They did a deal with Scully, and smuggled him out of the country. But Judd got wind of this, and spilled the story through Brookfield, in the New South Wales Parliament. The Government was caught flat-footed, and agreed to the Opposition demand for an inquiry, but limited its terms to the allegations against the police. They arranged for Scully to be brought back from San Francisco to Sydney.

Meanwhile, the police commissioned Louis Goldstein to find out what his brother was up to. Louis reported that Davis, too, had “sung” to Judd. So Detective Pauling went to work on Davis and, at the last minute, convinced him that he would have to recant. The impression one gets of Davis Goldstein is that he was afraid of the police, and it is likely that he was threatened with a charge of perjury if he did not repudiate his confession. However this may have been, the police pressure was successful. Before the Street Commission, Davis Goldstein repudiated every part of his confession, and swore that he had concocted it out of malice against the detectives and a desire for revenge. Similarly with Scully -- just how and when the detectives prevailed upon him on his return from San Francisco is unknown, but they succeeded. He did not repudiate his confession completely but he qualified it almost out of existence.

Mr Justice Street found himself quite unable to believe that the police would frame a case -- or even that they would embroider a good case to make it better. He ruled out completely the confessions of Scully and Davis Goldstein, and side-stepped all the other evidence of police corruption that the defence had so painstakingly amassed. The frame stood. Of the Twelve, three, perhaps four, had been involved in arson or preparations for arson (although the Crown case against the Twelve was largely faked and bore little resemblance to anything that these three or four had done); the other eight or nine had certainly not been involved and probably had no knowledge of what their fellow-workers had been planning and doing. But all twelve remained in gaol.

There is little more to tell. Davis Goldstein had left Australia before the Ewing Commission; after it, Louis Goldstein dropped quietly (and one imagines gratefully) out of sight. Harry Scully resisted further police pressure to leave the country, and finally succeeded in finding another job as a chemist; he died of meningitis two months before Charlie Reeve was freed. Henry Boote lived a long and honourable life as poet, labour journalist and radical propagandist; he died some years after the Second World War.

The dogmas which had hobbled Ernie Judd as a leader of the Socialist Labor Party, in the days before he was swept up in the great mass campaigns for the One Big Union and the Release of the Twelve, returned in even greater strength; he ended his days as a cantankerous stump orator, preaching the truths of De Leonism to a dwindling handful of the converted. Tom Mutch late in life became interested in history and genealogy; unfortunately, his papers in the Mitchell Library contain few reminders of the days when his world was wide. Jock Garden became a leading propagandist for Jack Lang in the hectic years of the depression and the "Lang Plan"; later, he was discreditably involved (when acting as secretary to a Federal Labor Minister) in a scandal involving timber leases in New Guinea. Tom Barker worked for some time for various Soviet agencies; eventually he settled in London. After World War II he became a Labour councillor in the borough of St Pancras (and, aged 77, still was at the time of writing). He was the only Lord Mayor to refuse to wear the mayoral robes, and on one occasion scandalised the Labor Party by flying the Red Flag over the St Pancras Town Hall. On the morning of March 22, 1921, while King and Reeve were still in gaol, Jack Brookfield stepped off the Broken Hill express at Riverton, where the train had stopped for breakfast. A Russian named Tomayev ran amok on the platform and fired off forty-one shots from a revolver, scattering the crowd. Brookfield and a police constable rushed Tomayev; Brookfield got two bullets in the stomach, and died that evening in Adelaide hospital. Tomayev later said -- probably falsely -- that he had been paid Ј100 to kill Brookfield. The poet Mary Gilmore wrote:

Tell it abroad, tell it abroad, Tell it by chapel and steeple, How, in the height of his manly prime, Brookfield died for the people.

Of the Twelve, most had had their fill of notoriety, and were happy to abandon public life. They once more became workers, and probably active unionists, but they left no further mark on the history of Australian labour. There were three exceptions. A Communist Party was formed in Australia in October 1920, three months after the first ten of the IWW men were freed. Jock Garden was a leading member. The Communist International at the time was seeking to draw the syndicalist revolutionaries of the IWW into its ranks. Tom Glynn and J.B. King became Communists, and Glynn the first editor of the party's paper. But the ideological differences were too great; a year later, Glynn and King broke with the Communists, formed the Industrial Union Propaganda League, and began to republish Direct Action. A temporary rapprochement followed a “unity conference” at which the Communists agreed to recognise the IUPL as the Australian section of the Red International of Labor Unions, a Comintern affiliate. But this did not last either, and Glynn and King finally broke with the Communist Party in March 1922. Their syndicalist venture did not prosper. King worked for a time in Russia, but returned disillusioned with the failure of the Bolsheviks to realise their earlier slogan of "industry to the toilers who work therein".

