August 2, 1918

The day that Vancouver stood still

BY MIKE GIDORA

On the morning of August 2, 1918,
a special notice appeared on the
front page of the British Columbia
Federationist, official journal of
the British Columbia Federation of
Labor and the Vancouver Trades
and Labor Council. Although the
heavily-bordered message could
not be missed by anyone picking up
acopy of the newspaper, there was
little in its appearance to indicate
that it was a call tor the first-ever
general strike in this country’s
history.

The message read:

“Special Notice by Trades and
Metal Trades Council. All mem-
bers of unions affiliated with the
above councils will cease work for
24 hours commencing 12 o'clock
noon, Friday, August 2, 1918, as a
protest against the shooting of
Brother A. Goodwin.”’

Brother A. Goodwin was Albert
(Ginger) Goodwin, a leading figure
in both the trade union movement
and the old Socialist Party of
Canada. On July 26, 1918, he had
been gunned down by special
constable Dan Campbell in the
woods behind the Vancouver
{sland mining town of Cum-
berland.

Such was the effect of Goodwin’s
shooting that even though the
strike call had only been adopted
by the Vancouver Trades and
Labor Council on the evening of
August 1, and had appeared in the
pages of the Federationist only on
the morning of August 2, by noon of
that day Vancouver had come to a
virtual standstill.

The Daily Province reported,
“when the streetcars faded off the
streets, and the facts began to be
realized, the city was_ literally
thunderstruck.”’

At the stroke of noon, in line with
the call, organized workers in the
city had downed tools in Canada’s
first general strike.

. As street cars finished their
runs, they returned to the Cambie
Street barns and the switches were
pulled to cut the power from the
lines. Within the hour, some 700
railwaymen had left their jobs.

At Coughlan’s Shipyard, 1,600
men were working on a rush order
for huge steel steamers for the
British government. At noon, as
one man, they stopped work.
Workers at Wallace’s Shipyard in
North Vancouver and- in other
yards followed suit.

Employees in the city’s
gasworks left the job at the
designated hour.

About 1,000 longshoremen, the
entire waterfront work force,
walked off the job exactly at noon.

All around the city the scene was
the same as organized workers’ in
the garment trades, boilermakers
and helpers and members of the
metal! trades downed tools and left
their jobs in memory of Ginger
Goodwin.

By one o'clock only a few
unorganized workers remained on
the job.

Nor was the general strike
limited to Vancouver.

In Cumberland, the entire
population of the town turned out
for Goodwin’s’ funeral. A
procession made up of 3,000 miners
and their families stretched back
for more than a mile behind the
town band as the labor leader was
carried to his grave.

Who was this man that he had
sparked such a swift and militant
reaction from the labor
movement? :

Ginger Goodwin was. a
mineworkers leader and a
socialist, having run as a Socialist
Party candidate in Trail during the
1916 provincial elections. He had
led a successful strike of Trail
smeltermen demanding the eight-
hour day and by 1917, he was
secretary of the Trail local of the
Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers,
inheritors of the militant traditions
of the Western Federation of
Miners. In the same year, he was
elected first vice-president of the
B.C. Federation of Labor.

But in 1914, Canada had followed
Britain into the ‘‘war to end all
wars’’, pledging her manpower to
fill the bloody trenches of Europe.
The B.C. labor movement and
particularly outspoken socialists
like Goodwin denounced the war as
imperialist and campaigned ac-
tively against Canada’s in-
volvement. But as the war dragged
on and the dispatches from the
front became longer, the editorial
calls for greater war efforts
became a strident call for con-
scription.

Already by 1916, the dominion
government had _ introduced
national registration which the
labor movement correctly saw as
only a prelude to conscription.
Immediately, the Victoria Labor
Council, the VLC and the B.C.
Federation of Labor denounced the
scheme and called on the labor
movement to boycott it. The
Federationist repeatedly  con-
demned conscription and the B.C.
Federation of Labor conducted a
referendum vote which asked for a
mandate to ‘“‘call a general strike
in the event of conscription, either
military or industrial, being made
effective by the dominion govern-
ment.”’ The vote was 1,814 in favor
with only 576 opposed.

