The vote that made John Curtin Labor Leader
1 October 1935
On 1 October 1935, John Curtin was voted Labor Leader.
He took the leadership of a fractious and deeply divided party. The ALP was still reeling from the Great Depression, in which the party was charged with negotiating the immense economic cataclysm.
Curtin’s rise to the leadership was far from assured, but it set the scene just 6 years later for his ascent to the Prime Ministership, and the beginning of Labor’s ‘golden age’.
John Curtin was born in Creswick in Victoria in 1885. His was a working-class upbringing, one that was deeply marred by the devastation of the economic depression of the 1890s. As a young man he was in constant search of employment to help support his family, but he found only procession of short-term and insecure jobs.
His experience of inequality and insecurity stoked his political consciousness. He rejected the dehumanising notion that the market alone should dictate standards of life for working people. He joined both the Labor Party and the Victorian Socialist Party and agitated for social change.
This activism led to his appointment in 1911 as Secretary of the Timber Workers’ Union. He represented workers in this dangerous and difficult industry, roaming Victoria from camp to camp to meet his members and learn their concerns.
Curtin was diligent in his duties, and a popular leader, but this was a difficult period for him. He was in the grip of alcoholism, a serious problem that tormented the young man. In 1916 he sought treatment. It would be an ongoing battle through his life.
During the First World War Curtin came to national prominence when he led the union campaign against conscription for overseas military service in 1916. The following year he left Melbourne to edit the AWU-backed Westralian Worker newspaper in Perth. In 1928 he was elected as the Federal Member for Fremantle.
In 1929 James Scullin led Labor to power for the first time federally since 1916. Just days after he was elected the Great Depression erupted. Curtin was a backbencher, and largely powerless to shape events. So he spoke and he wrote about how vested interests and the conservatives were leading the country to ruin. He argued that it was workers, once again, paying the price.
Scullin’s government was overwhelmed by events. Its attempts to ameliorate the worst of the depression were blocked by conservatives in the Senate. Bowing to pressure from international money markets and the conservative establishment Scullin endorsed the “Premiers’ Plan” – an economic restructure heavily critiqued within the labour movement for enforcing austerity.
At the end of 1931 followers of the NSW Labor Premier, Jack Lang, split from Scullin’s government and crossed the floor to vote against it. An election was called. Labor was devastated at the polls. Curtin and many others lost their seats.
Scullin stayed on to lead the party, but his leadership was a spent force. Curtin returned to Canberra at the 1934 election. The following year, Scullin resigned the leadership. It was widely expected that Frank Forde would be the new party leader.
Jack Holloway was the newly-elected member for Melbourne Ports. He had won fame in 1929 when he had successfully challenged the conservative Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce for his own seat of Flinders, and won (he lost the seat in the 1931 election).
He was also a long-time friend of John Curtin.
Holloway did not believe that Forde, or anyone who had supported the Premiers’ Plan during the Depression, could unite the deeply divided party. He asked Curtin if he had stopped his destructive drinking. Curtin assured him he had. Holloway convinced him to run for the leadership.
Forde was far more prominent then the barely-known backbencher from Western Australia. Holloway was convinced that the ballot would be close. Curtin had strong support in Victoria, but there was one Victorian MP whose vote for Curtin was not guaranteed: Maurice Blackburn, who had said he would not support either candidate.
Curtin and Blackburn had butted heads since they were both members of the Victorian Socialist Party decades before. The two had clashed over major questions of the day, such as compulsory military training, which Curtin had opposed and Blackburn supported. But there was also a clash of personalities between the two young men. Blackburn had the benefit of a university education. Curtin worked as an estimator in a factory who had left school in his early teens. There had always been tension between them.
Blackburn could not bring himself to vote for Curtin. He announced he would not even attend the caucus meeting where the ballot would take place.
Holloway sought to marshal the numbers. Another Curtin supporter, Arthur Drakeford, appealed directly to Blackburn, trying to convince him that only Curtin had the required attributes to lead. Blackburn rebuffed Drakeford. But on the day of the vote, Drakeford received a letter from Blackburn. The letter gave Drakeford Blackburn's authority to cast his ballot by proxy for Curtin if he genuinely believed it to be the right thing to do. Drakeford did.
Curtin was never a fan of Blackburn, even after the ballot. He once wrote of Blackburn that he was: “a blanc mange, clever, proper, a man without sin he is really destitute of virtue. He is personally too good to be politically worth a damn.”
But on the 1st of October 1935 John Curtin was elected as Labor leader by one vote. Blackburn’s vote.
Curtin later wrote of his ascent to the leadership:
‘I have no great sense of personal ambition, and I have never had any. It has been quite sufficient for me to be a member of the team and to do my best in the work given to me as a contribution to the success generally of the efforts all of us have made in our respective spheres. This spirit shall ever animate me.’
I thought some references might have been made to Ted Theodore.