Donald Grant, too, threw himself into revolutionary politics. Three weeks after his release from gaol, he was back on the Sydney Domain, preaching with all his old fire that he "hoped before long to establish a big organisation of rebels in the country, an organisation that would revolutionise the present social system”. He said Mr Justice Pring, Mr Lamb and others were true to their class but the workers were not. ... “A class war would have to be fought the world over, and it would have to be fought to the bitter end, even if the streets of the cities of the world were drenched with the blood of the workers".

He continued to agitate for the revolution for some years, but finally he made his peace with parliamentary politics, and became a Labor Senator. The last of the Twelve, Donald Grant, at the time of writing was living in quiet retirement in Sydney. There was still the clear blue gaze into the future, the Scots burr and the fiery turn of phrase, the pride of bearing -- that made him a hero of his time, but his voice was no longer raised.

What made the men who played their parts in these extraordinary events -- the police and the Wobblies -- act as they did?

It is almost impossible to dig through a pile of police documents to the minds of the individual men behind them. Policemen are trained to report in formal officialese, and there is little in the police reports of anything else. In the IWW files, those reports which concerned political activities showed little sense of discrimination about the finer distinctions of political ideas and organisations. There were only the broad divisions -- the conservatives, who were beyond observation and above suspicion, for it was only change which was suspicious; the Labor Party, whose public propagandist activities sometimes came under police survey and some of whose members might fall into the category of “doubtfuls”; and the radicals and revolutionaries, who were one big bundle of sinister and dangerous elements who must be watched. The reports lacked human understanding, they were not concerned with situations or motives, but with acts.

None had the slightest touch of humour; they were all deadpan.[8] What then does emerge from these files? A conservatism that was quick to suspect radical agitation and anti-“patriotism”, and to associate these with moral turpitude and crime. A moralism that was quick to denounce criminality in conventionally loaded phrases. It is no wonder that the police were alarmed and affronted by the IWW.

How did this conservatism and moralism get along with the corruption and malpractice which undoubtedly existed in the force? Once again, there are no direct clues. One must assume that many members of the force applied a double standard -- that they thought of themselves not only as law-enforcers for the community at large, but as law-makers for themselves. For even when they were clearly in the wrong they showed no sign of recognising it. And, with a strong sense of solidarity, when one was accused his fellows covered up.

Perhaps this came from a sense of embattlement, of the law-enforcers in continuous war with those who break the law. War is a dirty business: the opponent respects no rules; so he must be fought with his own weapons. If he is guilty, then he must pay -- even if his guilt cannot be established by untainted evidence. And if a crime has been committed, but no guilt can be established, then someone must pay. There is a potential criminal for every crime. The preservation of society demands no less. The police are forced by their situation to do wrong that right may come.

Nevertheless, to frame a complicated case demands careful thought and meticulous planning. This is not something that can be done every day -- it must be kept for important occasions, as was the trial of the IWW Twelve. Here personal distaste and political environment combined to encourage the police to act. The hope of personal gain was probably not a major motive; rather this was seen as a job that, in the situation, had to be done.

Between the police force and those who supervised and directed their work in the Government and those who judged it from the bench, there was a complex relation. It was the job of the police to do what they had to do and then conceal it; it was the job of their political and judicial superiors to pretend that this was not done. But this was an unacknowledged agreement. Law enforcement is based on violence; it almost necessarily involves malpractice; and many of those who take part in it are touched by corruption. Yet none of this can be admitted by Government or Bench, because to do so would be to undermine an institution on which the power of judges and politicians depends.

Between the police and the Wobblies, there was that strange love-hate relationship of which Dostoyevsky wrote. They were in such close contact, they knew one another so well, each side was preoccupied with the other's plans and motives and actions: this very intimacy made hate impossible. Yet they started from opposite premises, they served different gods. And so there was a nexus between them which could not be dissolved, for there is nothing more central to thought and emotion than one's closest enemies. Each man destroys those whom he loves -- and loves those whom he must destroy.

What of the Wobblies? Like the police, they were their own law-makers, but from more clearly defined premises. For the revolutionary, society is something that is external to him, operating against him in an oppressive and exploitative way. The law has no sanctity in its own right; it is not divinely ordained, and anything that is made by man may be unmade. Yet most revolutionaries live within the law -- perhaps because they fear the personal consequences; perhaps because they accept that even an unjust society is better that no society at all, and that change must come by persuasion rather than personal defiance.

But some do not, and among these were the Wobblies. They made contempt for the law a way of life; for them, this kind of direct action was the essence of revolutionary behaviour. Yet it was still a long step from striking, or speaking from a street corner soapbox or selling newspapers in defiance of the law, to the physical destruction of property or life.

What makes a man a nihilist? -- for there was a handful of nihilists in Australia. Anger, impatience, lack of faith -- whatever it is, it bites deep into men's souls, and leads them to destroy the symbols of injustice they see around them, believing that by destroying the symbols they are destroying injustice itself.

Yet they were not ordinary criminals. They destroyed not for themselves but for all men, not for greed or spite but for a dream. That is why men came to their defence -- even men who knew that they were wrong -- for beneath their error and their destruction were human hearts. The tragedy of the Australian nihilists was that what they finally destroyed was themselves and the cause they sought to advance.

