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World peace leaders on calendar

The 1952 calendar published by the Canadian Peace Congress features photographs of five famous
peace leaders in the five great powers, and the sixth from Canada.

the calendar.

At left is Madame Kosmodemianskaya, a Soviet teach
partisan fighter of the last war, Zoya. Photo in centre shows Dr.
of the Canadian Peace Congress. At right

People’s Republic and a leader of the Chinese, peace movement.

Shown above are three pages from
er and mother of the world famous
James Endicott, national chairman
is Madame Sun Yat-sen of China, vice-president of the new

BOOK GOES TO PRESS

'

Tom McEwen‘s biography of
Ol’ Bill out in mid-December

TOM McEWEN’S biography of
“Ol Bill” Bennett, a book eagerly
awaited by thousands who fol-
lowed the veteran socialist jour-
nalist’s “Short Jabs” column in
the Pacific Tribune and its pre-
decessors, will be published by
the Tribune Publishing Company,

_ Ltd. in mid-December. In mak-
ing the announcement this week,
Elgin Ruddell, business manager
of the Pacific Tribune, pointed
out that the book, to be published
under the title, He Wrote For
Us: The Story of Bill Bennett,
Pioneer Socialist Journalist, will
commemorate the second anni-
versary of Ol’ Bill’s death.

To complete the 50,000-word
manuscript, which is now being
edited and prepared for printing,
Tom McEwen, editor of the
Pacific Tribune, had to comb the
files of the B.C. Federationist,
which published Ol’ Bill’s first
writings, the B.C. Workers’ News,
in which the first “Short Jabs’
column appeared, and the files
of its successors—People’s Advo-
cate, The Advocate, The People,
Pacific Advocate and Pacific Tri-
bune—in which the column con-
tinued without a bréak until OL
Bill’s death on December 31, 1049.

Except for one slim volume,
Builders of British Columbia,
published in 19387, all or Bill’s
writings were for labor weeklies

published in this province over
a period of 35 years. McEwen’s
research work, begun more than
@ year ago, entailed both a thor-
ough search of labor paper files
and an extensive correspondence
with old-timers throughout the
province whg had been associated
with Ol Bill in the early days
of the Socialist Party of Canada
and later the* Communist Party
of Canada. Only when he had
completed this work last summer
could McEwen start writing the
manuscript.

Embodying the best of Ol’ Bill’s
own writings, He Wrote For Us

‘traces the story of Bill Bennett

from its beginnings on the Clyde-

“side through half a century of

the socialist movement in Scot-
land and Canada. As Ol’ Bill’s
own life was. woven into the
people’s struggles over the 40
years he lived in British Colum-
bia, so McEwen has taken Ol’
Bill’s writings and woven them
into his story of a fighting labor
movement. He Wrote For Us is
not only the biography of a great
pioneer socialist—it is also the
history, as seen through the eyes
ofa man who helped to make it,
of the labor movement in British
Columbia. : :
Anticipating a heavy demand,
Elgin Ruddell this week urged
readers of the Pacific Triubne

S298 SSS SSDS

SEND THIS ORDER IN NOW

To: Tribune Publishing Company Ltd. °
Room 6 - 426 Main Street, Vancouver, B.C.

PLEASE SEND ME [ ] COPIES OF

‘He Wrote For Us’

The story of Bill Bennett, pioneer: Socialist Journalist
By TOM McE WEN
Price $1.00

7 ENCLOSE: —[ ] money order

This is an nines order to be filled on publication.

SS

[ ] cheque [ ] cash

‘

to place their advance orders
for He Wrote For Us. without
delay in order to avoid. possible
disappointment.

“We have carefully estimated
the number of copies we may ex-
pect to sell,” he stated, “but -if
the demand exceeds our expecta-
tions priority will be given to
advance orders as we receive
them.” There would be no second
printing, he added.

He Wrote For Us will be pub-
lished in. a paper-bound edition,
with a dust-jacket designed by
Fraser Wilson, wellknown Van-
couver artist, and will sell at $1
@ copy, available either at the
offices of the Pacific Tribune,
Room 6, 426 Main Street, or the
People’s Cooperative Bookstore,
337 West Pender Street, Vancou-
ver, B.C. Clothbound copies, at
a price to be announced later,
may be ordered from the publish-
ers. ;

GOOD READING

Delegates report

on visit to USSR

IT’S A LONG title but the
writers have a lot to say. We
Have Learned the Truth About
the Soviet Union is the eye-wit-
ness report of British, Americans,
French Italians, Canadians, Ice-
landers, Danes, Dutch, Swedes,
Finns and Austrians who visited
the USSR in May, 1951,

Feigel Gartner, Pianist of the
Toronto Jewish Folk Choir, was
one of the Canadians with the
cultural delegation which went

from this country to see how

socialism works. In this pam-
phlet she describes a visit to a
Soviet. collective farm.

Besides Moscow, the delegates
visited several of the Soviet Re-
publics, many towns and Villages,
factories and mills, collective
farms, schools and scientific re-
search institutes. They also visit-
ed the homes of workers, collec-
tive farmers and professional
people. They inspected hospitals
and sanatoria, kindergartens and
theatres, clubs and sports stadia.

The 64-page illustrated pam-
phlet, which sells for 10 cents,
is available here at People’s Co-
Operative Bookstore, 337 West
Pender.

“in his favor.

LIBEL ACTION BEATEN

‘Power Without Glory’ is

book that rocked Australia

A 34-YEAR-OLD Australian
working man is having his look
at Europe these**days, after a
sensational victory last June
against a charge of criminal libel
because his first book, Power
Without Glory, got very much
under the skin of Australian re-
actionaries. It was sensational
the way Frank Hardy took his
case to the people. Committees
for his defense were formed in
the big cities. He and his wife
spoke at some 400 meetings, some
of them at factory gates. And
no less than £2500, in. shillings
and pence, were collected for the
legal expenses.

