Researching John Andrews

In 1921 he was called by President Harding to serve on the Unemployment Conference. He was a member of the secretariat to the League of Nations' first official International Labor Conference in Washington, D.C..

Dismissed in 1886 from his clerical employment with the Victorian public service for "insubordination", he had already had occasional pieces published, including in the Melbourne Herald where he won the poetry prize in 1885 for a poem about the Eight Hour Day. After dismissal he earned his living from his writing and from occasional white-collar employment, being published in mainstream journals such as Melbourne Punch and The Bulletin and elsewhere. But he would also live in the extreme of poverty.

It is unclear when he joined the Melbourne Anarchist Club but was appearing at its meetings by early 1887, and rapidly became a significant member. In the Melbourne Anarchist Club he represented the communist anarchism pole, strongly influenced by Kropotkin, and edited the club's journal Honesty. He took an active part in the struggles of the day, notably the 1890 Australian maritime dispute and was involved with the Sydney direct action group, the Active Service Brigade. He was imprisoned for three months in NSW in 1894 for the publication of A Handbook of Anarchy (the actual charge being a technicality), and further imprisoned for five months (plus two months on remand) for sedition in 1895. Skilled in languages he corresponded continually with the European anarchist movement. His friend the poet and socialist Bernard O'Dowd claimed that he was fluent in all the European languages except Russian, and also fluent in Latin and Chinese. (O'Dowd may have been slightly exaggerating but apart from his European correspondence Andrews is known to have studied Chinese and he would have learned Latin at Scotch College.)

A polymath, personally eccentric, ascetic in habits, a defender of the despised Chinese, he was nevertheless respected in the labour movement. Bernard O'Dowd supported his appointment as editor of the labour journal Tocsin in 1902, a position he held for a few months before his health collapsed and he was hospitalized and shortly died of tuberculosis. He was then 37.

Andrews was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on November 10, 1898, to Evangeline Holcombe Walker and noted historian Charles McLean Andrews. During his journalistic career he worked for Chung Mei in China before joining the Connecticut-based New Haven Journal-Courier. After Yale Law School and acceptance to the New York State bar, he began practicing with the law firm Root, Clark Buckner & Ballentine before leaving to write History of the founding of Wolf's Head, and then became involved in the publication of poetry journals. In 1936, he wrote Prelude to 'Icaros', designed as the introduction to an epic about Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight.

In 1940 he joined the United States Justice Department as chief of the Federal-State Relations Section, and later as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division.

He was director of the Washington Institute of Mental Health in 1951, then joined the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton before forming his own firm, Andrews Associaresm Inc., and retiring from the field in 1962.

In 1963 he was co-recipient of the Robert Frost Poetry Award, and edited Literary Quarterly and Poet Lore.

From 2009 until his retirement in 2015, Andrews was director of Centennial Institute, a public policy think tank based at Colorado Christian University, and chairman of its annual Western Conservative Summit. He currently heads up Americans for America, a nonpartisan citizens group; chairs two counter-jihad advisory boards; and blogs at BackboneAmerica.net and Ananias.org.

A familiar voice in Colorado TV, radio, and newspaper commentary since the 1980s, he is also the author of Responsibility Reborn: A Citizen's Guide to the Next American Century (Denali Press, 2011) and Backbone Colorado USA: Dispatches from the Divide (CreateSpace, 2015). He previously served as editor of Imprimis at Hillsdale College, was a senior executive with two Christian ministries, and participated as a member of the adjunct faculty in public policy at the Colorado School of Mines for 18 years.