Preaching the gospel of whiteness

In February 1924, the sixty-year-old W. M. Hughes sailed from Sydney for a five-month lecture tour of the United States. Now a backbencher, he had lost the leadership of the conservative government after the national elections at the end of 1922, following conflict between the coalition partners. He spoke in major American cities and was invited to leading universities. He had prepared talks on a number of topics – the Versailles Conference, Reparations, the League of Nations and Australia's system of industrial arbitration, but the lectures that attracted most attention were on the future of international relations in the Pacific and the White Australia policy.

It was race that most interested his American audience and Hughes didn't disappoint them, explaining that in Australia, ‘we believe in race’. Hughes subscribed to the idea that as Anglo-Saxons, Australians and Americans were ‘brother nations by blood’ (interestingly, perhaps as a result of the war, Josiah Royce's ‘sister republics’ were now imagined as masculine in character). Race was responsible, said Hughes, for the energy and the initiative ‘of our people’. The greatness of the United States was due to the hitherto purity of stock, which must not be watered down by the mixture of alien races. Australia was of the same select stock and claimed to be 97 per cent Anglo-Saxon.