The Scrim-Lee Papers: C. G. Scrimgeour and John A. Lee remember the crisis years 1930-40 by Colin Graham Scrimgeour, John Alexander Lee
The Great Depression -- in New Zealand as elsewhere a period of distress, mass unemployment, breadlines, political and big business skulduggery and at times, violence and repression. In broader view the period can also be seen to be the catalyst for dramatic social change, for challenging the order of a powerful elite: demands for a greater sharing of wealth and opportunity that were pitted against the inertia of a system which put moneyed interests before the basic welfare of people. Prominent in the turbulent tide of events in this country were two men, one a Methodist parson, the other a Labour Party MP, both committed to improving the common lot. The parson, C.G. (Uncle Scrim) Scrimgeour, had established the Auckland City Mission and was feeding and clothing Depression down-and-outs as best he could. The MP, John A. Lee, was spurring his Party to its first term of government. The two men first met one day in the early thirties when the imperfections of the world's trading systems were beginning to assume chronic proportions: inextricably tied as they were (and still are) to profitability, the systems incapable of adjusting to a time of over-production and under-consumption. Millions overseas, and tens of thousands in New Zealand were made redundant and went hungry, though raw materials and food abounded. And, as the authors tell in this book, it was all largely unnecessary. There were solutions. It was the refusal of Coates's Coalition Government to seek out those solutions and to put people before banks and overseas bond holders that set the stage for Labour's landslide victory at the 1935 election. It was their shared concern for the socialism of fair distribution that drove Lee and Scrim together, and as friends they supported each other through the numerous tribulations which that concern meant -- the jamming of Scrim's 1ZB Friendly road radio station on the eve of the '35 election; antagonism towards Lee from Labour Government administration; Scrim's banning and eventual sacking as first Controller of Commercial Broadcasting; Lee's dramatic expulsion from the Labour Party. The Papers is a unique record by two participants in those crisis years--Years in which the character of the country's future as a welfare staqte was largely formed. Many of the events the authors reconstruct have never been widely revealed before, let alone published. The story is told in the form of a statement and comment between Scrim and Lee, as it was in their voluminous correspondence from which the book grew ...--Inside front over.
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Binding: Hardcover
Published by: A. H. & A. W. Reed: , 1976
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ISBN: / 0589009729
151 pages.
Book Condition: Good
dj faded. Name on ffep
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