Some labor leaders, including
Goodwin, did register. On
November 10, 1917, according to
his military record, Goodwin
registered and, after examination
by a medical board was placed
in category D—unfit for military
service, But there were influential
people who wanted Goodwin out of
the way, preferably in the front
lines of the war.

On March 7, 1918, Ginger
Goodwin was suddenly ordered to
reappear before the medical board
in Nelson where his classification
was changed to category A. He was
ordered to report for military
service at Number 2 Depot Bat-
talion in Victoria on May 2, 1918.

The reason for the
reclassification was never given
andrather than trust his fate to the
military authorities, Goodwin, like
many socialists and war objectors,
took to the hills of central Van-
couver Island.

The next news of Goodwin was
the report of his death. The official
version had it that special con-
stable Campbell, part of a special
force sent out to round up draft
evaders, came upon Goodwin in
the woods.

The Province reported the
subsequent events this way.

“Stick up your hands and come
forward,’ shouted the officer.

“Goodwin apparently complied
but when about five yards distant,
suddenly dropped his arms and
levelled a rifle at the officer.
Campbell shot quickly from the hip
in frontier fashion and Goodwin
dropped with a bullet through his
chest. He died instantly.’’

The labor movement refused to
accept the story that Campbell had
shot in self-defence against one of
“a gang of four or.five embryo
desperadoes’’.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCTOBER 15, 1976—Page 10

BEDS he: :

a Ph css
— Sean Griffin photo

Ginger Goodwin's grave in the cemetery outside Cumberland.

The VLTC called a_ special
meeting to deal with the shooting.
Delegate after delegate questioned
Campbell's version. ‘‘What we
want to know is,” demanded W.A.
Pritchard, “will military
authorities, in a roundup of draft
evaders, shoot a man on sight for
his labor activities?”

John Kavanagh voiced the
question in everyone’s mind when
he asked, ‘‘The question is, was it
killing in self-defence as the press
says, or was it murder?” Finally
the council asked Joseph Naylor, a
former president of the BCFL, to
attend the inquest into the shooting
which was scheduled for August 1.

The inquest exposed Campbell’s
story of the shooting as almost
total fabrication. The first part of
the story fell apart as it was
revealed that Campbell did not
“shoot from the hip in frontier
fashion” with his service revolver,
but rather had drawn careful aim
with a rifle loaded with soft-nosed,
“dum dum” bullets which were
designed to explode upon impact,
guaranteeing certain death.

Goodwin, whom the press had
portrayed as being armed to the
teeth, was found to have been
carrying only a light .22 calibre
rifle, suitable only for hunting
small game. That small weapon
was removed trom the scene,
giving rise to speculation that the
position of the rifle would have
shown conclusively that Goodwin
could not have been aiming his
small weapon at Campbell.

But probably the most damaging
piece of information was testimony
which showed that the path of the
“dum dum”’ bullet was such that it
appeared as though Goodwin’s
head was turned away from the
officer, and therefore he was
probably not facing Campbell at
the time he was shot.

Although Campbell was placed
under arrest on a charge of
murder, the charge was swiftly
reduced to manslaughter. And he
never did stand trial as the fall
Assizes Court dismissed all
charges against him.

The inquest results only con-

firmed the- suspicions of the. labor
movement. On the evening of
August 1, the call went out for a
general strike the following day.

The prospect of a general strike
had been in the air for sometime,
and Goodwin’s death proved to be
the catalyst. Just weeks before a
number of local unions had voted to
conduct a general strike in support
of the postal clerks who had battled
the federal government in a
lengthy strike.

