British Columbia :
the people's story

11 - THE SOCIALIST TRADITION:

By HAL GRIFFIN

ONG before the first socialist organisation was formed in

British Columbia, socialist ideas were taking shape in the
minds of many workers. They came into the newly-discovered
hard-rock mines of the Kootenays with the ‘American miners.
They. followed the new railroads with the Russians and
Ukrainians, They were taken into the logging camps by Finns
and Swedes and spread among the fishing settlements of the
coast by Norwegians and Croatians. They were carried into
the trades by English, Scottish and German immigrants and
into the coal mines by Czechs and Italians. Variously inter-
preted, awkwardly grasped and wielded at first, they fused
with struggles engendered by bitter exploitation to become a
political force whose imprint upon province and country
deepens as it approaches the socialist future.

The proud tradition, the experience gained. from so many
betrayals, the unending struggle against opportunism, between
those who sought only to reform capitalism and too often
were themselves reformed and those who fought to end
capitalism—all these had their small beginning in the late
nineties of the last century when Socialist Leagues, after the
pattern of those already established in Ontario, began to
spring up in the hard-rock mining centres of the Kootenays,
at Slocan, Greenwood and elsewhere, and the coal mining
centres of Vancouver Island, notably Nanaimo, where the
Revolutionary Socialist party was formed around 1898..

The first Socialist organisation in Vancouver was founded
by Arthur Spencer, a railway worker who secured a transfer
from Hamilton with that purpose in mind. In 1898 he organ-
ised a branch of the Socialist Labor party and at the same
time set up its economic counterpart, the Socialist Trades and
Labor Alliance.

Founded in the United States as the: Working Men’s
party in 1876 and changing its name a year later, the Socialist
Labor party, in its early years, had worked with the Knights
of Labor and actually held the leadership of many assemblies.
Similarly, its members had worked within the American
Federation of Labor after its formation in 1881. But in, 1890
Samuel Gompers, the dominant leader of the AFL, refused to
grant a charter to the New York Central Labor Union on the
ground that the New York section of the Socialist Labor
party was affiliated to it. And in 1895, at its Washington
convention, the Knights of Labor refused to seat Daniel De
Leon, then editor of The People, a Socialist Labor paper, as
a delegate.

The Socialist Labor party severed all relations with the
Knights of Labor and at the same time embarked on ‘an open
struggle with the AFL, Gompers, who once had proclaimed
his socialist sympathies, was following a policy of collabo-
rating with the employers to win concessions for the skilled
workers at the expense of the semi-skilled and unskilled. Its
inevitable accompaniment was a repudiation of socialist ideas
and a defense of the capitalist system. Despairing of unseat-
ing the bureaucratic machine through which the increasingly
conservative AFL leaders maintained themselves in office, the
Socialist Labor party turned to dual unionism, a policy that
had the effect of withdrawing the most militant workers from
the craft unions, weakening the trade union movement as a
whole and strengthening the hand of the conservative AFL
leaders.

In 1898, when Spencer founded the Vancouver branch,
the Socialist Labor party was at the height of its influence in
the U.S., with a membership of some 350,000. By contrast,
the membership of the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance,
never more than 20,000, was declining, ‘Already, strong sec-
tions of the party were demanding a change in policy toward
the trade unions and the Vancouver branch had been in
existence for only a few months when a split in the party
divided its own thin ranks.

In 1899, the New York section of the party, empowered
by convention to elect the new national executive committee,

voted opponents of De Leon’s dual union policies into office.
But the old leadership refused to give up its posts and the
party was divided between two organised factions, each call-
ing itself the Socialist Labor party. The new committee called
a convention at Rochester, attended by delegates representing
a majority of the party membership, at which the Socialist
Trades and Labor Alliance was rejected for support of the
established unions. Then the convention invited the Social
Democratic party, organised in 1898 under the leadership of
Eugene V. Debs from socialist groups outside the Socialist
Labor party, to join it. The outcome was the holding of a
unity convention at Indianapolis in 1901 at which the Socialist
Party.of the United States was launched.
$03 % xt

In distant Vancouver, where the Socialist Trades and
Labor Alliance was no more than a name, the split was
reflected in a similar division over policy toward the unions,
with the majority breaking away to form the United Socialist
Labor party and seek alliances with other Socialist. groups.

