John A. Lee

This article is about the New Zealand politician and writer John A. Lee. For the US politician, see John Adams Lee .

John A. Lee

John Alfred Alexander Lee (born October 31, 1891 in Dunedin , † June 13, 1982 in Auckland ) was a New Zealand politician and writer. The radical socialist was one of the most prominent Labor politicians in his country, but also earned a reputation as a contentious and entertaining publicist.

life and work

The son of a juggler, whom little John Lee hardly got to know, grew up in poverty. He skipped school and made the acquaintance of schools and prisons through smuggling and theft. Three years after his release from prison he “saved” himself to take part in the First World War . Awarded an award in the Battle of Flanders in 1917 , he lost his left arm a year later. Back in New Zealand in 1919, Lee tried his hand at first as a shopkeeper. His involvement (on the "left wing") of the New Zealand Labor Party soon led him to a career as a politician. In the years 1922-28 and 1931-43 he had a parliamentary mandate, at times he even tried to prevent the consequences of the crisis from being passed on to the Little Man as Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Finance in the cabinet of Michael Joseph Savage (1935-40). Due to his comparatively radical positions, however, he made many enemies in his party, especially since he denounced the lack of internal party democracy. In 1940, on the occasion of a journalistic attack by Lee against Savage, a few days before his death from cancer, Lee founded the Democratic Labor Party , which, of course, performed poorly in the 1943 elections. Since Lee had lost his mandate and also had to be accused of cultivating the autocratic leadership style in his new party that he had criticized his old one, he turned to writing as a matter of priority. In this area Lee, spurred on by the books Jack London and Upton Sinclair , had already tried successfully in 1934 with his autobiographical and documentary novel Children of the Poor (Children of Poverty). Lee had a lucky hand for characters and tension, but lacked the aesthetic distance that his constant interventions in fictional events would have softened. In addition to short stories, non-fiction books and articles, he also wrote his politician memoirs (1963), in which he accused the Labor Party as a traitor to the working class. At least they shine with their title: Simple on a Soapbox .

Works

• Children of the Poor , autobiographical novel, 1934
• The Hunted , autobiographical novel, 1936
• Civilian into Soldier , 1937
• Socialism in New Zealand , 1938
• The Yanks are Coming , novel, 1943
• Shining with the Shiner , 1944 (Anecdotes about the rascal Ned Slattery , continued 1964)
• Simple on a Soapbox , Memories, 1963
• Shiner Slattery , 1964
• Rhetoric at the Red Dawn , 1965
• The Lee Way to Public Speaking , 1965
• Delinquent Days , 1967 (from Lee's youth, sequel to The Hunted )
• Mussolini's Millions , detective novel, 1970
• Political Notebooks , 1973
• For Mine is the Kingdom , 1975 (on the "brewery baron" Sir Ernest Hyam Davis , 1872–1962)
• Soldier , 1976
• The Scrim-Lee Papers , 1976 (with CG Scrimgeour and Tony Simson)
• Roughnecks, Rolling Stones & Rouseabouts , 1977
• Early Days in New Zealand , 1977
• The John A. Lee Diaries 1936-1940 , 1981
• The Politician , Roman, 1987 (written 1936)

literature

• Dennis McEldowney: John A. Lees Children of the Poor , in: Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel , Auckland, Heinemann 1976, pp. 24-39
• Erik Olssen: John A. Lee , University of Otago Press, 1977

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Psychopathology of Politics
2. ↑ Lee, John A. . New Zealand Book Council , January 2017, accessed April 18, 2018 .  
3. ↑ Among other things, he published a weekly paper entitled John A. Lee's Weekly (1940-48).
4. ↑ Hardly translatable. Soapbox should be the soap box.
5. ↑ On the title, a standing phrase, see WP en , accessed on December 24, 2011