Papers on Parliament No. 61
May 2014
Marilyn Lake "Oh, to Be in Boston Now That Federation’s Here"
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The dynamics of desire
This paper is about the strong ties—and dynamics
of desire—that joined progressive Australians and Americans at the end of the
nineteenth and into the beginning of the twentieth century. They are fresh on
my mind after recent travels on the trail of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture
that took me to the breathtaking ‘Falling Water’ in Pennsylvania, as well as
his home and studio in Chicago, where it is believed Marion Mahony and Walter
Burley Griffin, the designers of the city of Canberra, first met. It was for
good reason Andrew Inglis Clark sent his son Conway to study architecture in
the United States; architects were making their modernist mark in Chicago, New
York and Boston—and skyscrapers were soaring.
From Boston, Conway wrote to tell his father
that he had attended a series of lectures presented by the Boston Architectural
Club on ‘Modern Office Buildings’. In 1905 he worked on a Court House
Competition in Chicago and the Hancock building in Boston, ‘built entirely on
the steel frame system’ as he noted proudly.[1] Fittingly,
Conway would return to the new Commonwealth of Australia—as Dave Headon has
found—to work as secretary to the panel that judged the entries in the design
competition for the national capital, that Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin
would win with their modernist vision matching the ‘bold radical steps in
politics and economics’ that they, along with other progressive Americans,
admired in the new nation.[2]
In 1901, the year of the founding of the
Commonwealth of Australia, whose Constitution he helped draft, Andrew Inglis
Clark, republican and nationalist, wrote to his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr, who had just returned from a visit to London (and to his aristocratic
mistress) of how he longed to be in Boston. Holmes’ correspondence at the same
time detailed his longing to be with his lover across the Atlantic: ‘I am nigh
insane with the question of coming to England’.[3] Clark wrote
to Holmes about his desire to cross the Pacific:
I suppose that you had a good time in
England. I often wish that Australia was as near to California as Massachusetts
is to England. I should then see Boston every three or four years, and would
probably be preparing now for a journey there early next year. But I must bow
to the geographical configuration of the earth and all its consequences and
wait in patience until my time to cross the Pacific Ocean again arrives.[4]
This rich and extensive correspondence, held in
the Harvard Law School Library, illuminates different kinds of longing, desire,
yearning, fantasy and the mix of personal and political that informs these
states.[5] Diminutive Clark was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the
colony of Tasmania, described by Alfred Deakin as ‘[s]mall, spare, nervous,
active, jealous and suspicious in disposition, and somewhat awkward in manner
and ungraceful in speech, he was nevertheless a sound lawyer, keen, logical and
acute’.[6] Holmes was strikingly tall and handsome, a thrice-wounded hero of
the Civil War, former Professor in Law at Harvard and Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of Massachusetts, soon to be appointed to the United States
Supreme Court.
