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33 Jobless Hurt
‘In Police Attack
On PO, Gallery

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Above is an “extra’’ put out by the People’s Advocate, predecessor of
the Pacific Tribune, on Monday, June 20, 1938 when police attacked
the jobless in Vancouver's post office in what became known as

“Bloody Sunday.”

- fascist apologists and sym-
Pathizers at home while it cam-
Paigned for aid to peoples beset by
fascist aggression, victims of
appeasment by governments
Obsessed with their hatred of
Socialism in the USSR and their
fear of their own peoples.

Vancouver citizens demon-
Strated their temper in March,
1935, when they forced the Nazi
Warship Karlsruhe, on a “good-
_ Will” visit, to anchor out in the
harbor to escape their protests,
and a war veteran named Duffy
Was arrested for tearing the
Swastika flag from the cenotaph
Where it had been placed by
_ Karlsruhe officers.

The record of the magnificent
help the people of British Columbia
Bave to Republican Spain can be
traced through the pages of the
Paper from July, 1936, when
General Franco rose against the
People’s Front government to
Plunge the country into civil war,
to 1939, when the government fell
before overwhelming odds.

__ On November 27, 1936, the B.C.
Workers’ News reported this
Message from Dr. Norman

Bethune, heading the Canadian
Medical unit in Loyalist Spain:
‘Definite Canadian project
achieved today. Government
accepted proposal and authorized
Proceed organization Canadian
blood transfusion service entire
Madrid front line . . .”

In the ensuing months Canadians :

Were making their way to Spain
and women in Vancouver like

Beckie Buhay were campaigning |

against the King government’s
Proposal to ban enlistment of
Canadian volunteers in the In-
ternational Brigade.

The first mention of Canadian
Volunteers in action was in the
March 26, 1937 issue when it was
reported they had helped to hurl
“M1 Duce’s ‘volunteers’ back in
disorder in the Guadalajara
Mountains.”

The June 4 issue published the
first photos of Canadian volun-
teers, revealing that the
Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion
was ‘‘now some 400 strong.” The
June 25 issue reported the first

casualties in action — 28-year old
Yugoslav immigrant Stephen
Dasovic, a hard rock miner from
Vancouver serving in the Dimitrov
Battalion; and 28-year old Peter

_Johnson, Vancouver seaman and

Communist Party member who
had served on the picket line in the
1935 waterfront strike, both killed
on the Jarama front.

That same month, Art Evans,

-the man who had led the On-To-

Ottawa Trek, was touring the
province to raise funds for a
Communist Party project to send
an ambulance to be attached to the
Mackenzie-Papineau _ Battalion.

Spain was the decisive theatre in

which the issue of peace or war.
was being determined. But across:

the Pacific, Japan was building up
its fascist military machine in its
invasion of China and, ultimately,
its war against the allies, with raw
materials from B.C.

During 1938 the boycott of
German, Italian and Japanese
goods gathered strength
throughout the province, par-
ticularly after Vancouver Trades

and Labor Council and the CCF:

gave it their support.

The Pattullo government’s at-
titude, protecting the Canadian
mining interests profiting from
Japanese contracts, was apparent
in such actions as cancellation of
my own radio speech on the
boycott. by radio station CJOR and
banning of the film China Strikes

Back by the provincial censor

because it condemned Japan.
The People’s Advocate con-
sistently exposed the extent of the
war traffic with Japan, as in its
January 7, 1938 issue, reporting
that ‘5,000 tons of copper con-
centrates from Copper Mountain
and Allenby mining and milling
operations of Consolidated Mining,
Smelting and Power Company
were awaiting shipment to Japan

‘at Coquitlam this week.”

The paper also revealed that
Japan had contracted for the entire
output of Granby Consolidated
Mining and Smelting Corporation,
a contract which was renewed in
1940 with the announcement that
negotiations with Japan had been

conducted with ‘full knowledge -

HAL GRIFFIN. From

‘From the first issue
pages pulsated with
people's struggles

and approval’? of the King
government.

That, and the shipments of scrap —

iron from Vancouver picketed by
progressive organizations, con-
stituted one aspect of the war
traffic. The other, as relentlessly
exposed by the People’s Advocate,
‘was the threat to Canada posed by
Japanese acquisition of such
mining properties as the Iron Duke
mine.

In January, 1938, a Medical Aid
for China Committee was formed
in Vancouver. And that same
month, Tom McEwen, veteran
former editor of the Pacific
Tribune, and I went down one night
to see Dr. Bethune and his nurse,
Tom’s daughter Jean, off to China
aboard the Empress of Canada.

* *  *

May Day, 1938, in Vancouver
was one of the most stirring events
of that entire eventful decade.
Some 12,000 people marched in the
parade, an estimated 20,000
gathered for the rally in Stanley
Park, and the fishing fleet staged
itw own marine parade in the
harbor.

The speakers were Ogier
Preteceille, press secretary of the
Spanish General Union of Workers
and an outstanding journalist, and
Jack Lawson, first.of the Mac-Paps
to return from Spain. The ovation
they received echoed over the
North Shore mountains.

The following Sunday, May 8,
Leslie Morris, later to become
Communist Party national leader,
Maurice Rush, now editor of the
Pacific Tribune, and I spoke at a
rally in Powell Street Grounds. The
theme, Chamberlain’s policies
leading to war, presaged the
coming world conflict.

