Conservative Protest or Conservative Radicalism? The New Zealand Legion in a Comparative Context, 1930-1955

Abstract

Robert Campbell Begg was not a skilled orator. He was described by those who saw him speak as ‘placid’ and ‘undemonstrative’, despite having served as an officer during the Great War. Nevertheless, after being approached to lead a new non-party movement named the New Zealand Legion in February 1933, Begg threw himself into a whirlwind speaking tour of the country. The object of the Legion was simple – ‘to secure a Government . . . freed from the trammels of sectional pressure and actuated solely by the motive of patriotic effort’. The Great Depression had caused a national crisis, claimed Begg, and only the combined efforts of a self-sacrificing citizenry could bring it back from the brink. In this, the ‘undemonstrative’ Begg proved wildly successful – by the end of the year, his idealist appeals to national unity and moral regeneration had enticed 20,000 members into the Legion’s fold. Less than a year later, however, the Legion was all but defunct.

This paper argues that the Legion’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall into obscurity is best explained by viewing it within an international context. That it arose during the Great Depression was no coincidence, nor was its divergence from the conservative mainstream that gave birth to it. Its policies were reminiscent of the fascist and far-right movements that were taking hold in Europe at the time. However, to categorize the Legion as fascist would both oversimplify the movement and genericize the term ‘fascist’. Instead, this paper compares the Legion to several similar movements in Australia during the 1930s. It suggests that the Legion was merely one manifestation of a broader phenomenon of ‘conservative radicalism’ – a phenomenon that should be considered the antipodean reflection of what was occurring elsewhere in the world.