As historian John Reynolds pointed out many
decades ago, and John Williams more recently, in Makers of Miracles,
Clark was a devoted admirer of the United States and its republican political
history and legal culture.[7] ‘It was hero worship as well as admiration of intellect’, wrote
Reynolds in a letter to Holmes’ biographer, Mark DeWolfe Howe, in 1947, a
letter also to be found in the Holmes papers.[8] Williams
quoted Patrick Glynn as noting of Clark at the time of federation: ‘He feels
the significance of the sense of independence, and the feeling, in the case of
the American citizen, that his nationality has been created or won, not
acquired’.[9] But as another of Clark’s heroes, George Higinbotham, reminded
Clark in 1891, Australian colonists were not yet, it seemed, ‘prepared to
assume the burden of independence’.[10]
Still some liberal colonists nevertheless liked
to fantasise the possibility and Clark was more dedicated to the cause than
most.[11] Like Alfred Deakin, and H.B. Higgins after him, Clark found
intellectual sustenance and stimulation in the United States example of
independence as well as in manly American writings, fiction and non-fiction.[12] Clark was a particular admirer of Holmes’ classic text The
Common Law—it supplied ‘an annual course of instruction in first
principles’ and was the basis of lectures to law students in Tasmania.[13]
Holmes also recommended contemporary American
sociological works to Clark, in particular the publications of Lester Ward and
E.A. Ross’ Social Controls, ‘a mighty sharp little popular work’.[14] Ross was the originator of the theory of ‘race suicide’ and was
sacked by Stanford University because of his anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese
views.[15] Ward was a Progressive and founder of the discipline of sociology,
believing that its primary function was to improve society. The subject of
Ward’s most important book, Dynamic Sociology (1883) was education. In
1903, he published Pure Sociology: Holmes recommended ‘all that he
writes’ to Clark.[16]
In 1897, on his second visit to the United
States, Clark carried with him a letter of introduction, designed for new
acquaintances, from the American consul general in Sydney recommending Clark as
‘a great admirer of the splendid manhood of our dear America’.[17] Manhood was a key value. To be independent was to realise the full
potential of manhood; to live life as a ‘dependent’ was to remain in a
compromised, feminine, condition. When the Chinese imperial government wished
to put the Australian colonists in their place, its representatives routinely
referred to the colonies, correctly, as ‘dependencies of the British Crown’.[18] To which studied slight, nationalist liberals such as Deakin,
Higinbotham and Clark retorted that they were, to the contrary, ‘self-governing
communities’, with a recognised right to run their own affairs.
The republic of the United States was
conceptualised as an expression of masculine power: embodying strength,
virility, ruggedness, and the proven capacity for complete self-government. It
called up masculine desire. When Clark’s favourite English historian, the
leading Anglo-Saxonist, and Regius Professor at Oxford, E.A. Freeman, visited
the United States, in the early 1880s, and addressed the graduate seminar at
Johns Hopkins, whose library featured his famous motto on its walls—‘History is
past politics and politics are present history’—he expressed his admiration for
the New World republic in a series of lectures and essays that cast Washington
as ‘the expander of England’ and Anglo-Saxonism as a story of progress from
‘Old England [the Teutonic forests of Germany] to Middle England [England
itself] to New England [Boston]’.[19]
Freeman was one of the most cited authorities in
the Australian constitutional debates—and often quoted by heart. His writings
were especially influential in the New World societies of Australia and
America, where audiences were receptive to his coupling of democracy and race,
his elucidation of the Anglo-Saxon origins of self-government and insistence
that racial exclusion was the precondition of a self-governing democracy.
Anglo-Saxonism was not a species of racial science, but a theory of history, a
history of linguistic and political continuity and Clark, like many other
liberals, including Irish Patrick Glynn and Jewish Isaac Isaacs, was an ardent
subscriber. Clark’s copies of Freeman’s books were donated to the University of
Tasmania Library—as David Mitchell’s copies of Freeman were among the founding
collection of the Mitchell Library in Sydney.
Anglo-Saxonism represented an alternative to,
not a synonym for, Britishness as a founding identity.[20]Anglo-Saxonism
encouraged, rather, a strong identification with the republic of the United
States. ‘One of the pleasing results of the war between the United States and
Spain’, wrote naval officer George Dewey to Clark in 1898, ‘is the
strengthening of the bonds that bind the Anglo-Saxon peoples’.[21] Holmes wrote similarly to his ‘dear Hibernia’: ‘I am glad that this
war should draw our countries nearer together ... if there is to be a world row
then I hope with all my heart that we should back you and you us—to bring out
the English-speaking race on top’.[22]
Paul Kramer has documented the depth of this
sentiment of Anglo-Saxon solidarity in his book The Blood of Government.[23] Yet, asked another of Clark’s correspondents, Charles Stockton,
what would become of the Malays who predominated in the Philippines? ‘We cannot
make them Anglo-Saxons’.[24] Like other not-white peoples, they would be governed by others. For
the United States it was a ‘novel ... colonial experiment’.[25] White men were deemed not just especially endowed with a genius for
self-government, but also with the special attributes required to govern
others.
