Mac Ball and Anti-Anti-Communism

W. Macmahon Ball: Politics for the People
by Ai Kobayashi
Australian Scholarly, 2013, 278 pages, $39.95

Best known for his early championing of Australia’s role in Asia, Professor William Macmahon Ball (1901–86) was Australia’s first Professor of Political Science when appointed to the post at the University of Melbourne in 1949. Mac Ball, as he was known, began as a tutor in Psychology and Philosophy, but moved to Political Science after a stint under Professor Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE). He also became well known because of his two additional careers. He was a fluent foreign affairs commentator on ABC radio and in the Melbourne Herald. In addition he was appointed by the federal government during the 1940s to four important posts: controller of broadcasting during the war; part of the Australian delegation to the 1945 San Francisco conference which founded the United Nations; special observer to postwar Netherlands East Indies; and in 1946 Commonwealth representative on the Allied Council for Japan in Tokyo. The author of this biography, who is Japanese, has a fascinating chapter on the workings of the Allied Council, its relations with General Douglas MacArthur, and Mac Ball’s role on the Council.

Mac Ball played all sides. His academic credentials helped him to get broadcasting and diplomatic posts, and these in turn helped his academic career. This dual-track career made him a widely-known public intellectual, which did not happen to his fellow left-wing commentator at the time, Dr Peter Russo, who had no academic base. The danger for Mac Ball was of becoming something of a dilettante, dabbling in a number of areas but outstanding in none. Two senior professors at the University of Melbourne were wary of his seemingly effortless rise. Kenneth Bailey, Professor of Public Law, thought Ball displayed “the spirit of the propagandist rather than of the scholar”; Boyce Gibson, Professor of Philosophy, thought he displayed a “brilliant superficiality”.

How did Ball have such a golden run, with all these wonderful positions? He was personally popular, known to the general public, and with few competitors in the days when academics and media pundits were thin on the ground. Professor Richard Posner has written that in the United States “many public intellectuals are of modest distinction fortuitously thrust into the limelight”.

He worked well with both Labor and Liberal regimes in acquiring these important government positions, making seamless transitions as the federal government changed hands in the 1940s. In partisan politics he was primarily a committed left-wing socialist, yet he also managed in public life to present himself as a detached authoritative observer. During his post in Japan he acted like a mandarin, imperiously demanding better conditions for himself, yet in Melbourne he was an easy-going egalitarian, mixing in semi-bohemian circles. He was able to work for traditional bodies like the ABC, the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and the Herald & Weekly Times, while at the same time being prominent in various peace and anti-censorship bodies. He worked through personal contacts as much as through ideological positions. He had a wide circle of acquaintances from all walks of life and political persuasions, he was what we would today call a consummate networker, and he did not fall out with people whose views may have differed from his. His all-round personality made him attractive to politicians of all sides, to men and women, to academics and to people in public life. All this emerges clearly in Ai Kobayashi’s biography of him.

His first coherent view of things emerged in the 1920s. After relinquishing the faith of his Anglican clergyman father, he took up a position of rational tolerance. On any political issue he sought to look objectively at the factors, to understand the arguments of others, to put aside his prejudices, and to try to come to some agreement with people of good will. He applied this technique all his life. It is an important and essential approach to political debate, which I admire greatly, especially since it has been in such short supply in intellectual circles over recent decades. It is an essential step, but only a preliminary one, as tolerance itself does not constitute belief. Instead of taking up a strong position of his own, Mac Ball tended to defend the position of others, taking a peace-loving Quaker-like line. This sometimes incapacitated him from taking a firm stance against the many evils in the world that emanated from people who did not share his presumption of good will. Instead he would try to understand them and blame his own society for not doing likewise. He thought wars were caused by bad economic and social conditions, and did not understand that aggressive ideologies like fascism and communism were inherently expansionist.

His more directly political views were formed in the 1930s. At the LSE, Harold Laski convinced him of the “myth of 1917”, that the Russian Revolution was a key turning point in world history, a view Mac Ball passed on to his student Manning Clark. He adopted a familiar brand of mild peace-loving socialism. His view of the Soviet Union in the 1930s reveals him as a standard fellow traveller: 

Though I think it likely that Russia has discovered more just and efficient economic methods than are yet adopted anywhere under the British flag, I still feel that British political principles are superior to those of any other country.

This quote also illustrates his penchant for walking on both sides of the street. But what he saw on a trip to Germany in the late 1930s convinced him to drop his pacifism and to oppose Nazism. In the 1930s crying “peace, peace” all the time objectively helped the Nazis—it blamed our side and let the Nazis off scot-free, as Mac Ball then realised. Nations need liberty as well as peace; they can’t have peace without it.

Mac Ball was right to argue in the early 1940s that sending our troops to the European theatre of war endangered our security. After the war he focused on the rise of anti-colonialism, nationalism and communism in Asia. But he unlearnt some of the lessons of the 1930s. He reverted to calling for peace on all occasions, criticising the West for its failings but not, except on a few occasions, the Asian communist regimes, which he even supported in the belief that they would improve Asian economic conditions more than any Western ideologies. He seems to have been inoculated against anti-communism by his training under Laski.

