The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  The strike collapsed within ten days of the riot. Several union sympathizers – “agitators from Winnipeg,” Inspector W.J. Moorehead called them – turned up to urge the rank and file to vote against returning to work. Moorehead dispatched a sergeant and eight men to arrest them on the catch-all charge of vagrancy. Two days later the strike ended.

  The official RCMP attitude can be seen in Moorehead’s report of October 15: “The rioters consisted largely of Foreigners as very few English speaking people took an aggressive part.… I would strongly recommend discriminate deportation of the radical foreign element. In my opinion and until this method is put into effect, there is sure to be continued trouble.…”

  The Premier, James Anderson, made his own position clear on October 17 when he urged the miners to sever relations with the union leaders “because of their revolutionary tendencies.” The union had no chance. The owners continued to refuse to meet with it.

  The royal commission set up to investigate conditions in the mines accepted most of the miners’ grievances, but unfortunately its terms of reference did not include an impartial investigation of the riot. Judge Edmund Wylie, the commissioner, recommended a fairer wage scale and better working and living conditions. There was some improvement, but the operators followed few of the recommendations. The blacklist continued. Pete Gembey, for instance, who was blacklisted in 1931, didn’t get his job back for ten years.

  It didn’t pay to take a stand. Late that year, Sergeant J.G. Metcalfe reported to his superiors in Regina that any man “who has nerve enough to approach the Owners on behalf of the workers … is immediately branded a Red.…”

  No one wanted to help the families of the dead and wounded miners rendered destitute by the events of September 29. The union had approached the Estevan town council, which refused to issue any relief. The RCMP was worried that the union would then go after the federal government for assistance. But Ottawa denied all responsibility, insisting that the union look after its own. The union, however, was rapidly falling apart. In the years that followed, no other labour organization was found to replace it. The mine operators flatly refused to recognize any organized group until 1945, when times were better and the now militant United Mine Workers of America under John L. Lewis moved in and successfully organized the coalfields.

  Most of the principals are long dead, but in Estevan the strike has never been forgotten. And no one who strolls down Fourth Street from Souris Avenue to Eleventh can miss the small monument that stands in front of the old city hall. Here are engraved the names of the three men who died on that bloody afternoon almost sixty years ago. One line has been carefully erased, but everybody in town is familiar with it and never tires of repeating to the visitor the original obliterated words: “MURDERED BY THE RCMP.”

  6

  Nine on trial

  The royal commission into the Estevan tragedy was still sitting in Regina on November 2 – Martin Day and Dr. Creighton both gave testimony that day – when another hearing began to make headlines in Toronto. In the wood-panelled No. 3 Courtroom of Toronto’s romanesque city hall, the trial of Tim Buck and eight comrades, arrested in the August raids on Communist headquarters, got under way at last.

  There they sat, nine ordinary-looking men, the objects of considerable curiosity, some apprehension, and a modicum of sympathy – a mixed bag of party stalwarts and lesser lights. The diminutive Buck and his tall, spare colleague Tom Ewen of the Workers’ Unity League were the big game. The grizzled Malcolm Bruce, editor of the Worker, was another obvious catch. Others seemed to have been chosen arbitrarily and in one instance by accident. Big John Boychuk and Mathew Popovich, in their blue serge suits – contrasting with the work clothes that Bruce habitually wore – were leaders of the Ukrainian wing of the party. Tom Hill, leader of the Finnish wing, looked almost professorial with his slicked-down hair and steel-rimmed glasses. Three younger men – Buck’s protégé Sam Carr, recently returned from the Lenin School in Moscow, Tomo Cacic, a thirty-six-year-old Croatian-born party member who was trying to start a radical Croatian newspaper, and the twenty-two-year-old Mike Gilmore of the Young Communist League – were smaller fry. Cacic had wandered into the WUL headquarters to read some party literature and chat with the secretary when the police scooped him up. Gilmore had been arrested because he was bunking in Ewen’s flat when the police arrived. When they couldn’t find Ewen, they grabbed Gilmore instead. Since the YCL was not named in the indictment, he was released before the trial ended.

  On the third day of the trial the nine men in the dock were startled to see a familiar if incongruous figure walk into the courtroom – a swarthy, stubby Mounted Policeman, only five feet five inches tall, with a solemn poker face and mild brown eyes. In spite of his scarlet tunic and blue breeches he didn’t look a bit like a Mountie – at least, the Hollywood version. Even the Stetson seemed too big for him, while his European features belied the stereotype. Nevertheless he was an active member of the force and had been since 1918.

  His real name was John Leopold, but the Communists recognized him as Jack Esselwein, a former comrade until his exposure three years before. Once a trusted member of the party (Tom Ewen’s children knew him as “Uncle Jack”), he was privy to its darker secrets – the star witness for the Crown.

