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Art Evans: the full story is told

Workers of the World, the One Big ~
Union, the Communist Party, the ~
Workers Unity League, the Relief ~
Camp Workers Union, Mine Mill ©
the™
Amalgamated Building Workers. ~

From their composite account, ©
told in Evans’ own words and those ~
of the many people who knew him, ~
and reinforced with reproductions —
of various leaflets, documents and ~
photographs, emerges a picture of —

In the depths of the great

depression, when hardship and
misery filled the land, a tall, gaunt,
intense man emerged from
seeming obscurity to become a
symbol of struggle for hundreds of
thousands.
_The turbulent events of the
months following the start of the
On-To-Ottawa Trek from Van-
couver on June 3, 1935 placed the
name of Arthur (Slim) Evans, its
leader, on every tongue.

The concept of unemployed
workers boldly* challenging
govenment policies that relegated
them to a futile existence in relief
camps fired the imagination. All
along the route of their trek from

» Vancouver to Regina, the relief
camp strikers gathered support
from those who saw in it a glimmer
of hope for their own future.

When the trek ended in the
RCMP-directed attack on the
trekkers and their sympathizers
gathered in a peaceful meeting on
Market Square in Regina — the so-;

called Dominion Day riot — a
feeling of outrage swept the
country.

The name of Evans, arrested and
jailed, leapt into the headlines and
not all the distortions, the half-
truths and outright lies with which
the government sought to justify
its actions could dim its lustre.

' Until publication by the Trade
Union Research Bureau last month
of ‘Work and Wages’ by Ben
Swankey and Jean Evans Sheils,
the full story of these events
awaited writers capable of
bringing it to life for a new
generation.

Barry Broadfoot, in his Ten Lost
Years, gathers individual accounts
of what people endured in the
depression but tells only in-
cidentally of how they struggled
against it.

Prof. Michael Horn devotes one
section of his The Dirty Thirties to
the relief camps and the On-To-
Ottawa Trek, including a verbatim
report of the famous meeting at
Ottawa on June 22, 1935 between
prime minister R.B. (Iron Heel)
Bennett and members of his
cabinet and a_ delegation
representing the trekkers at which

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WORK AND WAGES: A
Semidocumentary Account of the Life

and Times of Arthur H. (Slim) Evans.’

Shiels and Ben
Union Research
$9.95.

Evans
Trade
1977. Paper,

By Jean
Swankey.
Bureau,

Evans told Bennett to his face,
“You are a liar.”

But Horn’s brief account of the
Regina riot merely echoes the
newspaper reports of the day
without delving into all the
evidence now available to prove
that it was provoked as a
deliberate attempt by the govern-
ment to smash the trek and
discredit its leaders.

Horn’s contribution to the
growing body of literature on the
depression years is his publication
of letters exchanged between CCF
leaders disclosing their differing
approaches to the trek.

Thus, commenting on the trek,
M.J. Coldwell, later to become
CCF national leader, wrote to CCF
national leader J:S. Woodsworth on
June 12 and 15:

‘... Undoubtedly there are some
Communists among them, but as
far as we are able to discover, a
large percentage of them are B.C.
CCF supporters. ©

“While our stand regarding
Communist affiliation is un-
doubtedly the only- one we can
pursue,-yet in dealing with this
problem of unemployment and
youth we should, I think, be playing
into the hands of the Communists if
because of the presence of Com-
munist sympathizers, we did other
than give them our sympathetic
support. . .

“Our local organizations both in
Calgary and Regina have
cooperated to the fullest extent. . .

“In many respects we have
taken the lead. There have been no
difficulties except of course insofar
as one or two of them (the Com-
munists) have endeavored to take
the entire credit for organizing and
conducting this trek.

“Among the men there are
several Communists who are
conducting themselves in a
manner which is earning the
respect of those of us who are
associated in this work. : .”

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE—DECEMBER 16, 1977—Page 14

ao

The stacks of copies indicating the wide response their new book has
generated, authors Jean Evans Shiels (left) and Ben Swankey autograph
their “Work and Wages” for Chris Guwick at an autographing party last

week.

‘But Angus MacInnis, CCF MP

for Vancouver East, in a letter to
Grant MacNeil on June 25, viewed

the trek, not as an imaginative
attempt to win a measure of social

justice for the country’s one
million and more unemployed but
as a Communist ‘plot.’

. The representatives from

the relief camp strikers have been

here and gone,” he wrote.: ‘Mr.
Bennett would not grant them
anything. Indeed, Iam not at all
disppointed as I was firmly con-
vinced he would not.

“Taking the developments of the
past months as a whole, I think our
Communist friends are ac-
complishing just what I thought
they would accomplish.

“They are giving the powers that
be every excuse to use force to
abolish what little democracy we
had left. Ihave a’rather confirmed
conviction that is just what they
want to accomplish. . .”

