Thomas C. Buchanan

Anti-fascism and Democracy in the 1930s

In November 1936 Konni Zilliacus wrote to John Strachey, a leading British left-wing intellectual and a prime mover in the recently founded Left Book Club, inviting him to ponder ‘the problem of class-war strategy and tactics in a democracy’. Zilliacus, a press officer with the League of Nations and subsequently a Labour Party MP, was particularly worried about the failure of the Communist Party and the Comintern to offer a clear justification for their decision to support the Popular Front and collective security. ‘There is no doubt’, Zilliacus wrote, ‘that those who are on the side of unity are woefully short of a convincing come-back when the Right-Wing put up the story about Communist support of democracy etc. being merely tactical camouflage.’1 Zilliacus’s comment raises very clearly the issue that lies at the heart of this article. For it is well known that the rise of fascism in the 1930s appeared to produce a striking affirmation of support for democracy, most notably in the 1936 election victories of the Spanish and French Popular Fronts. Here, and elsewhere, anti-fascism was able to unite broad political coalitions ranging from liberals and conservatives to socialists, communists and anarchists. But were these coalitions united more by a fear of fascism than by a love of democracy — were they, in effect, marriages of convenience? Historians have long disagreed on this issue. Some have emphasized the prior loyalty of Communist supporters of the Popular Front to the Stalinist regime in the USSR, and have explained their new-found faith in democracy as, indeed, a mere ‘tactical camouflage’ (a view given retrospective weight by the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact). Others have noted the gap between the democratic rhetoric of Communist leaders and the revolutionary temper of their working-class followers, while Tom Buchanan

‘Shanghai-Madrid Axis’? Comparing British Responses to the Conflicts in Spain and China, 1936–39

The impact of the Sino-Japanese War on Britain has generally been overshadowed by the impact of the Spanish Civil War, which broke out a year earlier. Indeed, the only book on the subject, Arthur Cleggs Aid China (1989), is subtitled A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign. Yet, for a few months in the autumn of 1937, these two campaigns achieved a kind of parity in British public perception. British opinion was united in condemnation of the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities, and, at its peak, the ensuing campaign attracted a broader range of supporters than the movement in solidarity with the Spanish Republic. For instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury publicly criticised Japans actions in a way that would have been unthinkable in the case of Francos Spain. Moreover, some acts of solidarity with China (such as the refusal by British dockers to load Japanese ships) went beyond what the supporters of the Spanish Republic could hope to achieve. This article makes a comparison of the two campaigns, and examines the interconnections between them. It not only sheds new light on the ‘forgotten’ campaign for China, but also asks why Spain – unlike China – became the ‘Great Cause’ of the later 1930s.

Levees of Hope African American Steamboat Workers, Cities, and Slave Escapes on the Antebellum Mississippi

The Mississippi River system was an important site of African American resistance to slavery. This article illustrates that slaves used the western steamboat economy to run away from their masters, a history that has been neglected by historians. Western cities, and the commercial working class that grew with them, were crucial to these escape networks. The labor mobility of the river, and the freedoms that came with it, were a dramatic extension of the relative freedoms of urban slavery. Runaway slaves knew that cities offered the hope of contact with a broader pan-Mississippi African American community that could allow them to ride the decks of steamboats to freedom.

The Politics of Democracy in Twentieth-Century Europe: Introduction

The apparent triumph of democracy in Europe after 1989 was as exhilarating as it was unanticipated. A method of government that in the 1930s had seemed doomed to extinction had, by the end of the century, come to be seen as normative. In contrast to the 1930s, moreover, this modern democracy was now intimately associated with political stability and economic prosperity. Despite this late twentieth-century apotheosis of ‘democracy’, however, it is easy to forget that democracy had not only been made to work, but that it had also been tamed. Events since 1989 suggest that what Charles Maier has termed the struggle since the French Revolution to make democracy ‘safe for the world’1 had finally been won. Maier’s comment is an apt reminder of the importance of locating the ‘democracy’ of the late twentieth century within a proper historical context, and that conceptions of democracy cannot be taken as timeless or unchanging. The democracy that appeared to fail in the interwar years was not, therefore, necessarily the same as that which succeeded after 1945. Likewise, the triumph of a particular conception of democracy in the late twentieth century represented the failure not only of the alternatives to democracy, but also of alternative forms of democracy. The study of democracy in twentieth-century Europe has been dominated to a remarkable degree both by political scientists and by methodologies derived from political science. In particular, there has been a flowering of interest since the mid-1970s in processes of change from democratic to authoritarian regimes and, now overwhelmingly, from authoritarian regimes to democracies. These ‘transitions’ have been assiduously tracked, recorded, compared and contrasted by scholars such as Juan P. Linz, Alfred Stepan and Samuel P. Huntington. An entire sub-discipline Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway

The Role of the British Labour Movement in the Origins and Work of the Basque Children's Committee, 1937-9

