~ tion anything about which he ca tania Ae mee preme Soviet that ‘“‘the imperialist character of this war is obvious to anyone who wants to face realities”’ alarmed our printers, two working partners who depended on the pro- gressive movement at that time for much of their business. One, Ben Blockberger, was him- self of German descent and knew something of wartime hysteria from his father’s experience during the First World War. Frequently he set the type himself and he had in- structed his apprentice typesetter to watch our copy closely and ques- might have doubts. His partner, Theodore Wink, of Austrian origin, used to come. down to the printshop from his liv-_ ing quarters above to run the flat- bed press at night and was content to leave operation of the business to Blockberger. The weekly newspapers they printed were their ‘‘bread and but- ter’? on which they depended to keep their three or four regular workers fully employed. From time to time most of them fell be- hind in their payments and The Ad- vocate was never out of debt, using the proceeds of its press drives to clear off the old debt and within weeks running up a new one. - Coincident with publication of its first issue, The Advocate laun- ched a drive, headed by Peggy For- kin, to raise $4,000 to ensure pub- lication for six months. The re- sponse was good, for circulation was increasing steadily, rising from 4,000 in September to 6,000 in De- cember, when the financial object- ive was reached, and eventually to 8,000. c Instead of clearing off the old debt, however, I paid it off in instalments, adding $100 or so to the $100 weekly bill for printing. Blockberger, was becoming ap- prehensive. The printshop was in an old wooden building ich he could not get full in- cael coverage and scrawled “hreats to burn the building down if he did not stop printing The Ad- ocate and The Federationist were feftie pushed through the mail slot. His apprehension was heighten- edin mid-November when the fed- eral government banned The ion. oe Ontario provincial and Toronto city police raided the paper’s of- fices, seizing records and files. All copies of the November 11 issue were stripped from the newsstands and seized in another raid on the *5 printshop. ie Ae Stewart, the business m: er, a veteran both of the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, was arrested and a war- rant was issued for the arrest of Charles Sims, the editor. Subsequently Stewart was sent- enced to two years in jail, reduced on appeal to six months definite and 18 months indefinite. ‘In cities across the country peo- ple were arrested for distributing a Communist Leaflet headed ‘The people want peace’ — four in Tor- onto, three in Windsor, eight in Montreal, three in Regina, one in , five in Vancouver. : The five in Vancouver received suspended sentences, city prose- cutor Oscar Orr commenting on the leaflet’s demand for high wages and better farm returns to counter rising prices that “‘perhaps this is true, but we shouldn’t go around telling it at this time.”’ The attack on civil liberties was gathering momentum, directed first against the Communist Party ~ butincluding in its sweep organized labor, the CCF, the United Church and any organization whose mem- bers dared to voice public criticism of the war. Clarte, the French Canadian weekly, already had been suppress- ed by the Quebec government of premier Maurice Duplessis. Police raids on the offices of Vapaus, the Finnish ethnic weekly, at Sudbury coincided with the ar- rest of Charles Millard, then a CIO organizer, for a speech he made in Sudbury — he was assisting Mine - Mill in its drive to organize miners at Timmins. Inthe legislature at Victoria, pre- mier Pattullo threatened to report CCF member Dorothy Steeves to the federal government for what Conservative Opposition leader Pat Maitland termed her “‘unpat- riotic and subversive’ statements and Speaker Norman Whittaker read’sections of the War Measures Act to the House. The Advocate’s news com- mentary, as well as that of The Fed- erationist, suspended in the first weeks of the war, was reinstated by the CBC under severe restrictions, but CKMO refused to carry it. And in January the refusal was extended toinclude the CCF and Mayor Lyle Telford of Vancouver. In face of this clear intent to sup- press all civil rights, the Canadian Labor Defence Leagme, under A. E. Smith, launched a national cam- -paign, reflected in the 1940. Van- couver May Day slogan “Repeal the War Measures Act.” Not even the present anti-Soviet campaign mounted by the Carter administration to destroy detente, reckless of the consequences to world peace, compares in its fury with the hysteria whipped up by spoken lies and printed falsehoods when Finland and the Soviet Union went to war at the beginning of De- cember. Now, when the defence of Len- ingrad against encircling German and Finnish armies at the cost of a million lives is a glorious page in Se- cond World War history, Soviet concern in 1939 for the security of the city seems eminently reason- able. The Finnish government even conceded at the time that Soviet proposals for territorial exchange and financial compensation were fair but rejected them as being ‘‘in- consistent with Finland’s policy of strict neutrality’’ — a ‘neutrality’ shed in 1941 when Finland emerged as a full ally of Nazi Germany. There were rumors of British forces being organized to go to Fin- land and, as release of secret papers has disclosed, attempts were made to embroil Sweden in the war, all to the ultimate aim of redirecting the war against the Soviet Union. Publication in The Federation- ist’s December 7 issue of an article “Bombs over Finland’ in which Angus McInnis, MP for Vancou- ver East, declared that ‘Finland, free and independent could not bea threat to the Soviet Union,” arous- ed a storm of protest in the CCF, duly reported in The Advocate. At the same time, the paper’s re- porter, John (Sandy) Wilson, inter- viewed a number of Vancouver res- idents who had fought in the White Guard forces under General Gus- tave Mannerheim, abhorred as “the butcher”’ for the ferocity with which he suppressed the real ‘‘free and independent” Finland in 1918. Within two weeks the Vancou- ver dailies were quoting these re- ports back from Pravda in Mos- cow, distorting them out of all con- text in their efforts to brand The Advocate ‘subversive.’ As I noted in the statement I is- sued, the now defunct News-Her- ald ‘‘left its readers with the im- pression that The Advocate was_ secretly operating a radio station and broadcasting Canadian troop movements to Germany.”’ The campaign had its purpose and the next paper to feel its effect was the Mid-West Clarion in Win- nipeg. At the beginning of March RCMP raided the paper, arrested John Weir, the editor, William Tuomi, Bertha Smith and Edna Shunaman, and issued warrants Appeasement’ Seen Behind The POR PEACE. PROG ADVOCATE tESS AND DEMOCKACY Japan Pact | =F we New He Suspended Unions lo Ask Reinstatement; Urge Labor Unity Wage Scale — Meet Held cto. Woman M.U foposes Plan nen, for John Clarke, the co-editor, and Annie Buller, the business man- ager. Around the same time, in Van- couver, Francis Turnley, a car dealer and owner of the Motor Bureau at Sixth and Main, was ar- rested. For several years he had been en- tertaining citizens with the political witticisms posted daily on his big signboards, but whatever the citi- zens thought, the police were not amused. He appeared in Vancouver Po- lice Court in March to answer the charge that “‘he unlawfully did publish writing likely to be preju- dicial to the effective prosecution of the war, namely ‘the big ba- boons commit you to war, then call on you monkeys to vote for their management’ and ‘we may get bus- iness from the war, but we have no business in it.’ ’’ He was bound over until termin- ation of the war. None of this made our printers feel any happier as they balanced the money we still owed them against the hazards of continuing to print the paper, although it was another three months before Blockberger informed me that the . May 17 issue would be the last he would print. Our debt by then was down to $1,200. They were months in which I worked under increasing strain and difficulty, making only brief visits to the office and working from rooms which I changed constantly. But I had to be at the printshop every Thursday to make up the pa- per, always wondering whether the RCMP would walk in and that issue would be the last. SON Te page May Ite t Defeat . Groups . Dissolve acl bo = Pay Tribute: "fo ‘Turner The paper missed one issue while I cast desperately around for an- other printer. I soon found that the ‘ RCMP had warned every printer in Vancouver not to touch us, but in North Vancouver I found an old printshop which knew nothing of the warning. Its equipment was out of the last century and every piece of type had to be hand set by an old compositor whose hand was so shaky that I held my breath as every stick of type went into the form. To get a four-page issue ready for press on Wednesday night, typesetting had to start on Monday ‘morning and that is what misled the RCMP when they raided The Ad- vocate’s office on Friday, June 14 to enforce the ban decreed by the government. The three issues we published were still dated for Friday, al- though they were published on Thursday, and the third issue was in the mail and on the newsstands before it was suppressed. The June 7 issue had already car- ried the report that the Communist Party and a number of ethnic or- ganizations had been outlawed and various of their leaders arrested and held for internment. Two weeks later, after the paper was banned, I had a different ‘‘of- fice’ in a house on Gilpin Street be- hind Oakalla Prison Farm in Burn- aby where the neighbor’s cow graz- ing in the field occasionally peered inas I worked at my typewriter pro- ducing the first issue of the illegal Vancouver Clarion. Kay Gregory and I printed it ona mimeograph in a chicken house on the property and we continued sé | ‘Language AN COUNTRIES NSION OF WAR Entry of Italy Into Conflict @ Increases Threat | ar Soon hes SMePeake Will Attend Meet th ee * ‘publishing it from various places until the summer of 1942, by which time the whole character of the war had changed. i Carried upcoast by fishing vessel and towboat, passed hand to hand in logging camps and mining oper- ations, it attained a circulation of 1,200, limited only by deviously obtained paper supplies. And then, in September 1942, I was at a new desk in the Shelley Building, preparing the first issue of The People, published on Oc- tober 13, 1942. My first visit was to Blockberger to arrange for publication and to agree that we would pay him the $1,200 we owed him on The Ad- vocate’s account in return for his writing off the $1,200 we still owed for publication of Bill Bennett’s Builders of British Columbia. Then it was that he told me that during those last months he had been seeing Sgt. Dick Barnes, then head of the RCMP special squad, on the golf course and so had ad- vance knowledge of the govern- ment’s intent to suppress The Ad- vocate. Barnes, he said, had told him that the strength of the progressive movement in the province and the wide support given to the paper were considerations in attempting to suppress the paper by depriving it of printing facilities rather than by direct ban. It was, in its way, a tribute to the unbroken publication of a paper that could not be silenced and the militant tradition of the British Columbia labor movement it has upheld and enriched from its first ISSUes 7s; PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MAY 2, 1980—Page 11