Reds Under the Bed: How Communists Frightened the Canadian Establishment, 1928-32

By Lita-Rose Betcherman

An engaging account of a formative period in Canada's political history, just as important as Senator McCarthy's Red Scare was in the US. This is an unbiased account of midnight arrests, imprisonment without trial, and forced deportation faced by those whose only crimes were unpopular political opinions.

The interviews with participants, the descriptions of street fights, and contentious court trials, prompted the Globe and Mail to note: “Rarely has the ambiance of an epoch been evoked with such a range of color.” The Montreal Gazette called it, “A pungent and often rollicking account of panic, zealotry and high confusion in both the Left and Right.”

For its important lessons in human rights and the abuses of government power, Quill and Quire said it is “a powerful and disturbing book. ”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bev Editions
• Release date: Jul 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780987814685

Lita-Rose Betcherman

Lita-Rose Betcherman received a doctorate in Tudor and Stuart history from the University of Toronto and was the Women's Bureau director for the province of Ontario. She is the author of three books on Canadian history and lives in Toronto.

Book preview

Reds Under the Bed

How Communists Frightened Canada's Establishment, 1928-1932

By

Lita-Rose Betcherman

Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords

ISBN: 978-0-9878146-8-5

Originally published by Deneau Publishing under the title The Little Band: Clashes Between Communists and the Canadian establishment, 1928-1932

Copyright 2012 Lita-Rose Betcherman

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter I - Chief Draper

Chapter II - Draper's Edict

Chapter III - The Vaara Sedition Trial

Chapter IV - Disorderly Conduct

Chapter V - Disorder Within

Chapter VI - Queen's Park Battles

Chapter VII - Trials and Appeals

Chapter VIII - The Depression

Chapter IX - Marshalling the Unemployed

Chapter X - More Trials and Appeals

Chapter XI - Inside the Party

Chapter XII - Deport and Ban

Chapter XIII - Attack and Counter-Attack

Chapter XIV - Council of War

Chapter XV - Round-Up

Chapter XVI - The Big Trial

Chapter XVII - Verdict

Chapter XVIII - Appeal

Epilogue

Notes

INTRODUCTION

There had been followers of Karl Marx in Canada since the late nineteenth century. Diverse forms of socialism and labour radicalism had found expression in various contending groups united only in their ultimate objective of a society governed by and for the working classes. The diversity among the Canadian left wing mirrored in miniature the then current state of socialism. Under the Second International, founded in 1889, there were as many brands of socialism as there were great socialist leaders: Keir Hardie of Great Britain, Jean Jaurès of France, August Bebel, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg of Germany, and the exiled Lenin — architect of the future revolution in Russia. The privileged classes of pre-war society, basking in their tax-free opulence, were not overly alarmed. The workers' state was still in the talking stages. Moreover, social reformism — the amelioration of labour's status through existing institutions such as Parliament — was more typical of leftist thought than Lenin's revolutionary theory was.

The advent of the 1914-1918 war showed the hollowness of international socialism. The solidarity of the working classes fissured along national lines. The hope of the Second International that workers would not fight each other in blind obedience to their respective ruling classes was shattered. The call for war on war went unheeded when the call to the colours was issued.

Then came the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. The news that a workers' state had been created in the most reactionary country of Europe revitalized the Left in Canada as elsewhere. At first, socialists of every stripe rejoiced; but the revolutionary doctrines of those who began calling themselves Communists and their slavish attachment to the Soviet Union soon alienated the moderate socialists and most of the trade union movement. When the Communist party was actually started in Canada it was nothing more than a tiny group of dedicated radicals.

The Communist party of Canada was founded in a barn outside Guelph, Ontario, at the end of May 1921. It was convened under conditions of extreme secrecy. The twenty-two delegates from Montreal, Ontario, and Winnipeg stole into the pleasant market town furtively to avoid the attention of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was the period of the Palmer raids in the United States, a witch-hunt conducted by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer to stamp out the infant American Communist movement. Some of those gathered in the Guelph barn were card-carrying members of the American parties. The clandestine character of the founding convention set the tone for the new Canadian party which operated underground until 1924. During the secret years, its public activities were carried on by an open, legal organization named the Workers' Party of Canada. Both the clandestine party and the Workers' Party had their counterparts in the United States.