But Goodwin’s death was
something different. He had been
killed because he had stood firm on
one of labor’s decisions—to resist
conscription and continue op-
position to the war. To the labor
movement, Goodwin’s death was
the direct result of political an-
tagonisms between the federal
government and the B.C. labor
movement and could only be an-
swered with direct political action
by the working class.

August 2, 1918 was a tumultuous

day in the city of Vancouver.
Within hours of the beginning of the
24-hour genera] strike, mobs of ex-
servicement had been recruited by
the Board of Trade and were
wandering the streets of Vah-
couver.
' Their first target was the old
Vancouver Labor Temple at the
corner of Dunsmuir and Howe.
About 300 men milled about in the
street demanding that the strike
endand at the urging of the papers,
the BGs Manufacturers
Association and other ‘‘respec-
table’? elements within the city,
they were whipped into an anti-
labor hysteria.

Soon rocks were being thrown at
the labor temple, and the mob
crashed through the doors and up
the stairs to the office of the
Vancouver Trade and Labor
Council. Council secretary and
business agent, Victor . Midgley,
was pushed through his second
story window onto a three foot
coping, and remained there despite
attempts by some of the returned

‘returned to their jobs as they ha

-and at a special meeting calle

soldiers to threw him off into the
street some twelve feet below.
Finally, he was dragged back
through the window, and hauled
downstairs, where amidst kick’
and punches he was forced to kneel
and kiss the Union Jack, an acl
which was designed to prove that
he was not an agent of the Kaisel

Despite the rioting and attempt$
at intimidating the strike leaders
to call off the strike, the evening of
August 2 found the strike still solid:
That night, a mass meeting was
held in the Empress Theatre wi
the purpose of smashing the strike:

t that meeting, the
promoters of the day’s violence
finally came forward, among them
Vancouver’s mayor C.S. Gale, H.S.
Clements, M.P., J.S. Cowper;
M.P.P., and'P.G. Shallcross of the
Board of Trade.

The Province’s report of the)
meeting stated that speaker afte!
speaker denounced the strike a5
the work of “German agents” and
Shallcross, reportedly speaking 02
behalf of the Board of Trade, called
upon the crowd to ‘kill the Germall
element among us’’.

Finally, after preparing the
crowd sufficiently for more
violencé, the call was raised for the
participants at the meeting to head
up to the Cambie Street barns an@
take over the streetcars.

By this time, the crowd had
become an ugly mob, and they
willingly, headed towards the
streetcar sheds, where Gale was
already meeting with foul
members of the Street
Railwaymen’s Union’s executive |
council. ; :

Though they realized that the
streetcars were symbolic of thé
general strike, the union executivé
members also saw that furthel
violence was sure to erupt if some
compromise could not be reached.
Finally they agreed, at 10:45 p.m»
to allow 25 streetcars to resume |
activity. The rest were to remaill
idle until noon the next day as was
originally planned. :

That seemed to satisfy the mob,
and they soon dispersed. And the
strike remained solid until noon the
next day, and though furthel
violence was threatened, . noné
materialized.

As noon

came, the workels
promised, and Canada’s first
general strike had come to 4!
end—with an interesting post
script. ;

The VTLC had been accused #
not representing the wishes of it®
membership in calling the strikes

after the strike, all’ delegate®
resigned and went back to thei!
unions asking to be re-elected 0 |
the basis that they had called thé
general strike. 4
Most unions refused to acceP!
the resignations, and of those tha
did accept the resignations, only
six delegates out of more than !
were defeated in seeking electiO®
The Federationist summed ¥P
the general strike with a commer :
which now, as organized labor all :
across Canada stands on the veré®
of another general strike, could 2?
be more prophetic. ‘Organize
labor may make many mistakes ay
the future, but the moment ¢

bosses try to take advantage of th®

situation, that moment will be t
signal for a rallying of labor fo"
ces?”

And today, as the bosses and thé |
bosses’ governments try to fore
workers to accept wage-cuttile —
legislation, we have yet anothe!
“signal for a rallying of lab?
forces.”