Search

Four years into the Second World War, the citizens of Trail, British Columbia, a small smelter city in the mountainous West Kootenay region near the United States border, were, like most of the world, totally unaware of the possibility of creating an atomic bomb. Trail’s industrial workforce, employees of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S Company), were home-front producers of war materials destined for Allied forces on the battlefields of Europe. They, along with the rest of humanity, would have seen the creation of such a bomb as pure science fiction fantasy invented by the likes of British novelist H.G. Wells.[1] They were understandably preoccupied with the life-and-death necessity of ensuring an Allied victory against the Nazis, Italian fascists, and the Japanese. It was no secret that, as it had done in the previous world conflict, their employer was supplying much of the lead, zinc and now fertilizer that Britain needed to prosecute the war.[2]What Trailites did not know was that they were for a short time indispensable in the creation of the world’s first weapon of mass destruction. [1] H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (London: Penguin, 2005), and The World Set Free (London: Macmillan & Co., 1914). Both allude to nuclear war. [2] Lance H. Whittaker, “All is not Gold: A Story of the Discovery, Production and Processing of the Mineral, Chemical and Power Resources of the Kootenay District of the Province of British Columbia and of the Lives of the Men Who Developed and Exploited Those Resources,” unpublished manuscript commissioned by S.G. Blaylock, Trail, B.C., 1945, 272, claims that throughout the war the company “supplied the British Empire with fifty per cent of its lead and zinc at an estimated saving to the Imperial Government of over $100 million.” See also Al King, Red Bait!: Struggles of a Mine Mill Local (Vancouver: Kingbird Publishing, 1998), 43.of its lead and zinc at an estimated saving to the Imperial Government of over $100 million.” See also Al King, Red Bait!: Struggles of a Mine Mill Local (Vancouver: Kingbird Publishing, 1998), 43. Surprisingly, it was a claim that did not merit mention in military historian J.L. Granatstein's "Arming the Nation: Canada's Industrial War Effort 1939-1945," a paper prepared for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and presented at its roundtable on foreign policy and defence, Canadian War Museum, 27 May 2005., BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly, No 186: Summer 2015

When American Legion commander George Love spoke to a gathering of concerned residents at Junction City, Oregon, in late August 1924, he warned of the imminent danger of allowing a group of Russian immigrants to establish a colony on the rich farm land along the Willamette River. Some of the local residents were so riled up by Love’s warning that they threatened to pick up the gun to rid the region of what the Legionnaire told them were communist “invaders.”[1] That Love wore a second hat as a leader of the Eugene Ku Klux Klan seemed only to strengthen his hold on the crowd.[2] Continued public pronouncements on the evils that the newcomers might bring to the peaceful valley persisted and Love doggedly pursued his mission to stop the Russian peasant sect known as the Doukhobors. It was not the first time that the troubled group had faced public repudiation and persecution in its long quest for what a traditional hymn called “Toil and Peaceful Life,”[3] nor was it the first time it had occurred in Oregon. In fact, during their first appearance, ten years earlier, the Klan had not yet found its full strength in Oregon, but the Doukhobors were to be confronted by another powerful social force in the form of the Supreme Court. In the end both the 1913 and 1924 attempts to establish an Oregon colony failed but in some ways the experiments reflected a history of troubles that had followed them for centuries. [1] Eckard V. Toy, “Robe and Gown: The Ku Klux Klan in Eugene, Oregon,” in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, Shawn Lay editor, (Champaign, Il: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 177. [2] Although Love was not referred to as the ‘Exalted Cyclops,’ the title given to a leader of the KKK, he was clearly leading the anti-Doukhobor charge in the Willamette Valley region. [3] “Toil and Peaceful Life” signified the Doukhobor way of life for these “sons of the soil” and “[w]orking the land was vital to, even synonymous with,” that way. Therefore, the word “toil” meant “toil on the land,” Carl J. Tracie, “Toil and Peaceful Life”: Doukhobor Village Settlement in Saskatchewan, 1899-1918 (Regina, Sask.: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1996), 97-98., BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly, No 180: Winter 2013/14

Worker poetry found in a Canadian trade union newspaper in the “age of the CIO” When celebrated Wobbly troubadour Joe Hill purportedly visited the Rossland Miners’ Hall in the early 1900s to lend his support to the first Canadian local of the rugged Western Federation of Miners (WFM), he no doubt shared some of his inspired verses with the mine workers who are said to have protected him.[1] Claims of his visit are unsubstantiated, but if he did get to Rossland, British Columbia, he likely would have sung them some of his most popular tunes about struggle, resistance, and the dream of a workers’ paradise, and in so doing he would have been performing the same service that poets and songwriters had rendered working people since the earliest days of the trade union movement. This paper explores examples of that historical literary tradition through a study of smelter worker poetry found in the pages of The Commentator, a trade union newspaper published in Trail by Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill) in the late 1930s and early 1940s as labour activists were striving to rekindle the union spirit at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S Company), then the world’s largest lead and zinc smelter and a key munitions manufacturer during the First and Second World Wars. [1] Jeremy Mouat, Roaring Days: Rossland’s Mines and the History of British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), p. 71, notes that Rossland miners formed Local 38 of the Western Federation of Miners in 1895. The WFM was instrumental in the founding of the IWW ten years later., BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly, No 177: Spring 2013

When Harvey Murphy, the pugnacious western regional director of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, learned that his friend and fellow leftist, American opera star Paul Robeson, was not going to be allowed to cross the Canada-United States border to sing at the Vancouver Mine-Mill convention on February 1, 1952, he didn’t mourn, he organized. First, he organized an impromptu concert where Robeson sang through long-distance phone lines to the delight of convention delegates. Then he promised a much bigger concert that May at the Peace Arch near the Canada-United States border at Blaine, Washington. If the American authorities wouldn’t let Robeson come to the convention, Murphy reasoned, they would take the convention to Robeson. Those authorities had quietly pulled Robeson’s passport in 1950. Had they needed to defend the suspension of the singer’s constitutional right to free passage, they might have said it was a matter of national security; they were protecting the nation from a threat of Communist infiltration. But they needed no such defence. After all, it was the McCarthy era and Communist sympathizers like Robeson were fair game., BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly, No 174: Summer 2012