or for

throbbing attack between
how these luscious golden pies
are le, and the agony will
sta, "

It started this way.’ All over
this’ continent, bakers and
restaurant owners have : long
complained that the most
beautiful pies were not the
most popular with our mil-
lions of pie eaters. If the pie-

“maker uses crunchy hard ap-
ples, he gets a pie that looks
perfect. But the first bite re-

pointment. Such pies are not
as juicy and flavorsome as
those we. used to wait for in
mom’s fragrant kitchen.

So the pie people tried to
use softener, juicer kinds of
apples, fully ripened. These

by DYSON CARTER

veals the customer’s disap-—

. apple-growers.

LL, the chemists have
come through. Scientists
in government laboratories of

Food to eat-

profit ?

headaches? Research men have deyeloped a new
kind of apple pie that prevents these chronic
pains in some people. Trouble is, this super- -scientific
pie is going to give countless other folk a terrific

D ID you know that apple pies can cause severe

the ears. dpst one look at

gave aroma and taste that —

were heavenly. But you
couldn’t get people to try
them. Such pies had that
flabby week-old look. The cus-

tomer would shudder and ask .

for doughnuts or rice pud-
ding.

Hence some expensive head-
aches. People who make or
sell pies have a multi-million
dollar business, and they have
been howling for the .chem-
ists to do something about
their pie worries. So have -the
What’s -. the
sense of developing spicy,
luscious apples if these vari-
eties won’t capture the pie
industry’s big money?

that was 40 years ago.”

‘

Massachusetts, New York
state and the U.S. depart-
ment. of agriculture have an-
nounced that. perfect apple
pie. To make it, you take
the soft and juicy kind of ap-
pies, fully ripe, and treat
them with a harmless chemi-
cal, calcium chloride. So little
of the stuff is required that
nobody can taste it in the fin-
ished pie. Even so, it makes
the pectin in mushy apple go
really firm.. After baking,
such treated apples give with
superb fragrance, taste and
firm bite.

This is expected to set the
apple pie. business booming.
Everybody was slapping the
chemists on the back and
even promising them a five-
dollar monthly raise in pay.
Then the long-distance phone
began to ring in a very nasty

* way.
Tens. of Be pccands of or-
chard owners’ have their

money invested in hard-apple
trees. Huge factories make
_ profits out of processing this
crop for bakers. Now the big
baking monopolists are not
buying. They want the juicy
apples like McIntoshes and
Gravensteins. So the discov-
ery has brought on an epi-
demic of nightmares, in
which bankruptcy and fore-
closures are playing the lead
roles. ‘

es...
ONDER -what the chem-
ists think? Have they

ever taken time to figure out
why a beneficial discoverey

should mean ruination to
great numbers of people? Why
should there not be a market
for all the apples we can
grow, when millions are hun-
gry for fruit? ,

The answer is that we real-
ly don’t grow apples or make
apple pies for people to eat.
The apple industry is out to
make
the profits for one group of
apple growers, the chemists
have knocked the profits out
of the competitors.

Right this .year a record
apple crop in Western Can-
ada may spell ruin to count-
less farmers, since the mar-
ket for juicy western varie-
ties has collapsed. Because of
the: Truman Doctrine and
Bevin’s. dollar-hoarding eco-
nomics, British and European
kids won’t get apples, soft or
hard, in pies or any other
way.

To make the contradition
complete, other scientists
have just won a long battle to
grow hardier apple trees. A
new species will bear fruit,
on a commercial scale, in re-

gions where wintry blizzards ~

lower the temperature to 25

below zero. This is quite an:

achievement, and the orchard
experts are proud of it. They

Say it should greatly boost

apple-growing in Canada and
the United States. Poor fel-
lows, they still think apples
are grown to eat!

UCH contradictions arrive

with every air-mail. The
other day scientists of the In-
stitute -of Food Technologists

profits. By boosting _

port of two new discoveries —
for improving food.

First, Dr. Ralph M. Bohn of
Minneapolis told how he had
made a ‘whipping’ formula
from soybeans. This protein
substance makes_ excellent
nougat, marshmallows, mer-
ingues and other tempting
delicacies. It makes them
cheaper and longer-lasting
than today’s whipping com-
pounds that contain egg-
white.

No difference to the public.
But bakery profits will go up.
Farmers’ will lose another
egg market.

And, at the same meeting,
same day, two chemists from
Iowa State College told of
research that improves egg-
white, so bakers can use it
with less fear of spoiling. The
process is quite expensive. To
‘make it pay more profits to
‘the big bakers, eggs would
have to’sell at a low price on
the farm.

Any way you look at it, the
farmer is going to lose. The
food monopolists are going to
cash in. And the scientists,
apparently, will go on work-
ing as if their left) hands
didn’t know that their right
hands were doing.

Don’t let all this spoil your —
appetite. Science is steadily
giving us better food. If we
want this food at prices we
can afford, that is up to us.
The battle-line is sharply
drawn now. It is a struggle
-between food for people to
eat, or food for the monopo-

sat back and listened to re-

lists to price away up inthe |
super-profit : levels. ay

He headed his
Red Spot on
Map,’ and this is

We

take the CPR and CNR into
Le

Pe asks ae ofa an
for public ownership. The Con-
servatives were going to take
over the railways and the tele-
went one better and advocated
government ownership of
public services and utilities. An@

_ By 1912 Bill's work in the
Socialist Party had earned him
a@ nomination, his first, in the
_ provincial election of that year.
He and Bill Pritchard, later

=< (gue of ths fowlders of the CCF

and editor of the ill-starred

erat Party. They elected Parker
- Williams in Newcastle and John

| FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1947

ai:

issues. Then, as now,

Place in Nanaimo,

Conservatives couldn’t take. The
Conservatives didn’t win a
-single seat and neither did we.”

