Fat Man v. 'the People': Labour Intellectuals and the Making of Oppositional Identities, 1890-1901

Labour History

Volumn , Issue 92, 2007, Pages 31-56

  Dyrenfurth, Nick ^a   Quartly, Marian ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85172221432     PISSN: 00236942     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3828/27516187     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Livingstone Hopkins, 'And that is now the question', Bulletin, 16 August 1890.
2. Tom Durkin, 'Toe the Scratch', Bull Ant, 9 October 1890.
3. Michael Leach, "Manly, True, and White': Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism', in Geoff Stokes (ed.), The Politics Of Identity in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, p. 63.
4. Sean Scalmer, 'Being Practical in Early and Contemporary Labor Politics: A Labourist Critique', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 43, no. 3, 1997, p. 307. Also see Frank Farrell, 'The practical politician: Link between early imagery of the working man of the 19th century and the working class hero of 20th century labourism', Australian Cultural History, no. 8, 1989, pp. 50-61. On labour constructions of mateship see Mark Hearn, 'Mates and Strangers: The Ethos of the Australian Workers Union', in David Palmer, Ross Shanahan and Martin Shanahan (eds), Australian Labour History Reconsidered, Australian Humanities Press, Parkside, 1999, and Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Howard's Hegemony of Values': the Politics of Mateship in the Howard Decade', Australian Journal of Political Science, forthcoming June 2007.
5. Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving, 'Labour Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations', International Review of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, April 2005, pp. 1-26 and 'Australian Labour Intellectuals: An Introduction", Labour History, no. 77, November 2000, pp. 1-10; Sean Scalmer, 'Experience and Discourse: A Map of Recent Theoretical Approaches to Labour and Social History', Labour History, no.70, May 1996, pp. 156-68; Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914, Merlin Press, London, 2003, and Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor Tradition: Synthesising Discourse and Experience', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 177-99. With regard to visual intellectuals see Marian Quartly, 'Making Working Class Heroes: Labor Cartoonists and the Australian Worker, 1903-16', Labour History, no. 89, November 2005, pp. 159-178.
6. Verity Burgmann, 'Language and the Labor Tradition', in Tim Battin (ed.), A Passion for Politics: Essays in Honour of Graham Maddox, Pearson, Frenchs Forest, 2005.
7. See for example Hearn, 'Mates and Strangers' and Lenore Layman, 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration: Labour Culture and Federation', in Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore (eds). Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation, 1890-1914, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001. For an analysis making use of narrative constructions see Mark Hearn, 'A Wild Awakening: the 1893 banking crisis and the theatrical narratives of the Castlereagh Street Radicals', Labour History, no. 87, November 2004, pp. 65-82.
8. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, London, 1963.
9. June Senyard, Labor in Cartoons: Cartoons of the Australian Labor Party in Victoria 1891-1990, Hyland House, South Yarra, 1991, p. 1, our italics. Senyard is one of the few writers to explicitly discuss the salience of the Fat Man in labourite imagery. Also see Vane Lindesay, 'Rich 200', Business Review Weekly, 12 May 1989, pp. 56-9.
10. Quartly, 'Making Working Class Heroes', p. 160. For the social context of the labour intellectuals see Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, ch. 1, and Stuart Macintyre, 'The Concept of Class in Recent Labourist Historiography: Early Socialism and Labor', Intervention, no. 8, 1977, pp. 79-87.
11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translator Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984. Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841-1936, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003, p. 401, identifies the fat capitalist as 'part of a long tradition stemming' from Pantagruel.
12. Jamie Agland, 'The Corporeality of Excessive Consumption in Eighteenth Century Visual Culture', unpublished article, 2006.
13. See for example 'Bubbles of the Year: Cheap Clothing', published in the London Punch in 1845, and reproduced in Frank E. Huggart, Victorian England as Seen by Punch, London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1978, p. 24.
14. John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890-1910, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, p. 21.
15. Public celebration and display of the female body took a few decades longer, though a semi-private appreciation - in women's gyms, for example - coincided with the masculine phenomenon.
16. John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America, Hill and Wang, New York, 2001; Caroline Daley, 'The Strongman of Eugenics, Eugene Sandow', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no 120, October 2002, pp. 233-247; Anna Alexandra Carden-Coyne, 'Classical heroism and modern life: bodybuilding and masculinity in the early twentieth century', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 63, December 1999, pp. 138-149.
17. Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Colorado, 1996; Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity. Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France, Thames and Hudson, London 1998; George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996.
