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A British Communist MP in Canada: Willie Gallacher
Builds the Popular Front, 1936
Historians of Canadian Communism have been handed some massive research gifts in recent years. The National Archives (NA) in Ottawa now receives from the revamped Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) all the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) surveillance files released to individual researchers under new Access to Information legislation.This material includes extensive personal, city and trade union files. In addition, the NA has recently created two collections of microfilmed materials bought from the Comintern archives; one is a general collection on the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and its relations with the Comintern, the other deals specifically with Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and International Brigades [1]. Distance will probably limit overseas interest in these collections, but a third major source is easily accessible. The recent publication of Gregory S Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds, RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part V, 1938-1939 (St John's, Newfoundland, Canadian Committee on Labour History [CCLH], 1997) concluded an almost decade-long commitment by the CCLH to obtain and publish every available issue of the RCMP's 'Weekly Summary: Report on Revolutionary Organizations and Agitation in Canada'. Edited throughout by Kealey and Whitaker, distinguished Canadian scholars, publication began with RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, 1939-1941 (St John's, Newfoundland, CCLH, 1989). Collectively, the eight volumes (the others cover 1919-29, 1933-34, 1935, 1936, 1937 and 1942-45) contain over 4000 pages [2]. Although they can be frustrating to use — many are quite heavily censored — handled with care, they provide masses of data on the Canadian party (on which the RCMP was fixated) and a substantial amount on the wider international scene. British historians, for example, would learn something about a little-studied phenomenon: the British radical diaspora of the interwar years. That diaspora ensured a warm welcome for William Gallacher, MP, when he made a coast-to-coast tour of the Dominion in 1936.
The Communist Party of Canada (CPC) was a sociological oddity. Although at least 75% of its 1937 membership of 15,000 were European immigrants, mainly Ukrainians, Finns and, in the key central Canadian cities of Toronto and Montreal, Jews, its leadership came disproportionately from the culturally and politically dominant Anglo-celtic communities. General Secretary Tim Buck was English, as was the editor of the party paper The Worker/Daily Clarion (and, much later, Buck's successor), Leslie Morris. Scots played an even more disproportionate role [3]. When recently elected British Com- munist MP Willie Gallacher — another Scot — visited Canada in 1936, three compatriots were provincial secretaries: Bill Findlay in Nova Scotia, Tom Ewan in British Columbia and James Litterick in Manitoba; that year, moreover, Litterick, a former Red Clydesider, gained a Winnipeg seat in the provincial legislature and thus became the first North American Communist elected above the municipal level [4]. Many others were prominent at all levels of the party, the Young Communist League (Peter Hunter), Friends of the Soviet Union (James Cowan, Sam Scarlett), Workers' Unity League (Ewan, J B McLachlan) and in union organising (Scarlett, Harry Hunter, Fred Collins, Alex Gauld) [5]. Several of these individuals appeared beside Gallacher in 1936.
Throughout its life (it was formed in 1921), the CPC was widely perceived as a party of 'dangerous foreigners'. The promotion of Anglo-celtic spokespersons (its three leading women comrades in the interwar years were English) helped challenge the stereotype [6]. The ability to project a 'naturalised' identity was especially useful during the Popular Front years (1935-39), when, like all its sister parties in the west, it was seeking to reinvent itself as the latest and fullest manifestation of a national heritage of radical democracy. 'Communism', one slogan proclaimed (rather less snappily than the CPUSA's 'Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism'), 'Stands for All That is Best in Canadian Tradition'. The CPC sought not only to assert its 'Canadian-ness' in terms of established 'British' notions of national identity, but also to expand Canadian nationalism by honouring both bi-nationalism and the reality of what today would be termed multiculturalism; at the same time as it encouraged leading 'ethnic' cadres to Canadianize their names, it invited the ethnic sections to express pride in their national cultures and enter confidently into national life. Ideally, it wanted to build a distinctively 'New World' sense of Canada's future, in which the standard of Canadian life would move increasingly towards the higher level of civilisation prevailing in the Soviet Union. Progress towards this destination, however, would depend on a positive response from Canadian 'progressives' to the Comintern's and CPC's appeal for unity against the imminent threat to humanity represented by international fascism.
