The working people of Nanaimo have written many pages of a people’s history.

People’s history
of Canada

PN TC aCe Cn s HUE

Stanley Ryerson outstanding Marxist scholar
and author of 1837: The Birth of Cahadian Democracy
and French Canada, was asked: We understand you are
working on the preparation of a ‘‘People:s History of

gx the basis of work extending
over some seven years, a group
of writers and researchers are
now engaged on a third — and we
hope final — draft of a “people’s
history” of Canada; We intend
to publish it before the end of
1954.

Its appearance, we know, is long
overdue. What the workers on
the project have had to contend
with has been, not only the big
dimension of the job and the
limitedness of our forces, but the
everpresent necessity of combin-
ing theoretical work and pressing
practieal activity in the working
class movement. We are confi-
dent of bringing the work to a
, suceessful completion in . the
months immediately ahead.

In the launching of the project,
at a conference on Studies in
Canadian History, in December
1946, the late Beckie Buhay was
an active participant, and chaired
the sub-committee on the history
of the Canadian labor movement.
The People’s History group pro-
poses to dedicate the forthcoming
book to the memory of her life
of struggle and devotion. It is
our hope that something of the
inspiration of her dauntless fight
will live in the pages to which she
herself contributed much. ;

Publication of the History is
being made possible by the re-
cently-founded Memorial Fund of
the progressive movement.
©
in the last few years a remark-

able number of histories of
Canada and studies in Canadian
history have made their appear-
ance. This is in the first place a
symptom of the growth of a
healthy national consciousness in
Canada, during and after the Sec-
ond World War; but in quite a
number of cases it is an expres-
sion of something altogether dif-
ferent — the calculated “Ameri-
canizing” of Canadian culture,
education, ideology.

The Carnegie Foundation, Yale,
Harvard and other U.S. institu-
tions, are actively pursuing the
ideological assault on Canadian
independence. While the depart-
ments of archeology of US.
“Jearned institutions” send ex-
peditions to Canada to steal pre-
historic relics (as at Manitoulin
recently) — their departments of
history, sociology and economics
are busily engaged in “proces-
sing” Canadian history for their
own imperialist ends.

One small illustration of the
way this process works is to be
seen in the titles of some of the
theses produced at U.S. universi-
ties, as listed in the Canadian
Historical Review, Sept., 1953:

Economic Fluctuations in Can-
ada (Harvard)

Canadian Reactions to U.S.
Foreign Policy (Rochester)

Canada.”

—What stage has been reached on the work on the
o you expect it will be pub-

People’s History? When d
lished?

—In what way will this book be different from the
numerous histories of Canada that are available now?

—How will a “people’s history’ help to advance the
struggle today for peace, democratic rights, Canadian in-

‘dependence?

In this article he gives his answers.

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The State and Economic Life in
Canada (Columbia)

Canadian Dairy Industry (Har-
vard) ‘

U.S. Influence in Canadian
Steel Industry (Harvard)

U.S. Struggle for Canadian
Northwest (Minnesota)

Analysis of Canadian
ment (Columbia)

Strategic Factors in Canadian
Economy (Yale).

The pirates 0; the mind are out
to capture and scuttle our herit-
age of democratic Canadianism.

Invest-

The struggle for Canadian in-
dependence demands of us that
we make known to Canadians the

t

truth about their own history —
the real story of people’s strug-
gles in this country. And that is
a job that cannot be done by
public-relations employees of big
business.

Try the experiment of ‘looking
up the topic “trade unions” in the
index of some of the recently
published histories of Canada.
You will find “trade routes,” and
even “trade winds,” but rarely
“trade unions.” The most re-
cent one to appear devotes one
page to “labor,” out of 400.
Schoolbooks on the provinces of
British Columbia and Ontario do
not so much as mention the ex-

istence of an organized labor
movement.

What kind of gutless history is
this?

It is “history”. that serves big
business; that emasculates the
history of the Canadian people.
By so doing it makes easier the
job of putting over the betrayal
of this country to the U.S. trusts
and the U.S. militarists.

Only by starting from the pro-
position that it is the people who
make history can we tell the truth
about our country’s past, and gain
inspiration for the struggle for its
future.

The People’s History group has
set itself the aim of telling, in a
popular outline, the story. of the
Canadian people’s struggles.

@

Just 100 years ago last spring,
the workers at Good’s Foundry,
located at the northeast corner of
Queen and Yonge Streets, To-
ronto, built the first railway loco-

. Motive to be made in Canada. A

few months later foundry work-
ers at Kinmond’s Locomotive
Works in Montreal built a second
one, then the men at D. C. Gunn’s
plant at the foot of Wellington
Street in Hamilton built’ several
more.