The Communist party of Canada was one of scores of Communist parties that sprang up in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Between 1918 and 1921 revolutionary groups were formed in virtually all European countries including Great Britain, in Argentina and Mexico, in India and China, as well as in the United States. The Russian Communists were not slow to take advantage of this ferment. The Communist International, or Comintern, was founded to promote world-wide revolution. In March 1919, while Russia was still in the throes of civil war, the First Congress of the Communist International was held in Moscow, ushering in the era of the Third International. The fifty-three delegates present on that historic occasion heard Lenin define the future in terms of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Second Congress, also in Moscow, took place in 1920. Although delegates came from thirty-seven countries, there was no constituent assembly. Right from the start, the Comintern was dominated by Moscow. Lenin himself formulated Twenty-One Conditions of Admission to the international body and these were adopted by the Second Congress. In essence, the Conditions called for absolute obedience to the dictates of the Comintern which, in turn, was controlled by the Russian party. The inevitable result of such highly centralized discipline was complete uniformity among the member parties. Unrelated to national circumstances, all were to have the same programmes, the same rules, the same tactics, the same slogans: the British Communist speaking freely from his soap-box in Hyde Park and the hunted members of the illegal parties of eastern Europe were to march in lock-step to Moscow's orders. Under the guidance of a Comintern official, the Canadian party at its founding convention in the Guelph barn affiliated with the International, endorsed the Twenty-One Conditions of Admission, and fell in line.

While the international Communist network was taking shape, the world of the comfortable classes was being badly shaken. In the early years after the First World War, the Marxist prophecy of world revolution did not seem impossible. Popular outbreaks detonated in country after country, as if international class war had already broken out. There were revolutions in Germany, in Finland, and in the Baltic States; for a brief period in 1919 Hungary became a Soviet Republic under the dictatorship of Bela Kun. Labour militancy was unparalleled. Striking workers numbered in the millions. In Glasgow a hundred thousand men went out on strike. In the United States in 1919 one-seventh of the labour force downed its tools. That same year in Canada the city of Winnipeg was paralyzed for six weeks by a general strike.

Perhaps even more than the Russian Revolution, the Winnipeg General Strike frightened the Canadian middle class. Although not Communist-led, it was regarded by many as the prelude to the establishment of a Soviet form of government in Canada. Retribution came in the form of arrests of the leaders, some of whom were convicted of sedition, and the swift passage of the most repressive legislation ever written into Canadian law: the notorious Section 98 of the Criminal Code. Its worst feature was that a person was liable to twenty years in jail for simply attending a meeting of an organization deemed to be revolutionary, or even for passing out radical literature. The strike was defeated by the concerted efforts of Winnipeg's employers and the police forces of the three levels of government; but its memory lingered like a collective nightmare in the cons- ciousness of the Canadian Establishment.

Thus the Communist movement in Canada appeared at a time when privileged classes everywhere were fearful of revolution. Indeed, the confrontation between Canadian Reds and the Canadian Establishment exemplifies the pattern of events in other countries. The Reds twisted the lion's tail. They preached the abolition of private property and of parliamentary institutions. They propounded atheism and free love. They vaunted Soviet Russia as the ideal organization of society. Some were sincere idealists, prompted by the suffering they saw around them; others were doctrinaire disciples of the Kremlin. In any event, such doctrines threatened the Establishment's economic and political control and undermined its religious and social foundation. The lion-responded with a roar.

Chapter I

Chief Draper

Toronto is going to like him.

Gregory Clark on Draper, Toronto Daily Star, March 24, 1928.

