‘This great America’: H. B. Higgins and Transnational Progressivism

Abstract

In 1914, before the outbreak of the World War One, H. B. Higgins travelled at the invitation of ‘industrial counsellor’ Robert Valentine to the United States, where he found an intellectual community of a kind that no political cause or group of people offered at home. There he joined a network of public-spirited experts who moved easily between universities, business, labour reform groups and journalism. Higgins' intellectual exchanges with jurists including Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Learned Hand and labour reformers such as Josephine Goldmark and members of the American Association for Labor Legislation formed the distinctive American context that shaped his iconic ‘Australian’ essay on ‘A New Province for Law and Order’ and a larger transnational Progressivism.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Lee-Ann Monk for her invaluable research assistance.

Notes

¹Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003); H. B. Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order: Industrial Peace through Minimum Wage and Arbitration’, Harvard Law Review 29, no. 1 (November 1915): 14.

²Daniel Rodgers, ‘In Search of Progressivism’, Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982): 127.

³Gerard Henderson to Higgins, Higgins papers MS 1057/264, NLA.

⁴Learned Hand, ‘The Hope of the Minimum Wage’, New Republic, 20 November 1915, 67.

⁵Higgins to Frankfurter, 3 July 1914, Frankfurter papers, Library of Congress, MS 18,868, reel 40. All subsequent references to the Higgins/Frankfurter correspondence refer to this file.

⁶John Rickard, H.B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 123–52.

⁷Higgins to Frankfurter, 15 October 1916.

⁸Tim Rowse, ‘Elusive Middle Ground: A Political History’, in The New Province of Law and Order: 100 Years of Australian Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration, ed. Joe Isaac and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17–54; Stuart Macintyre, ‘Neither Capital nor Labour’, in Foundations of Arbitration: The Origins and Effects of State Compulsory Arbitration, ed. Stuart Macintyre and Richard Mitchell (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989), 193.

¹⁰Higgins to Frankfurter, 8 July 1914.

⁹Rodgers, ‘In Search of Progressivism’, 116.

¹¹Joseph P. Lash, From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter with Biographical Essay (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 12–14.

¹²Higgins to Frankfurter, 8 July 1914.

¹³Higgins to Frankfurter, 8 July 1914.

¹⁴Nettie Palmer, Henry Bourne Higgins: A Memoir (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1931), 265.

¹⁵Rickard, Higgins, vii.

¹⁶James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Peter Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of Welfare States (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987); Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890–1960 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1984); Diane Kirkby, Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice. The Life of an Australian-American Reformer (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

¹⁷Marilyn Lake, ‘“The Brightness of Eyes and Quiet Assurance Which Seem to Say American”: Alfred Deakin's Identification with Republican Manhood’, Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (April 2007): 32–51.

¹⁸Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order’, 13.

¹⁹Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 66–74.

²⁰Sam Gompers, The Eight-Hour Workday: Its Inauguration, Enforcement and Influences, Eight Hour Series, no. 4 [no date]; Victor S. Clark, The Labour Movement in Australasia: A Study in Social Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 1906); Philadelphia Enquirer, 9 November 1906, 8; M. B. Hammond, ‘Judicial Interpretation of the Minimum Wage in Australia’, American Economic Review 3, no. 2 (1913): 259–86.

²¹ American Labor Legislation Review 3 (1913), cited in Jerold Waltman, The Politics of the Minimum Wage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 14.

²²Hammond to Andrews, 14 August 1911, correspondence files, series 5001, box 4, AALL papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

²⁴Hammond, ‘Judicial Interpretation’, 259.

²³Hammond to Andrews, 14 August 1911. Andrews to Singer, 17 August 1911.

²⁵Andrews to Hammond, 23 August 1911, AALL papers.

²⁶Hammond, ‘Judicial Interpretation’, 285.

²⁷Hammond, ‘Judicial Interpretation’, 285.

²⁸Joseph A. McCartin, Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 51–2.

²⁹Higgins draft autobiography, MS 1057/3, NLA.

³⁰Higgins to Frankfurter, 3 July 1914.

³¹Josephine Goldmark, Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life Story (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953), 157.

³²Quoted in Roe, Nine Australian Progressives, 53.

³³ Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 January 1913, 9.

³⁴Higgins travel diary, 24 June 1914, Higgins papers MS 1047/3, NLA.

³⁵Mary Chamberlain, ‘Settling Labor Disputes in Australia’, Survey, 1 August 1914, 455–58.