Apart from Sam Sharp, the
master mechanic at the Great
Western shops in Hamilton, build-
er of the first railway sleéping
car, few of the railway shop work-
ers’ names are recorded. Yet it
is such as they who were the real
“builders of Canada.”

In the course of the long strug-
gle for the nine-hour work day, a

_ hew great idea took root in the

minds of Canadian workers.

John Hewitt, at a meeting in
Hamilton in 1872, expressed it by
saying that the chief obstacle in
the path of labor’s self-fulfilment
was “the power .. . to accumulate
and centralize the wealth produc-
ed by the working classes . . . —
a gigantic fraud that was the
father of many frauds.”

The idea of overcoming the
power of capital, of putting in its
place the power of collective, co-
operative labor — by this, wrote
the first labor paper in Canada,
the Ontario Workman — it would
be possible to “supersede the pre-
sent system, as the present system
has superseded the serf system
of the past.”

That was in 1872, five years
after Confederation, and in the
period of the first mass struggle
of the Canadian working class, in
the Toronto printers’ strike and
the nine-hour movement.
©

At the same time, unconnected
with the emerging movement of
labor, a group of young profes-
sionals organized the “Canada
First” movement. Its aim: “To
cultivate Canadian patriotism, to
raise Canada above the rank of a

The pioneers who built the first ships in such yards as this on Burrard Inlet were amona the

builders of their country.

mere dependency, and to give her
the first place in Canadian
hearts.”

“What reason exists,” they ask-
ed, “why ... we in Canada should
not place own own land first, and
so act and speak as though we
felt proud — as we have a right
to be — of the name Canadian.

“It has been alleged that we
desire to create antagonism be-
tween native-born Canadians and
Canadians by adoption. The con-
trary is the fact.... When we
say Canada First we don’t mean
Canadians first. We are not such
fools as to suppose that a Cana-
dian is better than anybody else,
or is entitled as such to a prefer-
ence over anybody else. . . . But
at the same time many of us
think a Canadian is no worse than
other people, and we would have
all who have made Canada their

home, feel or try to feel that there
is no disgrace attached to the
name Canadian, and that te be
known as such, either here or
abroad, involves no soeial or
political obstruction.”

When this idea was put for-
ward, it was met with “volleys
of vituperation from the regular
party organs on both sides. ‘Can-
ada First’ was denouneed as ‘an-
nexationism,’ ‘Republicanism,’
‘treason’ and ‘Communism,’ the
orthodox Liberal organ as usual
leading the chorus. ‘Canada
First’ was no more annexation-
ist than it was Communist. Its
leading idea was a nationality
too strong in its unity to be ab-
sorbed by the United States.”

(Canada First—W. A. Foster,
Toronto, 1890)

Big business in Canada did its
utmost to stifle the “Canada First”
idea. To assert the national in-
terest as primary was “subver-
sive”: it eollided with the policy
of profitable sell-out to imperial-
ism—British imperialism in the
South African War and First
World War; U.S. monopoly in the
period thereafter, up to and in-
cluding the Korean War.

“Canadian workers in the past
in struggle after struggle have
come up against the tie-up of
Canadian business with Wall
Street. In their heroic nine-
months long strike the London,
Ontario street railway workers in
1899 were up against a U.S. dom-
inated. corporation. Wrote the
Industrial Banner at the time:

“The Company has used the
worst tactics employed in the
U.S. to crush the strikers. Union
men have been jailed on trump-
ed up charges, newspapers have
been bought up... .

“Spotters, private detectives
and Pinkertons were brought in
by the wholesale . . . (they are
out to) crush down Canadian
labor in London. It should be
the proud boast of the eitizens
of London that they are not the
kind of material that a Yankee
monopolist can crush.”

As its masthead this pioneer
working class weekly carried the
lines: ;

“The gaies of hell shall not prevail

To stop the rising flood
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men

And human brotherhood.”

In such struggles as this the
Canadian working class was tem-
pered — preparing it for leader-
ship of the nation.

It is an historic achievement
of the party of the Canadian
working class, in our own day,
to have combined the fight for the
national interest and national in-
dependence, with the struggle te
abolish the rule of big business
monopoly. In so doing the Labor-
Progressive party carries forward
the best traditions of “Canada
First” and of the movement of
the working class for social eman-

_ cipation—for a Socialist Canada.

These things are not to be found
in ruling-class histories.

Hence the need for a working
people‘s history: one that por-
trays the epic of the people’s
struggles for a happy life, against
poverty and oppression, “from
sea to sea.” :

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 29, 1954 — PAGE 9