Brigadier-General Denis Draper was the prototype of the law-and-order policeman, although he had never been on a force until he became Chief Constable of Toronto on May 1, 1928. In the first place, he could not have met the height requirement of five foot ten. His short, stocky appearance even belied the five foot eight and a half inches he claimed. But nothing about Draper's appointment was according to the manual. In the proper course of events, the job should have gone to Acting Chief Beatty, the choice of the mayor and city council. Yet the majority of the three-man police commission, two septuagenarian judges named Coatsworth and Morson, had been so impressed by the commanding presence of the little general that they had overridden Mayor McBride's objection to bringing in an outside man. The judges wanted a strong disciplinarian and they could point to many contemporary precedents both in the United States and Canada for appointing a military man as police chief. ¹

Draper's new position, like his previous one, had come to him via the old boy network of senior army officers. He had been working in Ottawa for International Pulp and Paper under the vice-president, General J. B. White, when he received a call from Major-General James H. MacBrien, the recently retired chief of staff, telling Draper of the opening in Toronto, possibly assuring him that it was his for the taking, for, in the upshot, with the blessing of his own chief, General White, Draper took the train to Toronto for an interview with the Police Commission.² It was not surprising that he accepted the post. The $7500 salary was a substantial increase over what he had been earning and this was an important consideration since the fifty-seven-year-old Draper was engaged to be married. His fiancée, university-educated and with good social connec- tions, was a librarian in the Department of Agriculture. Many years his junior, she had first met Draper in her girlhood home before the war, and their renewed acquaintance had ripened on the skiing slopes and riding trails around Ottawa.³ Despite the age difference, it was regarded as a thoroughly suitable match.

It was Draper's first marriage. On returning from the war he had lived with his widowed mother on the large family farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. He could have followed in the footsteps of his father, oft-times mayor and a pillar of the community, but (in the words of the wartime ditty) it had been hard to keep him happy down on the farm after he'd seen Parée. A stab at politics as a Tory candidate in 1921 had failed, and, until General White got him the job with International Paper, he had been at loose ends.⁴ Peace-time posed problems for retired generals. Canada was filled with somewhat tarnished top brass looking around for a civilian equivalent to their military glory. The dashing, handsome Major-General MacBrien was also looking around at this time. He may well have taken the train trip to Toronto himself, for he was later to become Canada's number one policeman - Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

From the outset, Chief Draper created the image of a strong man. His jutting jaw and tense, crouching stride, together with his air of sublime assurance, gave him the aura of power. Moreover, he immediately established his reputation as a fearless crime-fighter by personally giving chase to a gang of mail train robbers.⁵ In his bowler hat and gaiters he resembled the fictional Scotland Yard detective, an appropriate symbol for Anglophile Toronto. Indeed, Draper had all the credentials for acceptance by the Toronto Establishment. He was an Anglican of United Empire Loyalist stock, a staunch imperialist and, of course, a Tory. The one soft spot in Draper's hard-edged public image was his widely known sympathy for what were then called the returned men. Any vet- eran down on his luck was assured of a ten-dollar handout from the Chief. To those who had served under him he was a father figure, a tough but lovable authoritarian. Reunion banquets of his old command, the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles, rang with anecdotes of Daddy Draper, an affectionate sobriquet that followed him into peace-time life.⁶

Ten years after the war its participants had not been forgotten nor had they forgotten their wartime experiences. In the twenties, military reunions were as characteristic a form of socializing as the tea dance. Through them the returned men relived the drama of the war, mercifully forgetting the mud and the boredom, the blood and the terror; When they convened in hotel banquet rooms and Legion Halls, all the wartime camaraderie, the closeness greater than brother to brother, was revived in the beery conviviality of male voices joined in Keep the Home Fires Burning or It's a Long Way to Tipperary.