³⁶See for example Joint Board of Sanitary Control to John Andrews, 17 July 1911, AALL papers, correspondence files.

³⁸Higgins to Frankfurter, 3 July 1914.

³⁷Higgins to Frankfurter, 16 December 1916.

³⁹Higgins travel diary, 30 June 1914, Higgins papers MS 1057/3, NLA.

⁴⁰Higgins to Frankfurter, 3 July 1914.

⁴¹Higgins to Frankfurter, 12 December 1914.

⁴²Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, Introduction by William E. Leuchtenberg (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961).

⁴³Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, Introduction by William E. Leuchtenberg (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961), 59.

⁴⁴Higgins to Frankfurter, 19 July 1915.

⁴⁶ Bunting v. Oregon, Felix Frankfurter, ‘Brief for the Defendant’, ‘The Case for the Shorter Working Day’, Supreme Court, 1915, vol. 2, 523.

⁴⁵Frankfurter to Holmes, 11 November 1915; Robert Mennel and Christine Thompson, eds, Holmes and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence 1912–34 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996), 39.

⁴⁷M. B. Hammond, ‘Where Life is More than Meat: The Australian Experience with Wages Boards’, Survey: The Case of the Minimum Wage, XXXIII, no. 19 (6 February 1915): 495–502.

⁴⁸Learned Hand, ‘The Hope of the Minimum Wage’, New Republic, 20 November 1915, 66–8, 66–7.

⁴⁹Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order’, 23.

⁵⁰Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order’, 25.

⁵¹Hammond, ‘The Australian Experience with Wages Boards’, 496; Alice S. Cheyney, ‘The Course of Minimum Wage Legislation in the United States’, International Labor Review 25 (1938): 30–31.

⁵²Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Law School, from Report of the President of Harvard University 1915–16; Felix Frankfurter, ‘The Law and Law Schools’, reprinted from Reports of the American Bar Association XL (1915), Higgins papers MS 1057/12, NLA.

⁵³Higgins to Frankfurter, 4 December 1915.

⁵⁴ Waterside Workers Federation of Australia v. The Commonwealth Steamship Owners Association and Others, CAR (1915), 301.

⁵⁵Chris Nyland, ‘Scientific Management and the 44-Hour Week’, Labour History 53 (1987): 23.

⁵⁶Josephine Goldmark, Fatigue and Efficiency (Boulder: University of Colorado, 1913, reprint), 195–200.

⁵⁷Higgins to Frankfurter, 12 December 1914.

⁵⁸Higgins, ‘The Shadows of the Slope’. Frankfurter papers, Library of Congress.

⁵⁹Higgins to Frankfurter, 14 December 1917.

⁶⁰Higgins to Frankfurter, 14 October 1917.

⁶¹Higgins to Frankfurter, 15 October 1916.

⁶²Higgins to Frankfurter, 16 December 1916.

⁶³Higgins to Frankfurter, 14 October 1917.

⁶⁴Higgins to Frankfurter, 14 December 1917.

⁶⁵Higgins, ‘Address delivered … to the Millions Club, Sydney. 1 June 1917’. Frankfurter papers, Library of Congress.

⁶⁶Higgins to Frankfurter, 30 September 1917; Felix Frankfurter, ‘New Labor Ideas Taught by War’, New York Times, 15 December 1918, 8.

⁶⁷Higgins to Frankfurter, 14 October 1917.

⁶⁸Higgins to Frankfurter, 6 February 1921.

⁶⁹Frankfurter to Higgins, 23 December 1920.

⁷⁰Higgins to Frankfurter, 1 May 1921.

⁷¹Higgins to Frankfurter, 1 May 1921.

⁷²Samuel Crowther, ‘Who Wants a Living Wage?’, Collier's (1922), 8.

⁷³ Adkins v. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia, Supreme Court of the US, 9 April 1923, no. 795, LexisNexis.20.

⁷⁴Irene Osgood Andrews, ‘Minimum Wage Comes Back!’, American Labor Legislation Review 100 (1933): 103–5.

⁷⁵H. B. Higgins, ‘The Rigid Constitution’, Political Science Quarterly (June 1905): 211–12.

⁷⁶Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 155.

⁷⁷Frankfurter to Higgins, 25 July 1918.

⁷⁸Higgins to Frankfurter, 15 October 1916.

⁷⁹Frankfurter to Holmes, 11 September 1915; Lash, From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter, 13.