In the United States, especially in New England,
historian E.A. Freeman found—so he thought—the fullest expression of
Anglo-Saxon democracy, self-government and liberty. Freeman also had occasion
to deplore, in letters home, the political condition of Canada, that ‘poor
dependent land on the other side’: ‘Fancy being a province and having governors
sent, when it might be a state and choose its own’.[26] This was a
sentiment with which Clark would have agreed.
New England, on the other hand, especially its
capital, Boston, and its pre-eminent university, Harvard, were magnets for
liberals and republican-sympathisers from England and the Australian colonies:
Goldwin Smith, James Bryce whose tome The American Commonwealth would
inspire the name of the Australian Commonwealth, Charles Pearson, Alfred
Deakin, Andrew Clark, and H.B. Higgins among them. All of them would have
concurred with Deakin’s observation that Boston was a fine and remarkable city
of ‘many historic memories’. These were the shared memories of nineteenth-century
liberal democrats. Deakin had been mentored at the University of Melbourne by
Charles Pearson, former lecturer in History at King’s College, London and
Cambridge, who had journeyed to Boston from England in the late 1860s.
One of a number of Oxford-educated liberals who
travelled to the US, in part, to express solidarity with the cause of the Union
in the Civil War, Pearson recalled:
My ten days in Boston will always remain in
my memory as among the pleasantest incidents of my life. Acland had told me
that the society he met in Boston could not, he thought, be surpassed anywhere
in the world, and I had listened incredulously; but I am bound to say I came
over to his opinion.
When I was there, Ticknor, Longfellow,
Agassiz, Lowell, Wendell Holmes, Charles Norton, Wendell Phillips, Bowen Fields
and Shattuck were among the ordinary society of Boston and Cambridge; and
Emerson was a frequent visitor.[27]
Emerson, the prophet of American literary
independence, died in 1882. Pearson wrote a review of his work, while Deakin
undertook a pilgrimage to the site of his grave in Concord in 1885.
Pearson would use his observations of
developments in the United States, gleaned on two separate visits—of white men
being ‘cramped for land’ and the global spread of Chinese migration—in his
future magnum opus, National Life and Character: A Forecast, which
Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston and Theodore Roosevelt and his circle in
Washington read and exclaimed over in the year of its publication, 1893.
Anglo-Saxonism and America
Clark first visited the United States in 1890.
He initially sought a letter of introduction to Holmes from his good friend,
the Unitarian preacher, Moncure Conway, but Conway regretted that he didn’t
know Holmes Junior, only his father, the celebrated poet, Wendell Holmes
Senior.[28] Clark then asked Conway to write to him instead, but as it happened
he meanwhile met J.H. Allen of the New York Bar, who agreed to write the letter
that led Clark to meet Holmes Junior.[29] On that
first trip he met Alfred Deakin’s good friend, Josiah Royce, whom Deakin had
met two years before in Melbourne, and who lived in Irving Street, Cambridge,
where Clark’s son, Conway would take rooms. He also met the economist, F.W.
Taussig and the Harvard historian, Albert Bushnell Hart, who taught a course on
comparative constitutional law and federal political systems. Hart became a
grateful recipient of Clark’s copies of Australian convention debates, which he
deposited in the Widener library. ‘The friends of good government throughout the
world’, Hart assured Clark in 1900, ‘are rejoiced at the final accomplishment
of your long task’.[30]
In 1897, Clark became a subscriber to the Harvard
Law Review, the journal for which H.B. Higgins, a later convert to ‘this
great America’ would write his commissioned article on ‘A New Province for Law
and Order’ in 1915. Higgins’ justification of a legal minimum wage would later
be quoted at length by Holmes in his celebrated dissent in Adkins v.
Children’s Hospital in 1923. Holmes sent Clark copies of the Harvard Law
Review containing his articles on ‘Agency’ and a copy of his collected Speeches.