Willie Gallacher's coast-to-coast tour — recorded in some detail in the Security Bulletins — was clearly designed to help the CPC achieve its cultural and political goals. Gallacher was not the first British Communist to visit Canada in 1936. The 80 year-old Tom Mann was the keynote speaker at Toronto's May Day celebrations, the biggest in the city's history. At least 20,000 representatives of every section of the working class movement marched past the reviewing platform, which Mann shared with Buck, the Reverend Ben Spence of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and leading 'reformist' Toronto District Labour Council leader George Watson. That evening, 8,500 filled the Arena Gardens to hear Mann. His 'daring remarks', calling for a united working class front for the 'complete destruction of Capitalism ...evoked tremendous cheers and applause'. RCMP informants underlined the militancy of the meeting by noting that only the Reverend Spence remained standing when the evening commenced with the mandatory playing of The King [7].
The welcome accorded Mann and Gallacher (and Aneurin Bevan two years earlier) showed that there was an audience in the British working-class diaspora for 'stars' of the old country left [8]. The CPC announced Gallacher's impending arrival during Mann's visit, but waited until July to announce his itinerary — and an exhausting one it was! The first stage lasted three weeks (8-29 August), during which he spoke, sometimes more than once, in 14 different centres. Beginning in Montreal, he travelled via stops at Hamilton, Toronto, St Catharine's, Sudbury, Timmins, Fort William, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Blairmore and Vancouver, to the Vancouver Island coal-mining town of Nanaimo. The second stage began with a short stay in Chicago, from where he travelled to Nova Scotia for meetings (10-11 September) in Halifax and Glace Bay, another coal-mining town. He returned home from New York on 17 September [p 302]. In the course of his tour, Gallacher addressed at least 22,000 warmly enthusiastic — and, indeed, plain warm — Canadians (the tour took place amidst heat and humidity Gallacher would rarely have encountered in Paisley or Fife), usually at indoor meetings. He twice spoke before audiences of 3,500 in Montreal's Mount Royal Arena; 2,500 turned out at Massey Hall in Toronto, and when Vancouver's biggest theatre was damaged by fire, the British Columbia party attracted 3,500 to two meetings at a smaller venue. Crowds of over 1000 assembled in Winnipeg and Edmonton, and in smaller towns meetings were 'well-attended' or 'filled to capacity' [pp 350-51, 354, 362-64, 381-84, 408].
Gallacher's purpose can be inferred from an examination of the themes he expounded: the central one was the vital necessity of building the anti-fascist united front. He arrived at a pregnant moment in the evolution of the Comintern's post-Class Against Class line. A number of cautious initiatives in 1933-34 prepared the ground for the Seventh (and final) Congress of the Comintern in July 1935 to set each national Communist Party the task of constructing a 'People's' or (as it came to be more commonly known) 'Popular Front'. By 1936, a section of the CPC, leaders and rank and file, had become suspicious of the shift from a clear politics of class, and some were even willing to contest it. Only weeks before Gallacher arrived, J B McLachlan left the Party, maintaining that, while he remained a supporter of Dimitrov's Leninist conception of the Popular Front, the party was involved in a 'sad march to the right'. Although McLachlan was the only leading member to take such a step, there are strong indications that the departure of A E Smith, head of the Canadian section of the International Red Aid, for an extended stay in Europe that spring stemmed from Smith's difficulties in accommodating himself to the 'popularizing' of his Canadian Labour Defence League [9]. One of Gallacher's main tasks was to stiffen party unity by selling the People's Front.
Gallacher's prestige as a member of the Mother of Parliaments undoubtedly made his job easier. Audiences wanted to hear about his parliamentary experiences. Gallacher signalled that participation in the electoral system did not inevitably mean a loss of revolutionary purpose (precisely the opposite of what the CPC had told its members throughout the 1920s and early 1930s). He invariably displayed his hostility towards the National Government, and accused unnamed British statesmen of 'dragging Britain into a new war for the preservation of capitalism' [p 364]. He suggested to his Vancouver audiences that if Canadian workers drew inspiration from the solidarity and unity of the Fife miners they could elect their own parliamentary tribunes. The sight at his Winnipeg meeting of a 'unique feature ... the presence on one platform of the only two Communist Members of Parliament in the British Empire today' underscored these possibilities [p 364].