The Chief Constable of Toronto was in his element at military reunions. If the rank and file were warmed by a sense of comradeship at these gatherings, how much more intense was the gratification experienced by a popular commander like Denny Draper. His postwar reputation had not suffered the cruel revisionism which had soiled the names of so many other senior officers — the Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Corps, for one. So persistent were rumours that General Sir Arthur Currie had sacrificed the lives of Canadian soldiers needlessly that in 1928 he launched a libel suit against a newspaper that printed them.⁷ He won his suit but he was never completely vindicated in the court of public opinion. Later, he was known to weep on the podium as he recounted the events of 1918.⁸ When Draper attended a reunion, however, his popularity was attested to by the scrape of chairs as men rose to honour him and by the three cheers and a tiger which followed his blunt, no-nonsense addresses.

The fevered din of reunions and re-memories and rejoicings was caught perfectly by R. E. Knowles, a special features writer for the Toronto Daily Star, in his description of a mammoth banquet of the 48th Highlanders on Armistice Day 1928. The coliseum at Toronto's Exhibition grounds was set up with tables for twenty-five hundred veterans and their guests who included the Lieutenant-Governor, Premier Ferguson, Mayor McBride, and a dozen generals, among them Brigadier-General Draper. For Knowles, a distinguished journalist who covered the most famous events of the era, it was the experience of a lifetime to watch these soldiers of ten years ago, most of them splendid specimens of men. The noise of good fellowship and the skirl of bagpipes filled the auditorium, and, in the general pandemonium, after-dinner speakers went unheard. One after another, politicians and generals rose in their places, choked with emotion, gesticulating forcefully as in a pantomime. Even Major- General MacBrien, renowned for his Irish wit, had to concede defeat to the boisterous throng. Yet when the chaplain raised his glass and boomed out To our fallen comrades, Knowles observed that a miraculous calm fell, the hub-bub ceased, and the multitude sprang to its feet as one man. ... The almost sacramental silence thrilled with the high fellowship of soul with soul.⁹ The solidarity expressed at the reunions spread far beyond the meeting halls. Veterans' organizations were among the most conservative forces in Canadian society. In an age which revered the Monarchy, the Empire, and the Flag, the patriotism of the Canadian Legion was proverbial. The corollary was the Legionnaires' extreme animosity to radicals who sought to abolish the revered British institutions. At the deeper, level of consciousness, perhaps, was the need to believe in the cause they had fought for. They had been sent into the trenches in France to make the world safe for democracy. If democracy was rotten, as the Reds alleged, then they had sacrificed in vain. The banners of the Communist party at open-air demonstrations, blazoning their denunciation of the Canadian way of life, were to most veterans like a red flag before a bull.

Among the plentiful public speakers (for it was the heyday of volunteer organizations and clubs), none were more outspokenly anti-Communist than the colonels and the generals. This is not surprising; not only were they members of the military caste, but they were also a part of the Establishment or, at least, the propertied classes. A case in point was Major-General James H. MacBrien. Raised in the southern Ontario town of Port Perry on the reedy shores of Lake Scugog, he was the son of the local inspector of schools. With his father such a leading citizen it was hardly surprising that his childhood sweetheart and first wife should be the daughter of the town's richest merchant. Such a solid beginning moved him a few rungs up the ladder of success; from that vantage point his good looks and self-confidence, aided by his connections, took him to the top in his chosen career of the army. Following a brilliant wartime record (he was mentioned six times in dispatches) he became commanding officer of the peacetime forces.¹⁰ But in the get-rich-quick temper of the Roaring Twenties money was MacBrien's object. Finding the salary of a peacetime commander-in-chief too low, he had retired from the army and set out in search of a top corporate post. Shortly after Draper's appointment MacBrien did in fact obtain the type of position he was looking for as managing director of one of Canada's nascent commercial airlines.¹¹

MacBrien had every reason for wanting to see the status quo preserved. In his zeal for the capitalist system he was given to immoderate outbursts on the subject of communism. Speaking to a group of American three-star generals at the sumptuous Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal, he sounded the trumpet: We could join forces to destroy the common enemy we have in Bolshevism-Communism. We can join hands and stamp out that reptile menace to all governments.¹²

These were Draper's sentiments too, although he did not express himself in MacBrien's flamboyant style. Draper preferred action to words.