LTHOUGH the Socialist Party.

had received a setback on
the electoral field, the British
Columbia Federation of Labor,
formed in 1911, was making
advances on the trade union
field that would soon enable its
members to claim B.C. as the
most highly organized province
in the Dominion. In 1913 it

had 11,827 members in 70 affil-

iated unions and a_ resolution
endorsing “the doctrines of s0-
cialism” had been adopted by
a referendum vote of 1,718 to
413.

Those years immediately be-
fore the outbreak of the First
World War presented socialists
with their greatest challenge
and test witnessed a series of
strikes, beginning with a dis-
pute inyolving 5,000 building
trades workers at Vancouver in
1911 and culminating in the
historic strike of 3,700 coal
miners on Vancouver Island in
1912.

Bill took litle active part in

the strike movement, but his
contributions to the Western
Clarior, then edited by Donald
George MacKenzie, drew on his
now considerable experience in
both the socialist and trade
union movements to clarify the
he was
pitiless in exposing the men in
government and industry who

disguised their anti-labor de
» signs with an affected concern

for the public interest.
While he was still in Scot-
land Bill joined the Barbers’
‘Union in Glasgow, and in Can-
ada he became a member of
the Journeymen Barbers’ Union.

Then, after war broke out, he
went to work in a sawmill on

Burrard Inlet. Another worker
at the mill was Bill Pritchard
and soon the two of them were

and those |
were the only two seats the ~

busy organizing the short-lived
International Timberworkérs’
Union. x

Bill’s facility with his pen,
combined with a capacity for

. Study that had already taken

him through all the available
Marxist works, “including Capi-
tal, which every one _ talked

about but no one seemed to.

have read,”
constant

fitted him for the
demands the / party

"made upon him for contribu-

tions to its papers. His ability
was tested to the utmost

in 1917, the Russian: Revolution ©

burst upon the socialist move-
ment, demolishing old concepts
‘and establishing new and strip-
ping from Marxist writings the
accumulation of years’ of oppor-
tunist distortion and misconcep-
tion. Bill was one of the mem-
hers of the Socialist Party who
recognized that the time had
come for bold re-examination
and change,

The ruling class of Canada,
as of other countries, was
thrown into a frenzy of fear

‘by the Russian Revolution and

the upsurge of. working class
organization and socialist agita-
tion it produced in this coun-
try. That fear was reflected in
new repressive measures, par-
ticularly the vicious Section 98

enacted by the Meighen govern-

during the Winnipeg Gen-
eral Strike of’ 1919. It was
reflected in screaming headlines
falsifying the news from Russia
and distorting it beyond all
recognition of the truth, just as

‘today sensational headlines and

twisted news reports present a

.false picture of what is happen-

ing in the new democracies of

‘Europe.

ee

ILL BENNETT and others. set
themselves the difficult task
of combatting the lies and in-
terpreting the news the daily
newspapers either distorted or
suppressed entirely. :

Grand old man of Canadian labor

When the government banned
the Western Clariom in 1918
they launched the Red Flag,
and when the government is-
sued instructions to the post
office to accept the Red Flag
but not to send it out they

changed the name to the Indi- |
“Through their writings, .

cator.
through public meetings and
study groups they broke down
the barriers of distortion and
prejudice, spreading through
_the labor movement the pro-
found significance of the new
workers’ state that had come
into being to influence their
lives and open a new era for
their world.

Within the Socialist Party
itself the ferment created by the
war and heightened by the Rus-
Sian Revolution continued in ar-
gument and dispute, with the
advocates of an ° opportunist
course waging a losing struggle
against the militancy of the
rank-and-file, finally to take ref-
uge in the outright refusal of

the leadership to recognize the -

demand of the membership for
affiliation to the new Commun-
ist. International.

ILL was one of

the 15 or 20 members of the
Socialist Party, the OBU and
the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s
League, including Jack Kavan-
agh and Jack Clarke, who met
in Sullivan Hall on Cordova
Street, Vancouver, in December,
1921, as a committee to launch
the new Workers’ Party, which
in 1924 became the Communist
Party of Canada. The achieve-
ments of the working people of
Russia had demonstrated the

need for a new type of party’

to carry forward the struggle
for socialism. The Workers’
Party was the organization cre-
_ated by Canadian workers to
meet that need.

Twenty-two years later, in the
Georgia Hotel, Vancouver, Bill

Bennett was again 4 one ot a

the story of the

they have not dimmed his

“Aid the dawning, tongue

of new construction.

‘high as the affection with

gathering, no longer
in tens but in hundreds, ro
which the new Labor-Progt
Party was launched in the ©
munist tradition to which he be
devoted his life.

To tell the story of those in
tervening years one would: a
to write a history of the °
Communist Party, for in & |

Bill’s story.

Party is also * the
tne

ene is a bright rane
whole.

The years are
weigh upon Bill, greying his
and seaming the face rk
familiar to thousands of Wily
ers, in British Columbia — ie
far beyond, but if they ch,
limited his capacity for th-

ful outlook or corroded his’ view
of Karl Marx’ theory 45

the cornerstone of the scien?
which socialists must eee they
ther in all directions
want to keep pace with ie” R

Er rol
ea as in the B.C. wi
News twelve years ago, ‘0
Bil’s ‘Short Jabs, a fe"
which has become s0 :
that it is as Ol’ Bill rather f
Bill Bennett that he is

| wherever the paper is read.

In the socialist Canada
future when the working I
honor their pioneers who, ,
the words of Charles

pen,” Bill Bennett's —
will be among Ree
mortalized in the stone and "put

monument can ever tov af

ke is regarded by wor
ple wherever he goes.
finest tribute to the fifty
of service he has given | ¥
labor movement. eas

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—