From convicted criminal to politician
New Zealand’s welfare state philosophy had a number of outstanding founding leaders. Among them was John A Lee who was, at different times a convicted criminal, decorated soldier of World War I, publican, politician and writer.
He was born into a low income family in Dunedin in 1891 and by 1904, with only about nine years formal education and no father at home, went to work in a boot shop and then in a printer’s office.
By the age of 15 he was in trouble with the law for petty theft and was sent to the Burnham Industrial School. By the time he was just 20 years old he was in even bigger trouble and spent a year in Mount Eden prison for smuggling liquor into the King Country, which was still a ‘‘dry area’’, and burglary.
The army had a place for such wild young men and, in March 1916, Lee enlisted in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. He was articulate, quick-witted and clever, and began to write regular items from the front for Clutha Mackenzie’s Chronicles of the NZEF. In June 1917 he was awarded the DCM for single-handedly capturing a German machine-gun post at Messines Ridge. A year later he was wounded and lost his left arm.
Back in New Zealand he married Mollie Guy and, with a rehabilitation loan they established a small business as a soap manufacturer. By this time Lee developed a life-long passion for politics and work for the underprivileged joining both the RSA and the New Zealand Labour Party.
By 1920 he was president of the Auckland Labour Representation Committee and a member of the party’s national executive. Two years later he was elected to Parliament for Auckland East. He lost the seat in a subsequent general election but, in 1931, he returned to Parliament as the member for Grey Lynn.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a tough time for New Zealand and Lee organised public meetings to dissuade the Government from its policy of retrenchment.
In Dunedin he declared ‘‘war on those who are trying to drag the people down to degradation and poverty. We are starving our way to prosperity in a world of plenty, and it can’t be done’’.
He accurately predicted there would be violence and in April he led a huge demonstration by civil servants against their second 10 per cent wage cut. The unemployed joined in and the demonstration quickly became a riot.
During this time he wrote ‘‘Children of the Poor’’ which was a reflection on the misery of the Great Depression and was largely autobiographical.
Labour swept to victory in 1935 and Lee expected to be in cabinet but Prime Minister Michael Savage, made sole selector and he no longer liked or trusted Lee. They had clashed on policy and tactics the following year Savage appointed Lee to the cabinet committees on finance, defence and housing.
Lee quickly created a new government department and oversaw all the details of a large-scale programme of state house construction. By March 1939 some 3440 houses had been completed. They defined new standards for domestic housing and, in some cities, large new subdivisions were built, centred on parks and gardens, with schools, halls and shopping centres. The success of the programme owed much to Lee’s enthusiasm, organisational ability and forceful personality.
That same strong personality also had him at odds with his parliamentary colleagues and the infighting became personal and destructive. Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939 Lee’s supporters pushed to have him appointed to cabinet but Savage, who was terminally ill, appointed David Wilson, the party’s national secretary. Lee began working on ‘Psycho-pathology in politics’, an incisive, though veiled, attack on the dying Savage’s mental capacity to discharge his duties. Even some of Lee’s supporters thought he had gone too far.
The essay appeared in the left-wing journal Tomorrow in December 1939 while Savage was almost continuously unconscious and his deputy, Peter Fraser, was in London. Lee was dismissed as parliamentary undersecretary and preparations began to have him expelled from the Labour Party in the 1940 conference.
Lee was expelled by 546 to 344 votes. Two days later, on March 27, Savage died.
Lee promptly formed a Democratic Labour Party and then the Democratic Soldier Labour Party but both were shortlived. Shortly afterwards he lost the Grey Lynn seat and his political career was all but over.
He found a new lease of life as a writer in the 1960s. ‘‘Simple on a Soap-Box,’’ his account of the events of the 1930s, appeared in 1963. He wrote other books over the next 20 years on his political views and opinions. By this time he had become something of a sad curiosity to those who did not know his contribution to the New Zealand welfare state philosophy. He was invited to speak on university campuses where he surprised with his support of American intervention in Vietnam. He was interviewed on television, and was awarded an honorary law degree by the University of Otago in 1969. He died in Auckland on June 13, 1982.