1913: The Great Strike Boogaloo
September 24, 2021
By AHNZ
The New Zealand of 1912 was in one of its mini-civil war time periods. The previous 20 year era had been what Strauss-Howe Generational Theory refers to as Third Turning: Unraveling. The old social order and national identity had been picked apart so that by 1912 the time had come for 20 years of The Fourth Turning: Crisis.
During the Unraveling (1891-1912) New Zealand had come to be governed by feels over reals and by an openly socialistic government. Income tax was imposed for the first time. The great estates were attacked and confiscated. It was all to pay for experimental socialist programs. For example, old age pensions and state houses and government bankrolled tourism and hotel chains and banks. Women’s suffrage. Weberian bureaucracy first infected us and metastasised. Under the Liberal government spanning this period our mainstream had become hedonistic, race-obsessed, apathetic, paternalistic, and entitled.
Fourth Turning Begins
1912 Saw three big events marking the start of our Fourth Turning. In March, Captain Robert Falcon Scott froze to death exploring Antarctica. In April, the “unsinkable” Titanic plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic along with the complacent chauvanism the British had lately sunk to. These were great, unraveling, blows to the confidence of the British Empire of which New Zealand was a colony.
At home, half the year was taken up by New Zealand being put into lockdown by the New Zealand Federation of Labour (Red Feds.) Workers around the country striked in their industries in solidarity with the dispute of the Waihi goldminers. So much for the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act (1894) that had outlawed strikes in favor of compulsory arbitration we once bragged about to the whole world.
“The Boogaloo is the chimpout at the end of this age of the world. It is Ragnarok. It is Armageddon. It is the great reconciliation of grudges and grievances.”
“It’s assumed that the Boogaloo will involve a lot of violence, especially in the early days…Also related is discussion about social unrest. People like to talk about what might kick the Boogaloo off.” – Clown World Chronicles: What is the ‘Boogaloo’?, VJM (2019)
New Zealand was fed up with the lockdown and the elites picking apart their society. Scott becoming a Popsicle and Titanic an aquarium ornament were just the first straw. In the election of 1912 the Liberals were finally kicked out after 22 years and ‘farmer’ William Massey became the new Prime Minister.
Boogaloo Dudes
On Black Tuesday, 12 November 1912, the striking Waihi miners battled strike-breakers backed by Massey and the police force at his command. The strikers lost the battle. One of theirs was killed and his death greatly politicised but the war continued.
In The Great Strike of 1913, 22 October-20 December1, watersider unionists in Wellington pledged to overthrow Capitalism and take over their workplaces and run them for themselves. Other centers (Auckland, Huntly, Westport,..) followed suit, watching and emulating. New Zealand was being locked down again. On 5 November the The Battle of Featherston Street put the might of the new conservative mainstream against the dregs of the old Liberal-Labour regime who had now lost official martial and political power. The ‘Red Fed’ strikers and their class sympathisers were overcome by the police, army, navy, employers, and the mounted farmers militia special constables answering Massey’s call for help- Massey’s Cossacks; The Warf was re-taken. In Auckland, On November 8th, Team Massey took back the striker-held wharves and violently cleared the surrounding streets. Once the territory of the warves had been taken back it was only a matter of time before the Red Feds were crushed because they had lost their hostage (New Zealand’s economy.)
“Pro-strike tram drivers tried to ram specials on horseback, and metal spikes and detonators were thrown at horses’ hooves. Eventually the specials broke through and took control of the wharves. This was a decisive moment in the strike.” – nzhistory.gov
This mini-civil war was fought with ‘pepper spray’, explosives, spikes, stones, clubs, horses, and blunt instruments. However machine guns, bayonets and battleships were on display. Even the Prime Minister started conspicuously carrying a revolver in his hip-pocket. It was a horrible, divided, violent time.
Do transitions from Turning 3 Unravellings to Turning 4 Crises need to be savage?