At the time of Draper's arrival in Toronto, street-corner meetings of the Communist party were as much a feature of city life as similar gatherings of the Salvation Army. Indeed more.often than not, the Reds were haranguing on one corner while the Sally Anns blew their trumpets across the road. Both offered salvation. The Communist party promised to lead the workers of Canada forward.to a new social order, a society where workers ruled and the parasites of capitalism would be swept aside by the revolutionary will and power of the toiling masses. They trumpeted thai imperialist western powers were planning a war against the Soviet Union, the first and only workers' state. One young Communist, newly returned from Russia, stated publicly that if Canada became involved in an imperialist war the workers would turn their guns on the Canadian bourgeoisie.¹³

Understandably, their rhetoric as reported in the press was an affront to all beneficiaries of the status quo. Cherishing their private property, middle- and upper-class Canadians harboured an exaggerated fear of those who threatened to change the system. The extraordinary legislation passed in the hysteria of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919 remained on the statute books. Any person belonging to a revolutionary association was liable to twenty years imprisonment under Section 98 of the Criminal Code, and an amendment to the Immigration Act provided for the detention and deportation of radicals without trial. An Intelligence Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been set up to monitor the radical element. Initially it had concentrated on the One Big Union in western Canada (the OBU) was a revolutionary industrial union similar to the American Wobblies), but with the secret founding of the Communist party of Canada in 1921, the branch had shifted its attention to Toronto where the party had its headquarters. Through undercover agents and informers the RCMP kept abreast of the clandestine activities of the little band of Communists, an infiltration that continued after the party came into the open in 1924. Until 1930 the RCMP advised thé government that the Communists posed no threat to Canadian society. The head of the Intelligence Branch described the movement to the Minister of Justice as a handful of ineffective English-speaking leaders, a negligible French-speaking element, an isolated Jewish element, with the agitators drawn from Finnish and Ukrainian immigrants whose benevolent societies paid for the party's maintenance.¹⁴ Such assurances did not allay the Establishment's fear that Bolshevik propaganda might one day stir up the masses of Canadian workers against the free enterprise system.

It was a deeply conservative period, reflected in the preponderance of provincial Tory administrations. In Ottawa, laissez-faire liberalism reigned under Mackenzie King. King, who had begun his career as an apostle of enlightened industrial relations, had so slowed his timetable for reform during the twenties that, to all intents and purposes, the Liberal federal government was as conservative as the Tory administrations in the provinces. Government, the judiciary, the church, business, and the press regarded the free enterprise system as sacrosanct. Most Canadians agreed. In 1928 Canada was at the peak of prosperity and for those who were not sharing in it there was always the hope that they would soon do so. It was this optimism that brought the little investors into the stock market in droves, like sheep to the slaughter.

Life was good for the comfortable classes. There were summer holidays at the lodge or a cottage among the northern woods and lakes (which, it was generally supposed, had shaped the hardy Canadian character, though few Canadians spent more than one or two weeks of the year among them). For the more affluent, it might be a voyage on one of the CP Empress ships to the Mother Country, or winter holidays in Florida. There were dances and banquets in the, ballrooms of the chateau-style railway hotels, New Year's Eve in the Crystal Ballroom of the King Edward Hotel, with wailing saxophones, women in dresses cut above the knee wriggling the Shimmy or bobbing the Charleston, and everyone making whoopee, festivities at the exclusive private clubs where Scottish pipers led the grand march at midnight. Home might not be a porticoed mansion like that of the packing-house millionaire Sir Joseph Flavelle, but it was certain to have a cosy living room with a plump upholstered chesterfield and prettily shaded lamps for refuge from the harsh Canadian winter; and for the summer dog-days, a porch or sunroom with a glider and wicker furniture. Radios were becoming standard equipment but they could not keep Canadians home from the ritual Saturday-night movie or the Sunday drive. In the larger cities golf was almost a contagious disease.