The Wobblies harboured this element of nihilism because they were a loosely disciplined organisation with an undeveloped ideology, because they repudiated the law in theory and could not see why it should be respected in practice, because the syndicalist Utopia they preached had much in common with anarchism, and because the “propaganda of the deed” has always been one part of anarchism.

The Wobblies had been born of violence -- the naked, brutal violence of the war of the American classes. They had lived under the torment of injustice and bitter hate. And a few of them had come to live by violence and hate. But their movement was much more than this, and although it was as abhorrent to respectable trade union leaders and Labor politicians as to employers and conservatives, it was enormously attractive to many. Its members had a courage, a dedication, and a humour that were rare in the labour movement. Its promise of a future in which working men ended their exploitation and alienation by taking to themselves the industries they worked, and deciding among themselves the distribution of their product, gave hope to many minds and hearts. So that when entrenched conservatism and the whole power of the State sought to crush this movement by assimilating it to the actions and plans of its tiny nihilist minority, there were tens of thousands who came to its defence. Conservatism, by over-reaching itself, succeeded in doing what nihilism was unable to do -- to convert criminality into the class war; for what radical spirit could resist the cry from the depths of a movement whose members sang as if they meant it:

When the Union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the Union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might? Is there anything left for us but to organise and fight? For the Union makes us strong.

They have taken untold millions that have never toiled to earn But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn, We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the Union makes us strong.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold, We can bring to birth the new world from the ashes of the old, For the Union makes us strong.

Notes:

1. The ingredients were common enough in the bush: phosphorus was used for poisoning rabbits, and carbon bi-sulphide in tanning hides. As evidence that the tactic of incendiarism was not unknown in the bush, compare this couplet from a bushranger ballad of the 1880s: "If poor Dan Morgan is cold in the clay, He has two friends called Bryant and May"; and this description of "the present social system of pastoral Australia", from Joseph Furphy's Rigby's Romance: "a patriarchal despotism, tempered by Bryant and May".

2. There is some-though not very satisfactory-evidence for this. Demanding an inquiry in Parliament in July 1918, T.D. Mulch said: “The trials were hurried on; and I ask that the Royal Commission shall ... ferret out the telegrams which passed between the State Crown Law Department and the Federal Attorney-General's Department with a view to bringing on these trials at an earlier period than would otherwise be the case. ... we want produced the telegram that Mr Hughes sent, and the telegram which, I understand, the Attorney-General sent.” The Attorney-General denied any such exchange. Mutch retorted: “I have it on the authority of a man who is in a public office. ... I am informed that telegrams did pass between Sydney and Melbourne.”

And Davis Goldstein, in his statutory declaration of July 18, 1918, said that, when he had expressed doubts about the wisdom of the projected raid on the IWW headquarters on September 23, 1916, “Turbet ... replied that instructions, coupled with requests from Melbourne, were to the effect that the raid was to take place immediately and that "something must be done".

I did not discover any such exchanges or instructions in the New South Wales files I examined; this, however, does not prove conclusively that no exchanges took place. Goldstein denied that Turbet had told him about any instructions coming from the Commonwealth Government; however Mr Boyce, Goldstein's counsel, recalled that at one conference -- probably on September 25 -- Goldstein had complained “that the police bad acted too quickly; that if they could have waited a little longer they would have bagged the lot”.

The Prime Minister's interest might perhaps be established by an entry in Detective Leary's diary for October 1: “Interviewing the Prime Minister who was desirous of communicating with the Inspector-General of Police”. Leary said in evidence that his visit to the Prime Minister had nothing to do with the IWW case -- but it was recorded in his notebook in the middle of the pages dealing with the case.

3. The fact that the first mention of the name “Andrew” seems to have appeared in some of the detectives' diaries a couple of days before this does not necessarily invalidate the suggestion -- all the detectives agreed that they often wrote up their diaries days after the event. On the other hand, “Andrew” was first mentioned in Fergusson's diary on this day.

4. Besant was suspected of participation in the forgeries. Perhaps he was picked up because the police had been unable to make this stick.

5. This could have been done by Davis Goldstein, Tom Pope, or one of the police.

6. This could have been done by Tom Pope or one of the police. (I should make it clear that I am not accusing Pope of framing Teen or Fagin; I am merely stating that, on the face of the evidence, it was a possibility which bore investigation. To the contrary, Pope's demeanour before Mr Justice Street was that of a genuine members of the IWW, and it was he who took responsibility for supplying the prisoners with their meals while they were awaiting trial.)

7. After this was written, I learned from Messrs W. Sutton and J. Harris of the Queensland branch of the Labor History Society that Bill Beatty was also alive and living in Brisbane. Messrs Sutton and Harris recorded Bill Beatty's reminiscences; these appear in Labour History, November 1967, but add little to this record.

8. Almost the only exception was a side comment in Detective Leary's notebook, dated October 9, 1916: “Good stuff for a novel.”

Страницы: 1, 2