The headline in the September
23, 1938 issue, which termed the
Munich agreement an ‘‘infamous
betrayal,’ was ‘‘Chamberlain

must go!”
That November, replying to
Pattullo’s assertion in the

' legislature that ‘this whole House
would rise in a body to acclaim
Chamberlain if he were here,”
Tom Uphill, the veteran Labor
member for Fernie, retorted:
“The Munich pact was the greatest
sellout to a bunch of murderers,

937 to
1944, he was assistant editor of
the B.C. Workers News, editor of
the People’s Advocate and
Advocate and first editor of the
People. From 1946 to 1958, he
was associate editor of the Pacific
Tribune. Since 1959, he has been
successively associate editor and
editor of the Fisherman.

tyrants and sadists the world has
ever known.”

In September, 1939, the threat of
war became the stark reality and
the paper entered upon the most
difficult period of its 40-year
history.

Suddenly, the champions of
appeasement, the advocates of
non-intervention, the apologists for
fascism, all became ardent anti-
fascists — bus no less anti-socialist
in their denunciation of the USSR
for the pact with Nazi Germany
whereby it had thwarted their
grand design to embroil Germany
and the USSR in war, the grand
design for which they had
sacrificed Austria and Czechosla-
vakia. And no less anti-democratic
in. their policies at home.

The Soviet-Finnish War provided
them with new opportunities in
their striving to redirect the war
against the USSR. ;

In its December 8 issue, the

Advocate published interviews
with Finnish-born Canadians re-
calling the terror by which General
Mannerheim had come to power in
1918 and voicing their conviction
that ‘Finland is being used by
outside powers for imperialistic
aims.”

When these interviews were
quoted by Moscow Radio the three
Vancouver daily papers, all of
which had ignored the original
story, promptly seized on this, as I
said in my statement in the De-
cember 22 issue, ‘‘to confuse and
mislead their readers and depict
The Advocate as a ‘subversive in-

fluence.’ ””
The Vancouver News-Herald

even contrived to leave the im-
pression that The Advocate was
secretly operating a radio station
and broadcasting Canadian troop
movements to Germany!

The hysteria whipped up served
its calculated purpose, however.
The paper at that time was being

printed in one of the oldest wooden -

buildings in Mount Pleasant on
which the owner could not get
adequate insurance. Anonymous
notes threatening to burn the
building down were thrust under

the printshop door.

Only the fact that the paper
owned him considerable money
which he could only recover if the
paper continued publishing until
the next press drive induced the
printer to continue. But he in-
structed his linotype operators to
watch all copy and report to him
anything they considered ‘“‘sub-
versive’”’.

Already the progressive French-
Canadian weekly Clarte had been
suppressed during the Quebec
provincial elections in October.

On November 14, Ontario
provincial and Toronto city police
raided the offices and printshop of
the Clarion, seizing all copies of the
November 11 issue. In a.second
raid on November 16, police seized
copies of the November 18 issue
then on the press and the paper:
was banned under the War

_ Measures Act.

The Mid-West Clarion, published

* in Winnipeg, was next. On March 5,

1940, police arrested its editor,
John Weir, and other staff mem-
bers and suppressed the paper,
despite the protest made by
Winnipeg Trades and Labor
Council.

Only The Advocate remained,
and every Thursday as I made up
the paper in the printshop I won-

PACIFIC TRIBUNE SUPPLEMENT—FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 1975—Page 3°

dered if this would be the day
chosen by the police to raid and
seize the paper.

The government preferred to
move more cautiously against The
Advocate, however, deterred by
the very strength and mood of the
labor movement in this province.

Since the outbreak of war, its
circulation had doubled, from 4,000
to 8,000 copies weekly. And its
press drive for a modest $3,500 in
the spring of 1940 was over-
subscribed.

When the May 17 issue went to
press, the printer, having received
all except $1,200 of the money owed
him, informed me it would be the
last he would print.

Intimating that his action was
taken on RCMP “advice”, he
justified it by saying that, under
the sweeping powers of the War
Measures Act, he could be held
liable for whatever the paper
published.

Isoon found out that every other
printer in the city obviously had
been ‘‘advised”’ by the RCMP not
to print the paper. But the “ad-
vice” had not been extended to
printers outside the city.

In North Vancouver I found an
old printshop and persuaded its
owner to accept the paper. The
shop had no linotype, so that every
line of type had to be set by hand,
and it took three days to set the
four-page paper and run it off on an
ancient flatbed press.

After being forced to miss one
issue, The Advocate triumphantly
reappeared. I felt something of the
exhilaration Amor De Cosmos
must have experienced when his
British Colonist resumed
publication after being suppressed
by Governor James Douglas in

1859. :
The triumph was short-lived. On

June 14, after the issue had gone to
press, RCMP and city police
raided The Advocate’s offices in
the Flack Block, seizing all its
records, files and furniture, and all
copies of the paper from
newsstands around the city.

The Advocate was banned, but it

did not cease publication. It
reappeared in July as the Van-
couver Clarion, a monthly
mimeographed publication which
rapidly reached a circulation of
some 1,200, all that limited paper
supplies, obtained by devious
means, would allow.
. Fishermen distributed it up-
coast, railway workers, carried it
into the interior, loggers and
miners took it to the camps,
workers passed it along in the
shipyards.

Kay Gregory and I published it in
a chicken house on what then was
acreage behind Oakalla Prison
Where the greatest production

hazard was keeping the chicken

feathers out of the ink.
There were other hazards,

~ however, such as the time Kay was

carrying copies of the latest
edition, camouflaged by a leafy
cabbage on top, in a shopping bag.
As she walked along the road to the
Burnaby Lake interurban line, a
provincial policeman overtook her
and gallantly took. the shopping
bag from her before she could
demur.

Presently she noticed that the
handle was beginning to tear loose
and slowly the rip in the bag

- widened. Fortunately, the tram

Cont'd. on Page 7 Supplement —
See HAL GRIFFIN