18. Quartly, 'Making Working-class Heroes'. Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, ch. 5, shows the efficacy of heroic white working class images in the American scene, a decade or more later than the same phenomenon in Australia.
19. Scalmer, 'Being Practical in Early and Contemporary Labor Politics', p. 302. As should become clear we employ a wide use of the term 'labour' during the period under study - for socialists, unionists and other radicals were reading, with different purposes and inflexions, from the same script: producing and manipulating knowledge for a 'labour public'. Here we follow the work of Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving. They argue for the importance of a heterogeneous, uneven 'labour public': 'a space of withdrawal from wider society and organization to change it' (Scalmer and Irving, 'Labour Intellectuals in Australia', pp. 3-4). But during the 1890s this labour public meshed most effectively with wider public, popular culture. Intellectuals and institutions worked so successfully because they grasped and moulded the cultural materials both available in and foreign to the dominant public space.
20. Our practical stress upon the decade of the 1890s does not ascribe to 1890 some talismanic power as a 'turning' point. Deep material and discursive continuities persisted - though they were often presented as the historically legitimate maker of 'class' traditions. We must be critical in our sense of 1890 and the 1890s - both in terms of 'Labor in Politics' and of actual economic conditions. John Rickard points out that depressed conditions were unevenly spread and were often delayed until the mid-1890s (Rickard, Class and politics, p. 7). The 1890s did not embody, nor escalate a form of class warfare (however defined) despite clear organisational shifts, but did, however, produce a heyday of counter-hegemonic ideas, cultural forms and institutions - which meshed with and ultimately accentuated human action and agency.
21. nded.), Longman, Essex, 1996, p. 102 and more generally Graeme Davison, 'The Dimensions of Mobility in Nineteenth Century Australia', Historical Studies, no. 2, August 1979.
22. 'The General Council's Appeal', Worker (Brisbane), 7 March 1891, p. 4.
23. Ibid.
24. Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus (eds), Who Are Our Enemies?: Racism and the Australian Working Class, Hale and Iremonger in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Neutral Bay, 1978; Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1970; and Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales.
25. Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', Historical Studies, no. 22, 1986, pp. 116-31 and 'Socialism and Manhood: the Case of William Lane', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986; Leach, 'Manly, True, and White', and Bruce Scates, 'Mobilising Manhood: Gender and The Great Strike Of 1890 In Australia and New Zealand', Gender and History, vol. 9, no. 2, 1997, pp. 285-309.
26. See also Frank Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the radical tradition, 1875-1924, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996, and Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890-1950, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1984.
27. Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor Tradition' and Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins, p. 124. Joyce controversially argued that populism and class were divergent discourses; Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848-1914, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991 and Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.
28. Love, Labour and the Money Power, p. 1.
29. Ibid, p. 7-8
30. Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885-1905, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985.
31. Cited in Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, p. 189.
32. Graham Maddox, 'Revisiting Tradition: Labor and Socialism', Overland, no. 173, 2003, p. 54.
33. Anon, 'Capital and Labor: As it too often is - As it should be', Australasian Trades and Labour Journal, c. 1889.
34. Tom Carrington, '"Mammon's Rents"!!', London Punch, 10 November 1883. It is intriguing that this image was contributed to London Punch by the Melbourne-based Tom Carrington, whose cartoons in the Melbourne Punch generally made a gross and tyrannical King Workingman the villain. The caption of the oppressor ('House-jobber') reads: 'Now, then, my man; week's hup! Can't 'ave a 'orne without payin' for it, yer know!'
35. Tom Durkin, 'The Sweating Fiend in His Element', Bull Ant, 5 June 1890.
36. 'Editorial', Bull Ant, 21 August 1890.
37. Phil May 'Poverty and Wealth: it all depends on the position of the bundle', Bulletin, c. 1887. Reproduced in Vane Lindesay, It all depends on the position of the bundle', Business Review Weekly, 12 May 1989, p. 56.
38. Anon, 'The Difference Between Capital and Labor', Life, 3 February 1887.
39. 'Why Labouring Doesn't Pay', Boomerang, 3 March 1888. The subcaption reads 'The man who carries the hod would be lighter if he shook off the man who lives by his wits'.
40. Montague Scott, 'What Queensland is Coming To', Boomerang 3 August 1889.
41. See for instance Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood'.
42. The shift in terminology from May's 1887 'Poverty and Wealth' is striking. Given Hopkin's famed apoliticism, the label is probably W.H. Traill's - but the spelling of Labor suggests an American influence, perhaps as atheoretical as the the US Senate's investigation of 'Relations between Labor and Capital' in 1883.
