For forty-two days in the late spring and early summer of 1919, the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba – situated on the northeastern edge of the North American Great Plains, near the longitudinal centre of Canada – became the stage for the most dramatic confrontation between capital and labour in Canadian history. In a momentous display of working-class solidarity, some 35,000 workers – half of them belonging to no union at all – out of a total population below 180,000, answered the call of the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council and downed their tools. The ensuing near-total shutdown of the city began in support of the metal and building trades workers' proto-industrial unionist demand that employers negotiate with a common front of trade unions collectively rather than one-by-one with individual union locals. However, the call for a general strike also served as a galvanizing moment for mass working-class anger and discontent fuelled by low wages, unemployment, and severe inflation in the post-World War I period. The Citizen's Committee of One-Thousand, formed by the business community to break the Strike, financed a vigilante police force nearly two-thousand strong. These “special constables” replaced the city police force, fired en masse by the mayor for strong pro-strike sympathies. Tensions rose as the Strike persisted and ultimately ended six weeks after it began through use of state violence: the arrest of union leaders; a riot that witnessed mounted police charge into a crowd of strikers killing two and injuring over thirty; and, finally, the military occupation of the downtown core by a thousand militiamen armed with machine guns and armoured vehicles.
For a Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike & the Workers' Revolt is the latest addition to the substantial popular and scholarly literature on the Strike. Its main contribution lies more in breaking new ground and uncovering new avenues for research than it does in memorializing the Strike alone. The central themes and questions are raised by the editors in their comprehensive historiography and revisited in the concluding chapter. One such theme is the strike or revolution dichotomy. Was the Strike motivated by traditional trade union demands like collective bargaining and living wages? The arrested Strike leaders themselves held this position, albeit while awaiting trial on charges of seditious conspiracy. Or was the Strike a social revolutionary attempt at overthrowing the liberal capitalist order? The state and propertied classes insisted that the threat of Bolshevism and influence of “dangerous foreigners” lurked behind the collective work stoppage. Yet, the ruling elite, with its long-standing recalcitrant and often hostile attitude to organized labour, undeniably used this alarmist, if not hyperbolic claim, to discredit the strikers, regardless of any genuine concerns about direct threats to power and privilege. Perhaps the reform/revolution distinction is not suitable in the messy, real world of class struggle, and the Strike is best viewed in the words of the editors, as “an urban working-class uprising, uniting people across divides old and new – across distinctions of skill, ethnicity, and (particularly important at this moment) activity during the war.” (p. 9)
Winnipeg in 1919 ranked as the largest city in western Canada and the third largest in the country. Although the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 had diminished its strategic geographical advantage as a central railway transportation hub and a lynchpin in the Canadian grain trade, the city continued to grow rapidly. Tensions simmered across ethnic and class lines, often counterposing British/non-British identities that, at least on one occasion in January 1919, exploded into a full-scale anti-immigrant and anti-socialist riot fuelled by overt anti-Semitism. With these tensions and diversity in mind, essays by Adele Perry, David Thompson, and Henry Trachtenberg shed new light on the role, participation, and/or impacts that the labour movement and Strike had in shaping the experiences of Anishinaabeg and Métis peoples of Winnipeg and surrounding environs, the thousands of pro-strike ex-servicemen, and city's large Jewish population. Perry's “In the Water: Race, Empire, and the Winnipeg General Strike,” in particular, is a welcome contribution to the literature, placing the Strike in the context of the dispossession of Indigenous land and the complicity of craft unions in the settler-colonial project. Perry draws lessons primarily from the construction in the years immediately before the Strike of the aqueduct that still supplies Winnipeg with its drinking water, the source located more than 150 kilometres away on Shoal Lake 40 First Nation. Indigenous participation in the Strike itself is not discussed and remains a significant lacuna. However, well-known points of contact between Chicago's labour radicals associated with the Haymarket Affair and Industrial Workers of the World, and Métis and Indigenous resistance movements on the Canadian prairies, indicate some directions for deeper enquiry. In relation to this, perhaps a German reader will be inspired to examine the Freiheit or Arbeiter-Zeitung newspapers in an effort to obtain more information about the time that Haymarket Martyr August Spies apparently spent living in an Indigenous community somewhere in Canada.