Gallacher was obviously well-briefed on national and local concerns. At his first meeting in Montreal, he drew together the themes of Zionism, anti-semitism, the united front and the virtues of the Soviet Union, in an appeal to the Jewish community, whose members made up a majority of the audience. Gallacher urged the Jews as a national group to resist the appeal of Zionism and 'align themselves with the working class and the progressive movement, as the solution of the Jewish problem cannot be found under the imperialist[s'] control'. The USSR, he argued, by setting up the Jewish autonomous region of Biro-bidjan had shown how the best interests of Jewish people lay with the working class [p 351]. He modified the theme of anti-capitalist unity to suit different audiences. In the ethnically diverse town of Fort William in north-western Ontario, his appeal was aimed at dissolving ethnic divisions. He called on Anglo-Saxons, French Canadians and the foreign-born 'to forget national differences and ... unite for the struggle against Capitalism' [p 364]. At Regina in the heart of the prairies, he appealed to workers and farmers to unite against their common exploitation [p 382].
Gallacher's speeches reflected the growing tendency to elide the struggle against capitalism into the struggle against fascism (which Georgi Dimitov had equated with the most imperialist elements of finance capital). He referred frequently to the spectre of international fascism, whether in Spain (where the Civil War had recently erupted), Britain or Canada, his views gaining concreteness from the victory, during the tour, of Maurice Duplessis' right-wing, anti-semitic Union Nationale party in the Quebec provincial election. Gallacher observed in Regina that this result proved that Canada was 'already confronted with Fascism', which, he predicted, would 'spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific'. At the same time, he insisted that fascism would certainly be defeated in Spain and could be in Canada. 'Canada's possibilities', he argued, were boundless. The Dominion could be a 'great force in building up a new world' if it rejected 'the clammy, dying hand of decaying British capital' [p 382]. Here (the RCMP did not elaborate), he was probably referring to Mosleyite influences on Canadian fascism; even some French Canadian fascists identified with the British Empire.
If Gallacher's status as an MP gave him one kind of legitimacy, his membership of the Executive Committee of the Comintern gave him another. His tour operated on two levels: as a mass propaganda campaign on behalf of a CPC then in the process of reinventing itself as the guardian of democracy; and as an internal drive for Party unity behind Moscow's still evolving Popular Front line. His execution of the second role was seen most clearly during his trip to the Nova Scotia mining region of Cape Breton, where the recent departure from the CPC of James Bryson McLachlan had severely disrupted the local section. Gallacher's Glace Bay speech on fascism and the united front followed a well established pattern; the fireworks came in the discussion period afterwards, when all the audience wanted to hear was Gallacher's views on McLachlan's 'expulsion'. Gallacher's claim that the veteran Scot — a hero of the region's mining struggles since emigrating from Lanarkshire in the early 1900s — had 'left of his own accord' provoked uproar, in the course of which McLachlan himself intervened, explaining how he had been 'partly thrown out of the party because he would not support [John L] Lewis and he partly left he party so as to have greater freedom to express himself'. He went on to say, amidst hearty applause, that he 'loved the C.P. of C. and would die for it, but he would not accept orders contrary to his beliefs and feelings'. Whether out of respect for McLachlan or for the balance of opinion in the hall, Gallacher spoke gently to his compatriot, reminding him of the fundamental rule of democratic centralism: 'a Communist while disagreeing with a Party decision must loyally carry it out if the majority votes for it'. His public and private attempts at reconciliation with McLachlan failed [10].
This brief interlude speaks to several themes and issues in the history of international Communism in the 1930s. It reminds us of the personal dedication of leading cadres: a month-long summer tour of air-conditioned Canada would be a delight in 1998, but I suspect that in 1936 Willie Gallacher would have needed every hour of his return voyage on the Acquitainia to recover from the ordeal; certainly, his gift of a pipe from the hard-rock miners of Kirkland Lake was well deserved. We can glean from Gallacher's speeches hints of the transition from United to Popular Front, from a strategy based on the leading role of the working class to one increasingly reliant on 'unity from above' with the trade union bureaucracy (the issue at the heart of the J B McLachlan controversy) and on trans-class alliances with the progressive bourgeoisie. Given that the Popular Front line was not handed down with the sudden finality of Class Against Class in 1928-29, we may be seeing in Gallacher's propaganda work a cagy, hesitant Comintern or one that was genuinely seeking to operate in a more consensual (if still fundamentally manipulative) way. There is only so much insight to be derived from a single snapshot, however. The other object of this article has been to encourage historians of Communism to consider the RCMP Security Bulletins potential for research and teaching. Comparative study is always likely to enrich nationally-based research. In addition, precisely because these sources do require careful handling, they make excellent primary sources for undergraduates. They can be obtained directly from: CCLH, Department of History, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, Newfoundland, Canada, A1C 5S7.