43. Tom Durkin, 'Its Aim and Object', Bull Ant, 27 November 1890.
44. Tom Durkin, 'The Progressive Political League's Labor', Bull Ant, 25 June 1891.
45. Hummer, 2 April 1892.
46. Worker (Sydney), 12 August 1893.
47. Worker (Sydney), 12 December 1896
48. The Goanna, 'The Money Lender to the Unemployed', Worker (Brisbane), 11 June 1892.
49. Anon, 'The Loaves and Fishes', Worker (Brisbane), 6 October 1894.
50. The Clipper, 6 May 1893.
51. Anon, 'The MiddleMan', Worker (Brisbane), 12 January 1895.
52. Bongiorno, The People's Party.
53. The Shearer's and General Labourers' Record, 15 August 1893.
54. Worker (Brisbane), 5 March 1892.
55. Worker (Brisbane), 10 March 1894.
56. The Clipper, 12 October 1897, p. 2.
57. The Clipper, 26 June 1897, p. 2.
58. Worker (Brisbane), 21 April 1894, p. 2
59. Worker (Sydney), 4 November 1893, cited in Love, Money Power, p. 30.
60. Montague Scott, 'Falstaff Up To Date', Worker (Brisbane), 8 May 1893.
61. The Clipper, 9 February 1895, p. 2.
62. Montague Scott, 'The Governor's Speech', Worker (Brisbane), 28 July 1894.
63. The Clipper, 13 September 1898, p. 2.
64. The People and the Collectivism 10 September 1898.
65. Worker (Brisbane), 16 April 1895.
66. The Clipper, 28 April 1899, p. 2.
67. John Iremonger, 'Rats', in John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre (eds), True believers: the story of the federal parliamentary Labor Party, Allen & Unwin, East Melbourne, 2001, p. 267.
68. Montague Scott, 'The New Zealand Elections: Result: Social Democrats, 64: Fatmen, 14.
69. The implicit threat of rape and subjugation was something borrowed from and replicated in images of Chinese people. See Leach, 'Manly, True, and White', p. 74.
70. Worker (Sydney), 20 January 1894.
71. Worker (Sydney), 16 September 1893
72. The Northern People, 29 May 1897.
73. Livingstone Hopkins, 'The Capitalist's Day Dream', Bulletin, 6 September 1890.
74. The Clipper, 12 May 1894, p. 2. See also 'The Fatman's Song' published by Tocsin, June 23, 1898, p. 7.
75. Northern People, 27 March 1897.
76. Tocsin, 2 February 1899, p. 4.
77. The Clipper, 16 May 1896.
78. 'What shall we do with Australia?', speech by Ben Tillett, Melbourne Temperance Hall, 13 September 1897 printed in Tocsin, 9 December 1897.
79. Worker (Brisbane), 1 September 1894.
80. Worker (Brisbane), 9 December 1893, p. 3.
81. Worker (Sydney), 9 February 1894.
82. Worker (Brisbane), February 1894.
83. Worker (Sydney), 13 January 1894.
84. Worker (Sydney), 16 June 1894.
85. Worker (Sydney), 20 July 1895.
86. Anon, 'Why Don't they drop him?', Worker (Sydney), 11 December 1897.
87. Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, p. 232.
88. For other examples see E. Bowling, 'Letter to the Editor', Northern People, 30 January 1897 and Tocsin, 9 February 1899.
89. Worker (Sydney), 26 August 1899.
90. Worker (Sydney), 20 February 1897.
91. Montgomery Scott, 'The Road to Market', Worker (Brisbane), 26 August 1898.
92. Advance Australia, 1 March 1897.
93. Tom Durkin, 'The Proper Attitude of Australia', The Ant 3 March 1892.
94. Tocsin, 25 January 1900
95. The Clipper, 15 April 1899, p. 2.
96. Montague Scott, 'The Bushwackers' Brigade', Tocsin, 15 February 1900.
97. The People and the Collectivism 16 October 1898.
98. 'Pallis', 'Letter to the editor', Worker (Sydney), 16 November 1898.
99. The Clipper, 18 November 1899, p. 2.
100. The tag actually refers to the American examples; see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the 'Masses' 1911-1917: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, New Haven, Connecticut, 1925, p. 107, cited in Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, p. 401.
101. See for example Arthur Young's 'A Little Child Shall Feed Them', Life, 16 February 1911, and his 'Breed!', The Masses, December 1915, reproduced in Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, fig. 5.1 p. 233; fig. 5.2 p. 233. 102. Vance Palmer, 'Will Dyson', Meanjin Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, 1949, pp. 213-33.