While the editors clearly acknowledge that the Strike took place concurrent to the 1917–1923 revolutionary wave in Europe, the transnational lens in For a Better World is widened beyond Winnipeg only to the extent that it captures the labour unrest in the Western Hemisphere. This approach extends the concept of the Canadian Workers' Revolt – of which the Winnipeg General Strike was the defining moment – to the Americas more broadly. As many as twenty communities in Canada saw sympathy strikes launched in solidarity with Winnipeg, but of the seven chapters devoted to the theme of the Workers' Revolt, only Mikhail Bjorge's exceptional “The Edmonton General Strike” provides a detailed account of one such episode. He concludes with a critical reflection on the mixed legacies of the Workers' Revolt with reference to repressive state surveillance of left and labour movements and the politicization of municipal police forces, on the one hand, and the elimination of property qualification for voting eligibility in federal elections in Canada, on the other. Tom Lonford's work convincingly argues that the decision by some 7,000 coal miners in the Crowsnest Pass region of British Columbia and Alberta to participate a district-wide strike, nine days after the beginning of the Winnipeg General Strike, was informed more by the events in Winnipeg than has previously been assumed. This is followed by two pioneering writings on the Workers' Revolt in Montreal by Geoffrey Ewen and Benoit Mason whose contributions illustrate substantial levels of broad working-class solidarity and direct action in support a civic workers' strike in 1918 and provide new insights on the hitherto neglected history of activism by the unemployed, respectively. Similarly, Jeff Stilley's work on the Kansas City general strike spearheads new research into this overlooked, week-long display of working-class militancy. This section of the book closes with Cal Winslow's excellent treatment of the 1919 Seattle General Strike and Joel Wolfe's sweeping discussion of labour unrest in the Americas through the late 1910s and early 1920s. Wolfe's is the only chapter in the book that includes a more robust discussion of the influenza pandemic, which is noteworthy given that this world-historical experience, along with rising inflation, bears at least a superficial resemblance to our own time.
The declaration “Prison Bars Cannot Confine Ideas” – carried on placards by the working people who gathered to support arrested labour leaders – remains one of the memorable slogans of the Strike and its immediate aftermath. Indeed, state suppression failed to banish the memory of the Winnipeg General Strike or the ideas that animated it, but not for a lack of trying. Myer Siemiatycki and Gregory S. Kealey discuss the carrot-and-stick approaches employed by the Canadian state to police and contain the threat of labour radicalism. For Siemiatycki, the blunt instrument of coercion was not the most effective tool in the arsenal of the state and capital. This necessitated government co-option of the moderate trade union leadership into corporatist arrangements to promote harmonious labour-management relations. Kealy's masterful study draws on extensive archival research, detailing how the state security and intelligence apparati reorganized after the Strike, most notably through the creation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It is perhaps unsurprising then that official public commemorations of the Strike in Winnipeg did not commence until the 1950s and 1960s, during a Keynesian political and economic environment very different from the post-World War I period. As Sharon Reilly and David Frank observe in their exhaustive and rich overviews of the public history and memory of the Strike in Winnipeg, this commemoration has ranged from public art installations and theatre productions to murals and school curriculum. Reilly views these efforts as emanating from below, consciously in opposition to dominant narratives that reinforce the capitalist status quo.
For a Better World makes an outstanding contribution to Canadian and global labour history, expertly weaving together diverse themes that not only enhance our understanding of the Winnipeg General Strike, but also stake out paths for future research. This approach honours the memory of the Strike in the best possible way, by encouraging its continued investigation. It deserves to be widely read.