Socialist Leagues from Vancouver Island, the Lower
Mainland and the Kootenays were represented at the new
party’s convention held in Vancouver in the spring of 1900,
at which Will MacClain, an official of Vancouver Trades and
Labor Council, was nominated to contest a Vancouver seat
in the forthcoming provincial election—the first Socialist
candidate to contest public office.

Recognising the trade unions as “a carrier of the gospel,”
the new party called on its members to join and strengthen
them and “to educate your fellow unionists on questions of
socialism and the labor movement on economic and political
lines.”

Within the year, branches of the United Socialist Labor
party had been formed at several provincial centres and the
Lardeau Eagle, published at Ferguson by R. Parm Pettipiece,
had assumed the role of the new party’s semi-official journal.

At Vancouver, Victoria and Nanaimo during these same
years the trade union movement had been vigorously pressing
its own demand for independent political action on the Trades
and Labor Congress. In 1899 it took the initiative itself by
forming a Labor party at a provincial convention in Vancou-
ver attended by trade union delegates from the three main
centres, The demand for the eight-hour day headed its plat-
form, with compulsory arbitration, public ownership of basic
industries and the single tax as the main planks. Inevitably,
as a reflection of the prevailing sentimet in the labor move-
ment, it included Asiatic exclusion among its demands.

In the 1900 provincial election the new Labor party
made its greatest impact upon Nanaimo. It re-elected Ralph
Smith in Nanaimo City and John Radcliffe, its candidate in
Nanaimo South, came within 24 votes of defeating James
Dunsmuir, the millionaire coal owner who became the new
premier. In Vancouver the two Labor candidates, Joe Dixon
and F. Williams, and the United Socialist Labor candidate,
Will MacClain, polled substantial votes but fell far short of
election.

In the federal election that same year, Ralph Smith
resigned his seat in the legislature to contest the Nanaimo
federal constituency. Running as an Independent Labor
candidate, he won the seat with Liberal support to share with
W. A. Puttee, editor of the People’s Voice, organ of Winni-
peg Trades and Labor Council, who won election in Winnipeg,
the distinction of being the first Labor members of parlia-
ment. And in the ensuing provincial byelection in 1901,
Irish-born James Hurst Hawthornthwaite won the Nanaimo
City seat to become the first Socialist member of a provincial
legislature.

% % %

The rapid advances made by the labor movement around
the turn of the century were reflected in the wooing of the
labor vote by all candidates, particularly the Liberals, and the

violent resistance of the employers to the spread of trade
union organisation.

Concluded on next page

June 6, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—

Commentary
on capitalism”

WENTY-FIVE years ago ™

1923, a very important meet
ing was held at the Edgewatel
Beach Hotel in Chicago. Tho
present were: ;

@ The president of th ia
est independent ste®
company; ‘

@ The president of the Ne
tional City Bank; pe

@ The president of the late
est utility company;

@ The president of the larg
est gas company; ss

@ The greatest wheat spect
lator; =

@ The president of the New
York Stock Exchange 6

@ A member of the ¥™
cabinet; as

@ The head of the worl
greatest monopoly; ok

® The president of the Ba
of International %¢
ments~

That was a quarter of @ cel
tury ago. What became of th
men? a

Charles Schwab, the Pi
dent of the largest indepet
dent steel company, We
bankrupt and lived on aif
rowed money for five Y®
before his death. :

Samuel Insull, the preside
of the greatest utility ©
pany, died a fugitive
justice and penniless in 4
eign land. i

owed Hopson, the pres
dent of the largest gas ©

any, is now insane.

: Arthur Cutten, the great
wheat speculator, died abl?
—ainsolvent.

Richard Whitney, the
dent of the New York
Exchange, was recently
leased from Sing Sing. of

Albert Fall, the member
the U.S. cabinet, was parde ah
from prison so he could dt
home. atest

Jesse Livermore, the 8!©*,
“pear” in Wall Street, He
suicide. 4 of

Ivar Krueger, the he ot
greatest monopoly, die a
icide. per

Leon Fraser, the preside
of the Bank of Internati?

nt

pr

pres
stoc

Settlements, died a suict a { |

Lunatics, crooks, suc
what a commentary on thé "4,
tem that made these M®
gods!

Sherwood forest”
now all union me?

sr WAS bound to.
some day, considerME spit
egalitarian tradition
Hood. out °
Sherwood Forest, hana? po
Robin and his merry b@P’ ype |
soaked the rich to oe ent
poor, is now 100 Ped if
union, it has been revea .
Nottingham. fn hi
All forestry workers nee”
heralded spot are now

ized.
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