* * *

HARDY, WHOSE blue eyes
twinkle with combat, and whose
strong, straight jaw conveys the
impression of a man that can
take care of himself in a fight,
tells the story with pride. For
his case united writers and work-
ing people in.a way that Austra-
lia had never seen before.

It was a sensational victory,
too, because the sales of Power
Without Glory zoomed. Where-
as the ordinary novel sells a few
thousand copies, Hardy’s book
has gone into some 47,000 by
now, and has the whole country

buzzing. ~
The day of acquittal last June
was’ unforgettable. Policemen

shook hands with the author, and
people in busses cheered. The
jury had been out only five min-
utes and came back unanimously
“Only two of the
jurymen returned the book,” says
Hardy with a chuckle. And what
makes it all the more interesting
is’ Hardy’s membership in the
Australian Communist party,
since 1938, in fact, only a wear
after he came off “the trek.” He
had been a migratory worker,
picking apples and tobacco before
reaching the big city.
Pd * *

POWER WITHOUT GLORY is
a big book of 699 pages. It is
meant as the first of three novels
about 20th century Australia.
This one took him four years to

‘ write, 60 hours a week, he says,

in which he “struck all the prob-.
lems, even if I did not solve
them all.” But he hopes the next
one should be ready in 1952.

The root-idea, of course, came
from Balzac’s great Comedié
Humaine. But whereas the
French author based himself on
Catholicism “as a complete sys-
tem for the repression: of the
depraved tendencies in man,”
Hardy says frankly that Marx-
ism is his guide. And the can-
vas will be the whole of ‘Austra-
lia’s stormy history in our time.

The book itself is the story
of John West, who started out
as a pretty gambler to become-
a combination of J. Pierpont
Morgan and Al Capone. In this
sense, Power Without Glory has
something of Theodore Dreiser's
conception in The Titan.

Though nobody says so in so
many words, all Australians as-
sume without question that the
character of John West is based
on the fabulous and altogether-
well-known John Wren, one of
Australia’s big Capitalists, a
maker and shaker behind ‘the
Labor party, a power in. the
church of long standing.

In fact, it was Wren’s wife
who brought the libel suit. She
was “put up to it” (the story
goes). For in the book, the’
wife of John Wren is so re-
pressed by the atmosphere of
crime, gambling, political chi-
canery which absorbs her hus-
band’s life that she permits her-.
self an affair with a handsome

bricklayer. After’ the child,
Xavier, is born, Jack Wren os-
tracizes his wife, hardly ever
exchanging a word with her. For
she had done more than betray
him; she had challenged his
power. It seems that Mrs. Wren
took all this quite personally.
The upshot had all Australia
talking. It made a national fig-
ure out of Hardy, and was top-
ped by the court victory.
* * *

IT IS QUITE a yarn, this story
of Jack Wren’s rise to power
over half a centuny. Everybody
in Australia found something rec-
ognizable in it. Hardy told me.

But the most important thing
is that this novel comes from
a@ man -who himself comes from
the working’people. This is what
Katherine Susan Pritchard, the
great old lady of Australian lit-
erature,’ has underlined about
Hardy’s work. I got the feeling
from the book itself and from
hours of talk with Hardy that
something new is happening in
Australia—he is not only a writer
for, or about working people, but
of working people.

Hardy describes his father, an
old militant of the Socialist La-
bor party in the natal Village of
Macchus Marsh; his father had
a way of telling stories of the
early days of Australia, which
Frank never forgot. He himself
studied by correspondence, while
bumming the backwood. He got
to drawing before he took to
writing, and’ after working on a
small-town newspaper (from
which he was fired for unionizing
the place) Hardy joined the army .
in 1941, es 35

It was the Army journal Salt
which gave him a chance to

write and draw at the same time.

And after leaving the service, he
found himself part of a group
of left-wing writers, who formed
a sort of syndicate, selling their
stories and sometimes plays to
trade union papers. The -unions
paid “a quid” each; from fifteen
such subscribers a writer could
make fifteen pounds.
x * *

RECENTLY, Hardy has been
visiting the People’s Democracies
and the Soviet Union, and now
the reactionary Menzies govern-
ment, after the pattern estab-
lished by the Truman adminis-
tration, has announced its in-
tention of lifting his passport.

- Commenting on the Soviet Un-
ion’s tremendous “Constructions
of Communism,” he says:

“Is it possible that the Soviet
Union can build Communism,
make the brotherhood of man
and the utopia of material and
spiritual plenty a reality in our
time? One hesitates to be scep-
tical of their plans, they have a
habit of carrying them out.

“Those of us who know how
wrong H. G. Wells proved to be
when he scoffed at Lenin’s plan
to electrify all Russia will hesi-
tate. Wells went to Moscow in
1920 where he met Lenin at the
Kremlin! Lenin told him they
would electrify the whole Soviet
Union within ten years. Wells
declared the plan to be imposs-
ible for an industrially backward
country ravaged by the war of
intervention. Wells dubbed ‘Lenin
‘The dreamer in the Kremlin.”
But it was done—in less than
ten years. oe ea

“Now there are 200 million
dreamers in the Soviet Union.
Will they make their dreams a
reality? After spending five
weeks in their midst I am con-
vinced they will, provided they
are allowed to work in peace.”—
JOSEPH STAROBIN.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — NOVEMBER 23, 1951 — PAGE 1¢