Clark replied with characteristic enthusiasm:
The perusal of the speeches has given me
very much pleasure and has vividly revived the memory of the very delightful
time I spent in your company in Boston. Whether that short period of personal
intercourse warrants one or not in regarding myself as included in the ‘few
friends’ for whom those ‘chance utterances of faith and doubt’ were printed, I
shall always have a place among those ‘who will care to keep them’.[31]
In the correspondence between Clark and Holmes,
Clark often detailed the cases in which he was involved on the Tasmanian
Supreme Court and he sought Holmes’ advice. In November 1899, Clark wrote with
characteristic longing:
I often wish that you were much nearer to me
than you are so that I might discuss a point of law with you. A short time ago,
I differed from my colleagues on a question relating to the distribution of the
assets of a deceased insolvent ... I found several American decisions in support
of my opinion, but could not discover any English authority directly on the
point. If at any time you deliver a judgment on a point of law in which you
think I would be interested I shall be glad to receive a copy of it.[32]
Convinced by the American example and the
challenges posed by the need for uniformity between the Australian colonies, as
well as the writings of Anglo-Saxonists such as Freeman, whose text The
History of Federal Government was a key text for delegates to the
constitutional conventions, Clark became an ardent supporter of the move
towards federation. He represented Tasmania at the Federal Council meetings in
1888 and 1889, at the Federation Conference in Melbourne in 1890 and at the
federal convention in 1891, but he missed the later convention because he was
on his way to the United States. ‘I am very sorry that you will not be at the
Federal Convention’, Sir Samuel Griffith wrote to Clark. ‘I hope that your
trip to America will do you good’.[33]
Clark followed Freeman in believing that
Anglo-Saxons had a special genius for self-government and it followed logically
for them that those descended from peoples who had not inherited this capacity
must be excluded from Anglo-Saxon communities. Freeman’s racism intensified
during his visit to the United States where blacks had been enfranchised after
the Civil War; ‘I am sure ‘twas a mistake making them citizens’.[34] Plantation societies rested on and produced a caste system;
democracies enshrined equality of political status. Many white liberals
including Freeman and Clark found the prospect of racial equality difficult to
contemplate.
In the racial violence that followed
emancipation, the United States provided ‘history lessons’ that Australian
nationalists—Clark, Deakin, Higgins, Isaacs—would take to heart.[35] Lynchings in the United States reached a peak in Australia’s
federal decade. Talk of the necessity of deporting blacks to Africa was
widespread. Increasingly a multi-racial democracy came to seem an
impossibility. Chinese ‘fixedness of character’, as Clark would write, meant
that they could never assimilate into the Australian ‘homogeneal community’.[36]
In the United States, Chinese exclusion had been
enacted through legislation in 1882. In 1888 Clark wrote a ‘Memorandum on
Chinese Immigration’ in the context of the Sydney discussions that followed the
visit of the Chinese Imperial Commissioners in 1887 and the ‘Afghan crisis’ in
1888. His ‘Memorandum’ was reprinted in The Sydney Morning Herald at the
time of the intercolonial meeting there on Chinese immigration restriction and
pointed to the limits of Australian self-government.
Clark wrote:
Our Australian kinsmen, having done as much
as they believed they could within the powers granted to them by the Imperial
Legislature to restrict and repress the tide of Chinese immigration, now
declare that these powers are insufficient for the purpose, and are crying
aloud for the aid of the British Government to enable those Anglo-Saxon
communities flourishing under the Southern Cross to preserve their ‘type of
nationality,’ and to save them from the misfortune of having in their midst a
large number of a race which could not mix with them socially or politically;
and the question of the day is how, and to what extent, can this aid be best
rendered ... the United States and Australia are seeking to raise the barriers
between the Chinese and the rest of the world ...[37]
The comparison, of course, highlighted the
difference: the United States was a sovereign republic able to enact
international treaties and its own laws. The extent of the Australian colonies’
powers as self-governing communities had been tested in the Victorian Supreme Court
case of Ah Toy v. Musgrove and on appeal to the Privy Council. Radical
nationalists such as writers for the Age newspaper threatened
separation.[38] In the end, as we know, the British Government submitted to
Australian demands for race-based immigration restriction and the inauguration
of the new Commonwealth as ‘White Australia’. This was the cost for keeping the
empire intact.