Still, attendance at Toronto's multitude of churches did not suffer. While there was no established church, the churches were a visible part of the Establishment. It was a conformist Christian society and the word Christian itself was a synonym for worthiness. Canadians took their religion seriously. Few would have demurred when the Toronto Globe pronounced that religion and morality are the foundation on which the government rests and should these be destroyed constituted authority as it exists today will fall to the ground.¹⁵ A fiery sermon was front-page news, religious programmes were staple radio fare, and dire events were countered by a national day of prayer. The clergy were regarded as the natural leaders. Canon Cody of St. Paul's Anglican church, where the Toronto elite worshipped, was (said the Star) called upon like the town pump of humbler days and smaller places for the refreshment of all.¹⁶ The Sunday blue laws in English Canada almost enforced church attendance by closing all other places of public resort. Religious thought was tinged with fundamentalism; even the Anglicans tended to take the Bible literally. Although Canada produced no monkey trial, the theory of evolution was as taboo in Canadian schools as in those of Tennessee.

The secular face of the Establishment was to be seen at the Orange Lodges and the Masonic Temples. Orangeism was Protestant, anti-Catholic, Anglo-Saxon, and fervently monarchical. At the base of all the Orange mysteries was the oath to protect the Protestant Crown. Particularly at the July 12 parades commemorating the Battle of the Boyne against the Irish Catholics, the Orangemen's patriotism was distended into paranoia. Ontario was the Order's power base, and, conversely, membership in a Lodge was a prerequisite to a political career in Tory Toronto. The Toronto mayoralty was passed from one Orangeman to another as if by divine right. Although giving lip service to international brotherhood, the Masonic Order was also an Anglo-Saxon bastion. (One Grand Master was sorely troubled by some unidentified interlopers: Guard the portals, he warned the brethren.)¹⁷ The Masonic password was open sesame to a job at Toronto City Hall and many Toronto policemen were Masons. In the religiosity and conformity of the time, free thought freely expressed by the Communist party was anathema to Canadians. Similarly, the doctrine of free love, openly espoused by Canadian Communists, outraged conventional morality. Reading about the easy divorce and free abortion clinics in Soviet Russia, the average Canadian was scandalized.

As well as a repugnance for the atheist Soviet state, anti-communism in Canada was coloured by a national xenophobia. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from eastern and central Europe had been admitted to the country not from any humanitarian motive but with the practical purpose of filling its empty prairies, working its mines and forests, and manning its factories. But many of those born in Canada were deeply prejudiced against the newcomers — a cultural phenomenon that an American writer has labelled Anglo-Saxon nativism. Many of the country's leaders had been sent out into the world by the headmaster of Toronto's exclusive Upper Canada College with an indelible sense of Nordic superiority.¹⁸ This upper-class view filtered down into the public schools. It was a platitude of the times that foreigners could never understand the British institutions of Parliament and the free press, could never learn the rules of British fair play, and did not have the ingrained allegiance of the Anglo-Canadian to the monarchy. Since most Communists were known to be foreigners, it was erroneously assumed that most foreigners were Communists: in the case of both groups, prejudice and antipathy were compounded. General Draper for one could never believe that a Communist could be an Englishman.

In fact, the leadership of the party was almost entirely British-born. The leader was Jack MacDonald, a tall Scot with bushy black eyebrows and a phlegmatic manner that suggested a lot of reserve strength. Scotch as a granite crag, a journalist once described him.¹⁹ To one young recruit to the movement he appeared to be stand-offish, talking down to people,²⁰ but another remembers him as a truly impressive figure towering above other speakers at workers' meetings in Massey Hall.²¹ He had been a member of the British Labour Party and, on emigrating to Canada shortly before 1914, had taken a leading part in the leftist ferment that grew out of the war. A pragmatist rather than a doctrinaire socialist, MacDonald's objective was the improvement of the workers' lot. Theoretical communism did not interest him - his factional opponents later claimed that he had never even read Karl Marx ²² - and he left the theorizing to the party intellectual, Maurice Spector, but he was well versed in English socialism and was a radical spokesman of stature.