Complaining that Evans had
failed to keep an appointment with

—Sean Griffin photo

him at his office in the House of
Commons and finally had phoned
him at his home at 10 p.m. on June
22 to say that the trekkers ‘had
decided that the march on Ottawa
would continue,” asking ‘‘that we
fall in line,”” MacInnis concluded
with this dark accusation:

“The idea was for the delegation
to avoid the CCF members while
making it appear that they were
seeking our assistance and being
refused or ignored. . .”

Had Evans not met an untimely
death in 1944, dying from injuries
received when he was hit by a car
after alighting from a streetcar in
Vancouver, he might have written
his own story of the trek.

(There is some confusion about
his age. Swankey and Sheils give
his birth date as April 24, 1890,
which would have made him 53 at
the time of his death, but all the
reports they quote give his age as
56.)

Instead, one of the most inspiring
stories of-our history has remained
largely untold, with the sole ex-
ception of Ronald Liversedge’s
Recollections of the On-To-Ottawa
Trek, 1935, an excerpt from which
Horn includes in his own work.

Now Swankey and Sheils, who is
Evans’ daughter, have compiled
the story as fully as it can be told in
‘Work and Wages’, sub-titled -A
Semi-Documentary of the Life and
Times of Arthur H. (Slim) Evans,
1890-1944.

As their painstakingly resear-
ched work makes clear, Evans was
not an obscure figure who emerged

to lead the On-To-Ottawa Trek.

Unknown he may have been to
the majority of his fellow coun-
trymen before the trek thrust his
name into the headlines. But his
entire life, in a sense, was a
preparation for this undertaking
which called on all his experience
in struggle, his skill as an
organizer, his great personal
courage as a leader.

Combing every available source
— Evans’ own notes, letter and
files, family records, official
transcripts, newspaper reports,
interviews with veterans, of the
trek — Swankey and Sheils have

¢ pieced together a work which is at

once a biography of Evans and a
history of the various
organizations of which he was a
member over a period of more

- than 30 years.

From his birth in Toronto, they
trace his career from 1911 when, as
a young journeyman carpenter, he
held his first union card in the
United Brotherhood of Carpenters
and Joiners, through the Industrial

and, in his final years,

Evans the man, the dedicated

Communist who measured up to —
the desperate needs of his times. ~

We see him in Ludlow, Colorado, ©

where he was shot in the legs
during a coal miners’ strike,
suffering wounds which would
trouble him the rest of his life.

We see him again organizing —
coal miners in the Drumheller ©
Valley into the OBU, and again in ©

Princeton where in 1932 he led
miners organized into the Mine

- Workers Union of Canada to vic-

tory in a bitter strike, despite
strikebreaking, police attacks on

picket lines and his own arrest
under Section 98 of the Criminal
Code’ on a charge of being a
unlawful ©
association, the Communist Party. ~

We see him finally leading the —

member of an

On-To-Ottawa Trek, to which the

largest part of the book is devoted. ~
‘What did the trek accomplish? —

Was it, as Angus MacInnis
asserted out of his anti-Communist

obsession, an attempt to bring ©
about the abolition of democracy? ~
Or was it not rather an attempt to —
win from a government wielding —
arbitrary and undemocratic —
powers greater social justice,.—

greater democratic rights for

working people denied their right —
to work and excluded from the

democractic process.

In the 1935 federal election the ©
of #
prime minister R. B. Bennett, ©
incapable of producing a con- —
structive policy to lead the country
out of economic crisis, torn with —
internal differences and offering
demagogic promises which few —
believed, went down to crushing ~
defeat at the hands of the voters it —

Conservative government

had- deceived.

The unworthy heirs of political —
upheaval were the Liberals of W.L.
Mackenzie King who campaigned ~

on a promise of work and wages.

They did repeal Section 98, —
through which the Conservatives —

had sought futilely to repress

social unrest. They did abolish the —

hated relief camps.

But work and wages remained
an empty slogan. It was to be |
realized, not through any bold ~

of
recon- —
struction, but as the concomitant —

imaginative
democratic

program
economic

of world war which the King

government, by its policy of ap- ~
peasing fascism, helped to bring

about.

The RCMP attack on the ~

unemployed sitdowners at the
Vancouver Post Office in. 1938
showed that the Liberals, like the
Conservatives, had no other an-
swer to economic crisis.

As Swankey and Sheils state:

“The trekkers didn’t make it to”
Ottawa, but they did win their ©
battle many times over. They
kindled the spirit of fight-back at a
time when some labor leaders
preached resignation. They helped
to change the political map of
Canada, again proving in the final
analysis it is the people who make
history.”

‘Work and Wages’ is a sub-
stantial contribution to

should be
progressive.

read by

—Hal Griffin | |

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