Mac Ball became such a popular broadcaster that by the early 1950s he had a virtual monopoly of political comment on the ABC. But Menzies was now Prime Minister, and anti-communism the dominant foreign policy view in the community and in government. The ABC, being a traditionalist organisation in those days (in contrast to today) suggested that other commentators should be employed to “balance” Mac Ball’s frequently anti-anti-communist, anti-US viewpoint. Mac Ball, who had headed a prominent anti-censorship lobby in the 1930s, alleged censorship by the ABC. This was strange, as it contradicted his earlier promotion of tolerance and hearing all sides.

Ai Kobayashi speculates that Mac Ball’s poor academic output was because he was populariser who didn’t bother to research details, an argument advanced by his colleagues at the time. A more likely reason was that he had no strong positive beliefs, and that the hazy 1930s socialist outlook, which he never bothered to develop or critique, became less and less plausible as the decades rolled on. 

One difficulty with this book is that Ms Kobayashi does not clearly distinguish between her own views and those of her subject whom she is para­phrasing. She writes that during the Korean War period Mac Ball faced the problem of 

the political climate of the Cold War loaded with strong anti-communist sentiments—in which the principles of liberal democracy—freedom of thought and freedom of expression and association—seemed to be jeopardized.

This seems to me a peculiarly lop-sided view, seeing anti-communism as the suppressor of liberty rather than communism, Senator McCarthy as the villain rather than Mao. But it also comes troub­lingly close to some of Mac Ball’s own lop-sided anti-Western sentiments at the time, without making it clear if Ms Kobayashi was intending to make that connection. 

This book raises an allegation by Dr Frank Knopfelmacher in the 1960s of “undue Stalinist influence among academics” at the university, including the Political Science Department. Having thought it an important enough issue to raise in her book, Ms Kobayashi is obliged to treat it properly. Instead all we get is a few pages on how unbalanced Dr Knopfelmacher was, and how the lectures on the Soviet Union by Dr Lloyd Churchward, a hard-line Stalinist communist, were “virtually devoid of ideological bias”, and “balanced” and “fair”. To cap it off, Ms Kobayashi tells us that “as Churchward was a member of the CPA, so [David] Kemp had strong political allegiance to the Liberal Party”. This was the fallacious argument used at the time by Churchward’s defenders, which Ms Kobayashi has now adopted as her own, without telling the reader of its origin. (I hope I don’t have to rehearse the reasons why the supposed parallel is spurious.)

This is a hoary and much discussed problem, with an extensive literature which Ms Kobayashi, having raised the issue, treats as though it does not exist. The Political Science Department was gradually formed out of the History Department during the 1940s. The key figure was the notorious communist and spy Ian Milner, who is not even mentioned in this book, even though the on-line Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Mac Ball lists Milner as a work colleague. Milner was Acting Head of the Political Science Department in 1944. Another early staff member, Norman Richmond, is briefly mentioned here, though we are not told he also was a Communist Party member, as was Lloyd Churchward. Manning Clark, a fellow traveller and admirer of the Soviet Union, was Acting Head of the Department in 1946. Not a bad start for a small department. Coincidence is hardly enough to explain this tight cabal of comrades; someone or some group must have been behind this start­ling sequence of appointments. I hasten to add that Mac Ball was away from the department for most of the 1940s on government missions, and as far as I know was not involved in these appointments, and has never been under any suspicion of espionage or other improper activities, unlike some of his colleagues. A number of Melbourne University academics were subjects of interest at the 1949 Victorian government’s Royal Commission on Communism, and the federal government’s Petrov Royal Commission. Assessing all this information is essential in coming to a conclusion either way on Dr Knopfelmacher’s charge, but it has largely gone down the memory hole in Ai Kobayshi’s account.

The problem with this biography is not that it is hagiographic, as it gives a fair account of Mac Ball’s weaknesses, but that it is too close to its subject. Ms Kobayashi recounts an incident where a university staff member, Hugo Wolfsohn, publicly accused Mac Ball of “administrative terrorism”. Instead of asking if there was any truth in this claim, she simply repeats in favourable terms reactions at the time. Wolfsohn was declared to be “idiosyncratic”, “unpredictable”, “prickly” and “difficult”. One staff member said: “Mac was a gentleman. He always behaved in a very proper and decent way towards people.” These claims are simply a diversion from the issue of how Mac Ball ran his department. There is evidence in the book itself that he made “abrupt and arbitrary decisions”. As Central European émigré Jews, Wolfsohn and Knopfelmacher were being put through what the US author Thomas Cuddihy has called “the ordeal of civility”, the series of tests and hoops newcomers were put through in WASP-run societies to demonstrate they were not salonfähig, not acceptable in polite society, whereas Mac was a gentleman.