But still Clark worried about the ‘race
problem’. In September 1903 he received a letter from Chris Watson, the leader
of the Labor Party, who was responding to a newspaper article Clark had sent
him arguing the necessity of the deportation of African Americans:
Many thanks for your letter and kindness in
forwarding copy of American paper. I think it especially significant to find
deportation put forward as the only solution to the race problem in the States.
I was interested too to notice the reference to the opinion of Lincoln as to
the impossibility of the negroes living side by side with the whites. I had not
encountered the reference before but he evidently had the gift of prophecy in
this connection.[39]
In his essay on Clark’s ‘Memorandum on Chinese
Immigration’, Richard Ely asked whether Clark’s essay on democracy and his
views on Chinese exclusion represented a contradiction: were there two Andrew
Inglis Clarks?[40]
I would suggest, rather, that an understanding
of Clark’s Anglo-Saxonism and the racialised nature of the discourse on
self-government and democratic equality in the late nineteenth century led
precisely to the policies of exclusion favoured by Clark and his fellow white
men in the New World democracies of Australia and the United States. His son
Conway reflected this understanding when he wrote from Boston, in 1905,
deploring the advertisements he saw calling for ‘Tenders for the supply of 5000
Chinamen for 5 years’ to build the Panama Canal. ‘[A]lmost as bad as South
Africa eh!’ he commented, referring to the controversy over the importation of
Chinese indentured labour to work the Rand mines. Drawing the colour line was
clearly a global challenge. Conway also reported to his father on the debate
over Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to exclude or segregate Japanese immigrants.
‘The Americans have long ceased to worship the “little Brown Angels of the
East” ’, he wrote,
In the Harvard University graduation classes
of last year there were 2 Chinese and 4 Japs. The Chows beat the Japs out of
sight. I am still to be convinced about the angelic qualities of the little
Brown Man.[41]
His father would have agreed with his son’s sentiments,
but might not have dismissed Japanese capacity so easily. That year the
Japanese defeat of Russia—a European power—sent shock waves around the world.
In the last two years of his life, Andrew Inglis Clark witnessed some signs
that the old racial order—the rule of white men—might be about to change.
[1] Conway Clark to Andrew Inglis Clark, 26 August 1905,
A.I. Clark papers, University of Tasmania Library–Special and Rare Collections,
C4/C4 (hereafter referenced as Clark papers).
[2] Walter Burley Griffin quoted in Nicholas Brown,
‘Canberra 1913’, in Michelle Hetherington, Glorious Days:
Australia 1913, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2013, p.
73.
[3] Holmes to Lady Clare Castletown, 9 June 1898, Mark
DeWolfe Howe research materials relating to the life of Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr 1858–1968 (hereafter referenced as Holmes papers), Harvard Law School
Library, HOLLIS 12642017, 19-8, seq. 34.
[4] Clark to Holmes, 26 October 1901, Clark papers, C4/C211
(1).
[5] Clark’s letters to Holmes held in this collection have
been copied and also placed in the Clark papers at the University of Tasmania
Library—Special and Rare Collections.
[6] Alfred Deakin, The Federal Story: The
Inner History of the Federal Cause, 1880–1900, Melbourne University
Press, Parkville, Vic., 1963, p. 32.
[7] John Reynolds, ‘A.I. Clark’s American sympathies and his
influence on Australian federation’, Australian Law Journal,
vol. 32, July 1958, pp. 62–75; John Williams,
‘Andrew Inglis Clark: the republican of Tasmania’, in David Headon and John
Williams (eds), Makers of Miracles: The Cast of the
Federation Story, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 44–55.