  The government had brought Sergeant Leopold down from the Yukon, where he was stationed, to identify the accused men as Communists and to nail down the party’s commitment to violent revolution. No other outsider knew as much about the inner workings of the party as he – but then, he had been a respected insider for seven years. He had emigrated to Canada from Bohemia in 1911, homesteaded on the prairies, and joined the Mounted Police just after the war. Because he was intelligent and spoke four languages, the force waived the rules about stature. By 1920 Leopold was at work under cover, checking into left-wing movements in Regina, posing as Jack Esselwein, a part-time house-painter. He soon became secretary of the Regina Workers’ Party, the above-ground name of the then underground Communist party. Thus he was a trusted member of the party from its founding year, 1921, until he was exposed in 1928.

  There he sat in the witness box, facing but never looking directly at the men who had once been his closest comrades. Understandably nervous, he stared at the ceiling, moistening his lips from time to time as he discussed his own role in the party’s apparatus. It was a role that had once got him arrested and fined for taking part in a demonstration outside the consulate of the United States in Toronto protesting the U.S. government’s role in the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two most famous anarchists of their day. It was the only case on record in which the Communist party had paid the fine (albeit unwittingly) of a member of the hated RCMP.

  Leopold was the icing on the government’s cake, a show-piece who garnered columns of newspaper copy. But the prosecution knew that its real case rested on the documents, most of them of Russian origin, the Mounted Police had gathered and hoped would tie the party to the Soviet Union and the Communist International.

  The government had been able to find no evidence that the Canadian Communists had advocated violence. What it had to prove was guilt by association. Buck, Ewen, and the others had always been careful in their public pronouncements. On the witness stand, Buck denied that the party advocated overturning the government by force. “We teach the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism, that is all.”

  The defence, however, was up against Section 98 of the Criminal Code, the notorious legislation that, in Frank Scott’s words, “for permanent restriction of the rights of association, freedom of discussion, printing and distribution of literature, and for severity of punishment, is unequalled in the history of Canada and probably of any British country for centuries past.”

  The section had been drafted at the time of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which terrified the authorities into taking draconian action. It was an example of the kind of over-reaction to an isolated incident of violence that has cha
racterized the so-called “Peaceable Kingdom.” Canada, a country that has never known a revolution, has always been fearful that one might explode at any time. When D’Arcy McGee was shot in 1868, scores of innocent people were jailed, and the same pattern would appear a century later in Quebec when Pierre Laporte was strangled. In the face of apprehended insurrection, the government of the day has always been ready to stamp on civil liberties. The phrase “peace, order and good government” is not an empty one. Bennett managed to insert the words into the 1931 relief act. That made it possible to deport undesirables without the nuisance of legal proceedings. King, to his credit, fought this provision, which was removed but would be reinstated by a stubborn Bennett in 1933.

  Section 98 was in force for fifteen years. It was the government’s big stick against radical thought because it made mere membership in an illegal organization convincing evidence of guilt. If any organization could be shown to advocate a change in the political or economic system by force or violence, then every member was guilty. If you went to even one of its meetings, gave it money, spoke publicly in its favour, distributed its literature, or wore its emblem you were liable to twenty years’ imprisonment. And contrary to British legal practice, you were held to be guilty until you could prove your innocence. Anyone who rented a hall to an illegal group was subject to a five-thousand-dollar fine. Anyone who printed its literature advocating violent political change, or who imported similar literature, could also go to jail for twenty years. In fact, anybody who advocated violence in this context, whether he belonged to an illegal association or not, could go to jail.

  Not deeds but words alone were enough to convict. And those words could be second-hand. No documentary evidence was submitted in the 1931 trial to show that the Communist Party of Canada had ever committed an act of violence or that the arrested men had ever advocated violent overthrow of the government. It was enough that they belonged to an organization that came under the umbrella of another organization, the Communist International, that did appear to advocate it.

  It wasn’t difficult for the prosecution to prove the international link. Leopold testified to it, and the documents supported him. At its second world conference, the Comintern had declared that a general strike wasn’t enough to achieve victory. “The proletariat must resort to an armed uprising … an organized political party is absolutely essential … hapless labour organizations will not suffice.”

  If that was the Canadian party’s stated goal, there was no evidence to suggest that the men in the dock had the slightest hope of accomplishing it, nor was there any evidence that they had tried. The defence argued that the party had conducted itself legally in Canada and that it wasn’t bound to follow the Moscow line; nor did it advocate or teach revolution. As one of the defendants put it, “it is not necessary for us to spread discontent among the Canadian people. It is being done without our assistance.”

  In the Marxist view of history, revolution was inevitable; the party was merely preparing for the day, which it was certain would come. It would be naïve to believe that the men in the dock might not have harboured wistful hopes for enough power to give the revolution a little shove. But Tim Buck, who was acting as his own counsel, attempted to make the argument of inevitability over and over again in his summing up.

  All the testimony had been presented by the end of the afternoon of November 10, and Buck expected to have the evening to prepare for his address to the jury the following day. Instead of adjourning the session, however, Mr. Justice Wright turned to him and said, “Well, Mr. Buck, have you anything to say?”

