Rod Young's record Editor, Pacific Tribune: Sir: I notice that among the letters to the editor in the latest CCF News there is one signed “A CCF Sympathizer” asking “if Rod Young, the newly elected mem- ber for Vancouver Center, was expelled from the CCF party at any time.” The writer explains that he is asking because he has been so informed many times. The editor’s note attached to the letter states: “To the best of our, knowledge, Rod Young’ was never expelled from the CCF at any time,” To my way of thinking, the editor of the CCF News is delib- erately deceiving his readers. A reader asks, was Rod Young. ever expelled from the CCF, and he re- plies, no, he was never exPelled. In all honesty he should have add- ed that Rod Young was suspend- ed from the CCF for one year at the 1937 CCF convention for his disruptive actions. As one who was active in the CCF in the 1937 provincial elec- tion I remember well how Rod Young schemed to have the CCF provincial executive deny its offi- cial approval to the late A. M. Stephen because he spoke out for unity of the left wing and wel- comed cooperation with the Com- munists. Young managed to cre- ate considerable division and dis- “unity from which it took the lo- cal CCF a long time to recover. As a result of his actions, A. M. Stephen was narrowly defeated in an election that he could have won with a united vote and the Liberals retained the Nanaimo seat, as they still do. At the 1937 CCF convention, the whole sorry business was aired. A. M. Stephen was expelled be- cause he had: taken a stand for working class unity and Rod Young, who should have been the one expelled, was merely sus- pended because he had taken a stand against working tlass unity. As I have already said, I was a member of the CCF in those days, but I was so disgusted by the affair that I dropped out. There were many other like me. However, I have not lost inter- est in labor polities, I read both the CCF News and the Pacifiic Tribune, and when I see such a questions as this falsely present- ed I feel I owe it to those who have come from other provinces, like the writer of the letter to the CCF News, to provide the true facts. A FORMER CCF’er. Nanaimo, B.C. ‘Big Push’ of BCER Editor, Pacific Tribune: Sir: Enclosed is “An open let- ter to the big push of the BCER”. Dear Dal: You sure are a smart cookie. No wonder you are a roads scolar. I was at the P.U.C. hearing last Friday and the way you told off ~CLASSIFIED A charge of 50 cents for each insertion of five lines or less with 10 cents for each additional line is made for notices appearing in this column. No notices will be accepted later than Monday noon of the week of publication. your capillaries nerve and brain, etc. Free illustration ASH BROS. CARTAGE 516 West Seventh Ave. General Cartage FA. 0242 FA, 0469 General Insurance— Anywhere in B.C. LAURIE NOWRY 706-16 E. Hastings St. TA. 3833 . SALLY BOWES— INCOME TAX PROBLEMS. Room 20, 9 East Hastings: MA. 9965. MEETINGS Swedish-Finnish Workers Club meets last Friday of every month at 7.30 p.m. in Clinton Hall. What's "Contax? Social— Popular Girl Box Social, Satur- day, July 17, 1948, at 1542 Charles St, 8 pm. Whist, Bingo, games and refreshments. Auspices: Commercial Drive honoring Miss Whist & Bingo— At 176 Salisbury, Saturday, July 17, 8 p.m., on pehaft of Miss Service Worker. Auspices: Grandview Club. House Party— Miss Lumberworker invites «you to attend a house party at Johnnie Ottewell’s, 1742 Bast 8rd. Take car No. 4. Saturday evening, July 17th. There will be dancing, games, and refresh- ments. Fresh Air Dance— Swedish Park Pavilion every Saturday night. Beach Party— . Kitsilano Beach, Sunday, July 18, 6 p.m. Basket picnic, games, prizes, singing, swimming, re- freshments. Supporting Miss Building Trades. Meet at Com- munity Stoves. Auspices: Elec- tricians Branch. Garden Party— ; At 1706 Alberni St on Saturday, July 24:at 7.45 p.m. Dancing, film, games, refreshments. Every- body welcome. Auspices: West people there would rather have End Club, them Boundary Road residents was nobodys bisness. You sure are a roads scolar. Them guys on the City Council is roads scolars to—look at Hastings Street. I liked the way you told how the property owners was. lucky guys. Having them 33 feet by 140 feet towers on there front lawns is a lucky break for them, es- peshully if you pretty them up by putting flasher “lights on the gur- ders so people can sit on there front porch and read the reports in the papers about the high cost of living. Theyll love that. What a bunch of saps this here Burnaby Council is to, Imagine them .sticking there nose into your bisness. Just like you was to put up a glue factory in Central Park, they think they got rights. You tell em Dal, that they aint got no right to monkey with free enterprize. : Im glad your not a red though, - like some M.P. says you are be- cause otherwise youd put your power lines underground like them Europe undergrounds which Hitler said was communists which is probably what all them Boundary Road people is any- way. z Yours comradly, His (X) Mark 39300 Pandora Street, in sight of the site FRASER WILSON GUIDE TO GOOD READING Steinbeck in Russia THE PUBLISHERS OF STEINBECK’S A Russian Journal remark that “the serious-minded may be startled to find that so gay a book could be written on a subject which is usually treated by passionate pundits.” How gay Steinbeck’s book is we shall see. e John Steinbeck and Robert Capa went to the Soviet Union to find out how the Russian peo- ple, not the leaders of government and party, live and think. “How do they make love and how do they die? Do they dance, sing, and play? Do the children go to school? Once in the Soviet Union, Stein- beck actually tried to carry out his intention. As soon as they could, he and Capa got out of Moscow, the thick center of gov- ernment and party, and went in- to. the hinterlands, to Kiev, to Stalingrad, to Soviet Georgia and the Black Sea resorts, They spent a couple of days on a