In the spring of 1937, fighting on the northern front of the Spanish Civil War reached new levels of intensity and, as Nationalist (rebel) forces closed in on the Basque capital of Bilbao, concern grew amongst relief workers for the fate of the many children who would be caught up in the fighting. This concern was magnified by the bombing of Guernica on 26 April, which raised the spectre of devastating air raids on the civilian population. Following the example of the French CGT trade union centre, which undertook the care of 2300 child evacuees, the newly formed British ’National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief’ (NJCSR) successfully put pressure on the British government to allow an even larger number of children to be evacuated to Britain, on the condition that the Committee would take full responsibility for their welfare. This was seen as a short-term humanitarian gesture the children were merely being kept in safekeeping until the danger had receded and the Basque government insisted that the evacuees should continue to be taught in Basque and not be subjected to undue religious or political influences. Once in Britain (they arrived on 23 May), the children

Delivery: Relics of the Past? Rethinking the History Lecture and Tutorial

Increasing student enrolments in higher education and burgeoning class sizes have required creative approaches to delivering course material, especially if active learning on the part of the student is the aim. In this context, traditional forms of course delivery such as lectures provided by a ‘sage on the stage’ and tutorials have been criticised as ineffective and expensive. However, thoughtfully designed to accommodate student needs and desires, history lectures and tutorials can still play an important role in higher education.

B.H.P.’s “Place in the Industrial Sun”: Whyalla in its Golden Age

ABSTRACT Whyalla epitomised the promises of industrialism and consumerism during Australia’s Golden Age of capitalism, roughly 1945–1975. Located on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, Whyalla was a bustling industrial town (later a city) following the Second World War. It was home to the shipyard of Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited (BHP) and, from 1965, a steelworks. Before the war, Whyalla had been a company town, one planned and directed by BHP. Following the Second World War, it had morphed into a hybrid public–private town, albeit one that was heavily influenced by BHP, so much so that many still considered Whyalla to be a company town. Drawing from company materials, parliamentary records, oral histories, and the Whyalla News, this article argues that, together, BHP, the South Australian government, and residents conveyed and developed Whyalla to be an “Industrial Eden”. These actors forged postwar Whyalla to be a metaphor for what BHP, South Australia, and, ultimately, Australia had to offer. Whyalla represented progress, modernity, abundance, and stability. Moreover, it was presented and even accepted as a great place to live and work. For a moment, Whyalla was a capitalist utopia.

The return of the steel octopus: free enterprise and Australian culture during BHP’s Cold War

Abstract This article argues that Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd (BHP) and Broken Hill South Ltd (BHS) played a multifaceted role in defending the values of free enterprise in Australia during the Cold War. It reveals the promotional efforts these companies made toward schools, homes, universities, churches and workplaces, which aimed to reinforce the values of free enterprise, and associated beliefs, among ordinary Australians. In making these arguments, the article’s cultural studies methodology offers a new approach to the history of industrial capitalism in Australia. The Communist Party of Australia’s metaphor of the Steel Octopus is our point of departure in examining the intimate ways that industry shaped the minds of Cold War Australians.

Role immersion in a history course

This article assesses Reacting to the Past, a humanities role-immersion pedagogy that is popular at many colleges and universities in the United States. This pedagogy has been found to have many learning gains compared to traditional face-to-face teaching, but has not been adequately compared to online versions of the course. The findings of the article suggest that while learning gains can be achieved that are comparable to face-to-face versions of the course, student satisfaction was lower. The article concludes not by rejecting the online Reacting to the Past, however, but by suggesting possible ways to incorporate successful elements of it within a blended approach. These findings will be of interest to people interested in this particular pedagogy, but also to those who are interested in the general comparison between online and face-to-face learning and teaching. Reacting to the Past, a humanities role-immersion pedagogy, was studied.Online mode was compared to face-to-face mode.Learning outcomes were similar in both versions, but students preferred the face-to-face mode.The authors suggest ways to adapt elements of the online version to a blended format.The study furthers the evaluation the efficacy of different modes of teaching and learning.

The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (review)

propriate facilities and to make outdoor relief payments to the elderly and to families with children more adequate. What they do not show Haslam doing is questioning the system. In the long saga of her determined struggle to prevent beer from being served in the workhouse at Christmas, dutifully detailed in her working diary each December, we can see a clear indication that Mary Haslam did indeed embody the Nonconformist progressive tradition—for better and for worse. Understandably caught up in her story, King expresses great sympathy for the female guardians, who “had to tread a precarious line between hostile colleagues, an ungrateful pauper host and the competing demands of class, politics, domestic life and local government office.” (15) But for what, precisely, should the pauper host have been grateful? To a reader interested in the poor law, therefore, the book has much to offer in the way of details of administration on a local level, but nothing to help us understand how a kindly and progressive inhabitant of a Late Victorian manufacturing city could be more concerned about the evils of an annual glass of beer for institutionalized people than about the manifest unsuitability of the poor law structure to a modern industrial economy. Mary Haslam and her colleagues did make some difference in the lives of the poor, but the principal function of poor law administration in this study is as a pathway to involvement in local politics and the feminist movement. To the study of these issues, the book is certainly a valuable contribution.