  Buck was taken aback. He had a great deal to say, but he wasn’t prepared. He asked for a recess of at least fifteen minutes. The judge allowed him five; he had so little sympathy for the Communist leader that he had not even allowed him to sit at the table reserved for the other lawyers. In spite of this, Buck spoke off the cuff for more than three hours, interrupted constantly by the judge, who was clearly out of patience with his attempts to give not only a history of the Communist Party of Canada but also the history and theory of Marxism and international communism.

  “I do not want to stop you or have the police remove you,” the judge said at one point, “but I want you to confine yourself to the evidence. You are making a harangue on things entirely outside of the evidence. Kindly confine yourself to the case here.”

  Buck tried to hammer home his point that no social system could be overthrown simply because a person or party decided that it should be overthrown, and he insisted that that was the communist belief. Change was effected by economic and historical forces, while “violence has all through history been the result of the fact that the ruling class has fought to maintain its privileged position.”

  It is doubtful whether anyone on the jury understood that fine distinction. Buck later admitted that much of what was said was over the jury’s heads. As he put it, “they just gave up listening.” Some were asleep long before he finished. “I think the judge was awake but he was showing very little interest.”

  Buck, however, was speaking for the record. The twelve good men and true may not have been listening, but the comrades were. The speech – a milestone in the history of the Communist Party of Canada – was reprinted in full by the Canadian Labor Defense League. Until this point, Buck’s position as party leader had been shaky. His address to the jury confirmed it for life.

  When the court adjourned that evening, the party faithful gathered at Buck’s house to congratulate him. Buck was elated, but after the gathering broke up, Becky Buhay, an impassioned orator for the movement, reported to him the gloomy opinion of J.L. Cohen, a left-wing lawyer who had often defended party members. “Sommerville is going to have you convicted,” Buhay told him, mentioning the name of the Crown prosecutor, “independent of anything you say, on the premise that if the Party is allowed to continue, there will be riots and violence, even if you don’t advocate it.”

  Riots and violence – the Peaceable Kingdom’s abiding phobia! Buck realized that she was right. The following day, November 11, in a two-hour address to the jury, Norman Sommerville, K.C., hammered home that point, never forgetting that this was Armistice Day. The aim of the men on trial, he said flatly, was civil war - not in the far distant future but here and now – and “the men in the box constitute the general staff for that civil war.”

  “The time to put out the fire is before the conflagration,” he said. “These men, professional agitators, have been travelling up and down the country … setting class against class … stirring up strife.”

  In his summing up, Mr. Justice Wright took a similar view. The Communist party itself, he indicated, was on trial, and the question was “whether it shall be allowed to grow and flourish on Canadian soil.” He believed the testimony of Leopold, who had sworn that the party intended to overthrow the existing system in the country by force. The other witnesses, he indicated, were less objective and therefore less credible. “If you think force and violence a logical, natural result of their teachings,” he told the jurors, they must agree that the accused were “advocating, advising and defending force and violence for the overthrow of governmental and industrial institutions.” It didn’t matter whether the revolution was a long way off. “It is not a question of time but a question of the intent of their teachings.…”

  As for the controversial Section 98, “whether it is harsh or not it is the law.” The judge made it clear where he stood on the controversy. “Is it unreasonable to prohibit force and violence, and does it seem very natural in a free country that changes in government or institutions shall be achieved, not by force and violence, but by pleading and reason and argument?”

  Then he turned to the third count against the accused – seditious conspiracy – and bore down on the Criminal Code’s definition of sedition, emphasizing one clause that made it seditious to excite “ill will between different classes of the King’s subjects.” The judge asked, “In a democratic country like this, where the prolet
arian of today may be the bourgeois of tomorrow … is it just and proper to set one of these classes against the other?” The question was, of course, rhetorical.

  The conclusion was foregone, as Cohen had predicted. The jury found the eight defendants guilty on all counts with no recommendations or reservations. Thus Canada became the first country with parliamentary institutions, apart from Japan, to outlaw communist organizations and to declare their property, belongings, and facilities subject to confiscation.

  The sentences were extraordinarily harsh. Seven of the eight were sentenced to five years at hard labour on the first two counts and two years, to be served concurrently, on the third – seditious conspiracy. One man, Tomo Cacic, was sentenced to two years only. On appeal, the Chief Justice, the same William Mulock who had that year called communism “a treasonable, seditious virus,” upheld the first two verdicts against the seven but quashed the third as insufficiently stated. It didn’t matter to the prisoners, who would have to serve their five years in Kingston Penitentiary anyway because the sentences were concurrent.

  The Prime Minister was determined that the guilty men would serve every day of their sentence with no hope of parole or pardon. No doubt he felt that he had contained the Red Menace and the turbulence that had marred his first year in office would end. If so, it was wishful thinking. The party was hydra-headed, and its front organizations became more active than ever. The jailing of Tim Buck and the others had not in any sense put a damper on the party. It had, instead, given it new life and energy by providing it with a group of martyrs and a rallying point on which to focus.

  1932

  1

  The dole

  2

  Shovelling out the unwanted

  3

  Boxcar cowboys

  4

  Restructuring the future