collective farm; they tramped through the ruins. of the City of ‘Steel, taking pictures and making notes on what they saw and what they heard. Steinbeck is, by his own lights,. an honest reporter. I am sure he tried to set down faithfully what he saw and how he felt about it. The question that will come to the mind of a critical, not to say seriows-minded, reader, is: how much did he succeed in seeing and how mature was his reaction to what he saw? * * * ms IN THE FIRST PLACE, con- sider the itinerary. Steinbeck went SPEAKING OF CIRCULATION Britannia’s well read _ THE MAN ON THE STREET was given an oppor- tunity to do something to help the Great Lakes seamen last weekend. The dramatic tear-sheets that formed the front page of the Pacific Tribune were used by hundreds to protest the evasive policy of Labor Minister Humphrey Mitchell. Industrial, workers proved their support to the seamen by selling thousands of extra copies on the streets and on the job, particu- larly workers in the service in- dustry, electrical workers, city. and sawmill workers. Fishermen ‘and loggers showed their solidar- ity along with the rest and the youth set an example for any group to be proud of. Members of Copper Mountain Mine-Mill local covered their en- tire industry with this issue. Every member will know the story benind the seamen‘s strug- gle, and the labor paper that brought it to them, . This is the way to introduce the Pacific Tribune. Now let’s keep it up. Every issue is import- ant and the working people need to know of their paper. Never was it more important. What about this Saturday? Will you all be out again? * * * HIGH UP ON THE top of a mountain sits the townsite of Britannia. The folks who live there are as fine working people as you could find anywhere. They have changed Britannia from’ a company-controlled into a solid union town in a few short years. These miners and their families have learned the value of union- ism. They know how important it is for the workers to stick to- gether. It was a treat for me to visit our many subscribers and to in- quire as to how they liked the paper. The friendly response was more than gratifying. Some - the Pacific Tribune than any other paper. I was told that during their strike a couple of years ago, Ours was the only paper that gave them a fair deal: they look- ed forward to every issue. When you visit a house in Bri- tannia and say that you repre- sent a labor paper, husbands and wives are immediately -interest- ed. Almost everyone knew of the Pacific Tribune and had seen copies of it in their club rooms or at the neighbors. Twenty- seven families decided to have it in their homes and are now regu- lar readers of our paper. Supporters in Britannia, like Eric Anderson and Dave Daniel- son, assured me that they would keep the subs rolling in. Each has pledged 15 subs in the next month, and now the race is on to see who will get them in first. This is just the start, be- cause from now on our circula- tion is going up, up, up. Let’s see if some of these other indus- trial towns can do as well as our friends in Britannia—FEL ASH- TON, to three places outside of Mos- cow; Kiey, Stalingrad, Soviet © Georgia. He travelled by air each time from the hub, Moscow. He never mentions that he. tried to go anywhere else, and he explic- itly states he was allowed free- dom. of movement. He seems never once to have been aware of what any schoolboy could tell him, that the Soviet Union offered him the richest possible field for the study of comparative ethnology, a sub- ject in which the Steinbeck of ten years ago might well have been expected to evidence an in- terest. Nor in his relations with the people did Steinbeck display any intelligent interest in the effect on human psychology of a social- ist way of life. He limits himself to cataloging the kinds of food ‘they served him and listing the political questions they asked, He is not antagonistic to the people. Rather he is dumbly sympathetic. They are good people, and he is embarrassed by the sharp ques- tions they ask. At farmhouses he tries lamely to explain why it is we Americans _ allow “some” of our newspapers to.call for aggressive war against the Soviet Union. At literary (“in- tellectual”) affairs he is bored and feels “inadequate at this sort of thing.” “We were asked about new writers emerging, and we mumbled a little about John Her- ~ sey, and John Horne Burns, who wrote The Gallery, and Bill Maul- din, who draws like a novelist.” (1) And éverywhere and always Steinbeck is physically uncom- fortable. The Russian air trans- ports, with no passenger food ser- vice, become his special bugaboo. The cocktail parties of the for- eign correspondents in Moscow become his haven. He actually grows lyrical about cosmetics, the lipsticks, the nail polish, the mas- cara of American women. A new version of the Romantic return- ed to a Golden Age! All in a very gay little book, a> * * GIVEN STEINBECK’S attitude and personality, it is mot surpris- ing that he comes to no profound conclusions, comes back in fact with no special impressions, “We found, as we had suspected, that the Russian people are people, and, as with other people, that they are very nice.” What does emerge through Steinbeck’s oblique vision and through Capa’s accurate lens, is a picture of a people at work, re- building a land devastated by war, a people profoundly concerned that peace shall. prevail in the world. For any further under- standing of the vast potential for constructive work in a socialist way of life, the reader will havé to go to other sources than Stein- beck’s book.—WILLIAM MAGK. meet Vancouver Office 501 Holden Building 16 East Hastings Street MArine 5746 STANTON & MUNRO BARRISTERS, SOLICITORS, NOTARIES Nanaimo Office Room 2, Palace Building Skinner Street 1780 \ HIGH QUALITY LOGGERS AND WORK BOOTS HAND-MADE JOHNSON‘S BOOTS 63 West Cordova Street - - - - - - Phone MArine 7612 ° PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JULY 16, 1948—PAGE 10