The ‘Prophet’ Generation who presided over the preceding Unraveling (1891-1912) somewhat ensured it. They pressed their advantage while in power, forcing things on New Zealanders in a way that was certain to rebound one day when they reached elderhood.
Boogaloo 2020s
Today the ‘Woke’ Generation also takes away the free speech, guns, T-shirts, alcohol, and drugs from the out-group they are opposed to. They cancel opposition websites and voices and social media accounts. They banned books, crushed and/or confiscated vehicles, even had people fired from their jobs. Institutions, like public libraries or our public schools schools, have been re-formed to propagandise children against the family values chosen by at least some New Zealanders. Those Kiwis become proportionally alienated.
The new ‘Hero’ generation growing to adulthood will, short of being deported or killed outright, come for justice one day. Culturally orphaned and consigned to the underground, this class will always rise again. After being in the cold for decades, that’s exactly what happened with the ‘Nomad’ and ‘Hero’ farmers under William Massey’s banner. The Liberals, the r-selected, became toxic and covetous of their power and wouldn’t hand it over peacefully and democratically. So, it came down to skull-cracking, Boogaloo.
The 2020s COVID Crisis has less plausible pretense at being about health as each day goes by. It is political. There is a division between those who want vaccination as a choice and those who want it forced. And, between those who want vaccine passports and masks and government-tracking and those who do not.
Nobody claims the vaccine prevents infection or spread. Nobody claims that masks have more than a negligible affect on health. But these things do send powerful social signals about which team someone is on in the current mini-civil war. Likewise, nobody deep down really believes a man-made climate change disaster is a meteorological problem. It’s a political problem, the knowledge that the human climate is Turning and those who once were first soon shall be last.
Another battle line forming up is between the underground, suppressed, farming community and the Woke urban liberals currently in power. The conflict between the Red Feds and Massey’s rural Specials became large and polarised and violent but in an early phase looked a lot like today’s contest between the Groundswell farming movement and the establishment.
For now the downtrodden, non-woke, rural, conservative bloc has no William Massey and do not hold the treasury benches. The military and the police take their orders from the Labour 6.0 of Jacinda Ardern. So it was in 1912 until the Liberals lost power to Massey. Only then did their political leaders start begging for mercy. Liberal leader Thomas Wilford extorted Massey to, “shake himself free from the trammels of the past” and to “be evolutionary not revolutionary.” In other words, don’t take revenge on us now that you’re the one with the power! Joseph Ward, another Liberal leader, pleaded for Massey not to be an autocrat as the Liberals had become but to “Be like I used to be.”
Too little, too late, to convert to “kindness” when the powerful have become powerless. The best thing that anyone governing can do is to do what Prime Minister Ardern promised to do upon her re-election: “I want to govern for all New Zealanders.” The New Zealanders who are exploited, cancelled, and forced into the underground always rise again. Out of the Fourth Turning that Massey led New Zealand into came a new consensus led by the people he had made the underground: Labour 1.0.
In the hour of greatest slaughter the great avenger is being born. These cycles of history don’t look like they’re ever going to stop. Always we see 4 archetypes of Prophet, Hero, Nomad, and Artist. Always they are being born, reaching adulthood, mid-life, and elderhood. Always the composition of our society is in flux, transitioning into Turnings 1-4. What we can control is how peacefully and respectfully those transitions occur by giving up our power when our turn is up and not crushing Others when we have the power. Only this will allow diverse people to live together at the same time and in the same space without having to try to harm one another.
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1 The Great Strike’s last gasp extended to mid-January for miners who still held out before the penny dropped for them too
Image ref. colorised by unknown, showing mounted Special Constables on horseback lined up in front of the premises of A and G Price on Quay Street, Auckland, during the November 1913 Waterfront Strike. A N Breckon for NZ Herald; Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections; Timespanner, Facebook
Image ref. Mounted Special Constables during the 1913 waterfront strike, Wellington. Sydney Charles Smith; National Library
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