[8] John Reynolds to Howe, 10 March 1947, Holmes papers,
HOLLIS 12642017, 14-4, seq. 13–15.
[9] Williams, ‘Andrew Inglis Clark’, p. 55.
[10] George Higinbotham to Clark, 8 March 1891, Clark papers,
C4/C206.
[11] As did Alfred Deakin, intermittently. See Marilyn Lake, ‘
“The brightness of eyes and quiet assurance which seem to say American”: Alfred
Deakin’s identification with republican manhood’, Australian
Historical Studies, vol. 38, no. 129, April 2007.
[12] Marilyn Lake, ‘ “This great America”: H.B. Higgins and
Transnational Progressivism’, Australian Historical Studies,
vol. 44, no.2, June 2013.
[13] Clark to Holmes, 20 January 1892, Clark papers, C4/211
(5).
[14] Holmes to Clark (undated), Clark papers, C4/C210.
[15] Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing
the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial
Equality, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 99, 171, 313.
[16] Holmes to Clark (undated), Clark papers, C4/C210.
[17] George Bell, letter of introduction, 15 March 1897, Clark
papers C4/C391 (12).
[18] Marilyn Lake, ‘The Chinese empire encounters the British
Empire and its “colonial dependencies”: Melbourne, 1887’, Journal
of Chinese Overseas, vol. 9, no. 2, 2013, pp. 176–92.
[19] Marilyn Lake, ‘ “ Essentially Teutonic”: E.A. Freeman,
liberal race historian: a transnational perspective’, in Catherine Hall and
Keith McLelland (eds), Race, Nation and Empire: Making
Histories, 1750 to the Present, Manchester University Press, Manchester,
2010.
[20] Marilyn Lake, ‘British World or New World? Anglo-Saxonism
and Australian engagement with America’, History,
vol. 10, no. 3, 2013.
[21] Dewey to Clark, 29 July 1898, Clark papers, C4/C46.
[22] Holmes to ‘Hibernia’ [Lady Clare Castletown], 10 May
1898, Holmes papers, HOLLIS 12642017, 19-8, seq. 22–23.
[23] Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government:
Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006.
[24] Charles H. Stockton to Clark, 26 October 1901, Clark
papers, C4/C268.
[25] ibid.
[26] Lake, ‘ “Essentially Teutonic” ’, op. cit., p. 65.
[27] Charles Henry Pearson, ‘The Story of my Life’, in William
Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson, Fellow of Oriel and
Education Minister in Victoria: Memorials by Himself, His Wife, and His Friends,
Longman and Green, London, 1900.
[28] Many accounts of Clark’s first meeting with Holmes have
assumed incorrectly that his introduction was enabled by Moncure Conway.
[29] Clark to Holmes, 4 October 1890, Clark papers,
C4/C211(6).
[30] Hart to Clark, 14 April 1900, Clark papers, C4/C198.
[31] Clark to Holmes, 20 January 1892, Clark papers, C4/C211
(4).
[32] Clark to Holmes, 3 November 1899, Clark papers, C4/C211
(4).
[33] Griffith to Clark, 26 February 1897, Clark papers,
C4/C187.
[34] Lake, ‘ “Essentially Teutonic” ’, op. cit., p. 65.
[35] Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global
Colour Line, op. cit., pp. 138–43.
[36] Richard Ely (ed.), A Living Force:
Andrew Inglis Clark and the Ideal of Commonwealth, Centre for Tasmanian
Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 2001, pp. 78–9.
[37] ibid., p.71.
[38] Lake, ‘The Chinese empire encounters the British Empire
and its “colonial dependencies” ’, op. cit., p. 187.
[39] Watson to Clark, 28 September 1903, Clark papers,
C4/C312.
[40] Ely, op. cit., p. 83.
[41] Conway Clark to A.I. Clark, 16 September 1905, Clark
papers, C4/C6.
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