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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¢