Maurice Spector, his second-in-command, was the editor of the party organ, The Worker. A college education and a profound knowledge of socialist theory invested him with a unique intellectual status in the party. Although younger than the other leaders, he had been among the little group who founded the party in the Guelph barn in 1921. Another member of the founding convention recalls the youthful Spector handling the resolutions and setting the organization on its doctrinal course - a pilot's task he was still performing in 1928.²³ While MacDonald was motivated by sympathy for the workers, socialist ideology was at the base of Spector's commitment to the party. During Draper's first summer in Toronto, MacDonald and Spector were overseas — the party's euphemism for a visit to the Soviet Union. (Among themselves Moscow was referred to as Mecca.) This left Tim Buck in charge.

About thirty years old, Buck had the slight build of many English working men, stunted by generations of premature toil. A machinist by trade, it was during his apprenticeship as an ironworker in Lowestoft, Suffolk, that he first became involved in the union movement. At this impressionable stage of his life he heard the Labourite MP Keir Hardie speak and afterwards shook hands with him. For the first time I heard socialism discussed as something that could be achieved only by the working class, he later wrote, and from that day forward he was a dedicated man.²⁴ His socialist views caused a break with his conservative father and in 1910 he emigrated to Canada, bringing over his wife and baby as soon as he found a job. In those years skilled tradesmen worked on both sides of the border and in the United States during the war his growing reputation as a trade unionist brought him into contact with the leading figures of American radicalism. After the Russian Revolution, convinced by the few writings of Lenin then in circulation in America, he became a Communist and a founding member of the Canadian Communist party. With his trade union background, he became the party's industrial organizer, educating and organizing workers groups across the country. Unlike the bushybrowed MacDonald, Buck was unprepossessing in appearance, but his alert intelligent face indicated that he was more than just the quiet inoffensive little man he seemed to one rising Establishment lawyer.²⁵ Self-educated, he had the gift of popularizing economic issues for working class audiences. Tireless in the cause, he was sometimes sighted on a streetcar writing in a notebook propped on his briefcase or perched on his knee.²⁶

Another worthy opponent of the system was A. E. Smith, a dignified, white-haired one-time member of the Manitoba legislature who had formerly been a Methodist minister. During his days in the manse in North Winnipeg and other working-class districts, he had become increasingly unorthodox as he saw the inequities and hardships suffered by the poor. The Russian Revolution galvanized him. After reading the Communist Manifesto, he came to the conclusion (as he records in his autobiography) that Jesus was a Communist. In 1919 he broke with the church over the Winnipeg General Strike. and in 1925 he and his wife joined the Communist party. Actually Smith's young son Stewart had become a Communist before him. At fourteen Stewart was national secretary of the Young Communist League and at sixteen a member of the politbureau — the governing body of the party. So promising a youth was he that the party groomed him for leadership and gave him the education of an heir-apparent. A tour of the Nova Scotia mining communities was followed by a trip abroad. After participating in the General Strike in Great Britain in 1926, he travelled in France and Germany, where he met famous revolutionists, and then on to the USSR where he was enrolled in the new international Lenin School — the elite training institution for Communists from all over the world. In the summer of 1928 he attended the Sixth Congress of the Communist International as an observer with the Canadian delegation headed by Spector and MacDonald.²⁷ He returned to Canada in the autumn of 1928 an anointed Communist with the official and incontrovertible word on the movement.²⁸

Another leading member of the party in Toronto was Becky Buhay, who emigrated from England just before the war with her brother Michael, also a prominent Communist. Draper, however, would undoubtedly have classed the Buhays as foreigners — although English, they were also Jews. A short stout woman in her early forties, slovenly in her dress, Becky was as idealistic and sentimental as she had been in her girlhood. At the outbreak of war, when socialists all over the world abandoned their traditional pacifism and waved their country's flags, she retained her burning commitment to the ideal of