

Loveridge also gives interesting examples of the forces of authority (MPs, police etc.) trying to restrain popular outbursts of anti-German hysteria, such as the smashing of the windows of shops owned by people with German names. Again, we deplore this sort of racism, but it is ahistorical to pretend that it was not the popular attitude, or that it was imposed from above.

Third, Loveridge considers New Zealand’s military ethos. Well before 1914, there was already the attitude that a hardy soldiery represented the best qualities of New Zealand manhood. Such images were not manufactured from above during the First World War. At least since the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, there had developed the view that the “colonial” soldier was hardier and more enduring and more self-reliant and athletic than the British “Home” variety. There were indeed some anti-militarist views aired when New Zealand’s Defence Forces were professionalised in 1909, but then anti-militarists were often those who preferred the idea of a trained and armed civilian militia – they were not necessarily anti-military. And all the while, quasi-military groupings (such as the Boy Scouts), military parades and displays and “sham fights” were very popular. Despite socialists calls for equality of sacrifice and the “conscription of wealth” as well as the conscription of men, the inauguration of conscription in 1916 was a popular measure.

Fourth, the persecution of “slackers” and “shirkers” during the First World War, cruel as we now judge it, was in line with general popular sentiment. Well before the war, there were pseudo-scientific fears about “racial degeneracy” advancing as New Zealand became more urbanised and fewer New Zealanders were in any sense “pioneers”. (By 1911, New Zealand’s town population for the first time exceeded its rural population.) Young men who were not athletic or not of a military cast of mind were easily regarded as lacking the correct racial credentials. The burgeoning (and ultimately sinister) eugenics movement played a big part in promoting such ideas. And (embarrassing though it may seem to some feminists now), so did first-wave feminism, which often endorsed the idea of breeding healthy and war-fit young men. Be it noted that this discourse began long before the First World War and continued long after the war was over in the ethos of Health Camps and the quasi-military nurturing of young children by timetabled feeding a la Truby King. We are appalled by the mistreatment of Conscientious Objectors during the First World War, which Loveridge duly recounts in detail, and we are outraged by the thought of women following non-combatant young men around and forcing white feathers upon them. We are heartened to learn (as Loveridge again documents) that even at the time many people were disgusted by such actions. Even so, as Loveridge’s extensive documentation shows: “harsh sentiments towards objectors were by no means an exceptional feature of the New Zealand government – again, a historiographical focus upon top-down manipulation masks more pervasive forces and patterns”. (p.166) To put it crudely, simply (and unpalatably), most New Zealanders fully approved of harsh treatment for COs and the vilification of “slackers”.

Fifth, Loveridge argues that it was not the First World War that changed the status of New Zealand women; and also that women were as fully complicit in pro-war sentiment as men were. First-wave feminism (gaining the suffrage; gaining first entry into universities and the professions) was in full swing well before the First World War. A detailed statistical survey, quoted by Loveridge, shows that the proportion of women in the workforce did not suddenly grow during the war, despite the absence on overseas war service of so many working men. Women’s participation in the workforce increased gradually during the war and as a continuum with the level of increase both before and after the war. More to the point, even first-wave feminists implicitly accepted the notion of women as being especially equipped for motherhood, as purifiers of the social order, and as mothers of healthy war-ready young men. Women were often to the fore in pro-conscription agitation, in campaigning for the early closing of pubs as an “economy” measure and in harassing “shirkers”. It took a zealous New Zealand woman to found the foreigner-harassing Anti-German League. Another woman-related matter is the way propaganda often presented an idealised image of mothers encouraging young men to go off to war, and being especially solicitous of their wellbeing. Yet, as Loveridge argues, this image too was very much in line with popular sentiment. It was not created by cynical propagandists. After all, the overwhelming majority of actively-serving soldiers were single young men for whom a mother was still the single most important woman in life.

Finally, Loveridge considers the cult of grief – the way war was connected with the religious ideas of duty, service and sacrifice. Again, these ideas were already in the mainstream of New Zealand’s “sentimental equipment” – they were not invented by official wartime publicity. The honouring of wartime duty, service and sacrifice is seen in the 452 popularly and publicly-funded war memorials that were erected in New Zealand after the war was over. Sometimes there were local controversies over what form these memorials should take. Should there, for example, be a “utilitarian” memorial bridge or public building rather than an “ornamental” memorial cenotaph or monument around which mourners could gather on ANZAC Day? In the great majority of cases, local communities chose the latter option. The desire to have a dedicated focus for genuine grief was widespread. Loveridge notes later attempts to pretend that these popular memorials were imposed from above (quoting a gem of dollar-book Freudian smugness, sourced to Chris Maclean and Jock Phillips’ 1990 book The Sorrow and the Pride: New Zealand War Memorials). Writes Loveridge:

“Grand manipulation has been… nominated in explaining the shape these ornamental memorials took and the political, and apparently ‘highly phallic’, character of these monuments has been deconstructed. For instance it has been claimed that New Zealand’s war memorials were ‘deliberate and often controversial acts of propaganda and social control’ erected by certain ‘especially influential’ social groups who acted ‘with definite ideological purposes in mind’. ” (p.201)

Again, what amounts to a conspiracy theory has been imposed on history, and the real popular attitudes of the time have been either patronised or ignored.

As you will have deduced from all of the foregoing, I approve thoroughly of Steven Loveridge’s well-argued attempt to set the historical record straight. I emphasise that in showing how New Zealanders, men and women, by and large thought of themselves as British, willingly entered into the First World War, approved of coercive actions against German nationals, approved of hostility towards conscientious objectors and “slackers”, and shared a sense of war as duty and sacrifice – Loveridge is in no way arguing that these are values we should now be prepared to support. He is saying that these attitudes are the historical reality of 1914-18. We should not allow our knowledge of this historical reality to be buried under the Oh! What a Lovely War! or Blackadder Goes Forth versions of the First World War, which, as Loveridge says in his introduction, have become the most commonly accepted versions of the war to those who do not know what history is. As he says eloquently of his book in his Conclusion:

“This interpretation of New Zealand society at war straddles the line between academic exercise and cultural commentary. The prevailing contemporary sense of the conflict seems firmly wedded to a mythology of the war grounded in futility, horror, pity and regret. It could fairly be said that this mythology can be traced to events and emotions at the time, that it captures some fundamental realities of the War/wars, and that it often serves the benign purpose of spurring contemplation of the human costs of conflict. An unfortunate consequence of this mythology, however, is that historical realities are distorted and significant context is cropped. In particular, the mythology diminishes our recognition and comprehension of the hope, idealism, resolve and fury New Zealand society poured into its war effort. Indeed many raised within the tradition of the Great War as tragic poetry may be shocked at the assertion that there was a prevalent commitment to the war and that this support can be broadly understood as indicative of conventional social values and attitudes – rather than being pathologised as ‘jingoism’, ‘hysteria’ or grand manipulation.” (p.247)

I’m so glad somebody has said all this.