9 Socialistn Survival

The Woodsworth-Irvine Socialist Fellowship and the Preservation of Radical Thought in Alberta

Mack Penner

For three decades, from 1932 to 1962, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) provided political representation for the socialist movement in Alberta. The party’s popular support peaked around the provincial election of 1944, when it won approximately one-quarter of the popular vote but just two seats in the legislature. From that point, Cold War anti-communism combined with rising prosperity to undermine the CCF’s electoral appeal. In this way, the 1944 election simultaneously marked both a high point and a missed opportunity that, in the words of historian Alvin Finkel, “proved a crushing blow.”¹ By the outset of the 1960s, the CCF had ceased to be an effective player in the province’s electoral politics. The dissolution of the CCF in 1962 and its replacement by the New Democratic Party (NDP), then, represented a new beginning for left politics in the province. But this new beginning raised concerns for many socialists, who feared that the creation of the NDP would entail significant dilution of the socialist ideology that had been the foundation for the CCF’s political activity.²

For some CCF stalwarts who believed that the 1950s had already seen a lamentable retreat from unabashed socialism in favour of “an antiseptic version of Keynesian ‘planning,’” the direction of the NDP only exacerbated those worries.³ Especially in Alberta, socialists were eager to see the new party continue to define itself in explicitly socialist terms—something that seemed improbable given the elevated status of pragmatic labour bureaucrats within it. The anti-communist political climate of the Cold War had resulted in the purging of communists and the general de-radicalization of most unions in Alberta, as elsewhere, which led in turn to the perception that a labour party like the NDP would be an unlikely champion for a genuinely socialist message.⁴ In accordance with these concerns, the final convention of the Alberta CCF adopted a resolution that held that upon the dissolution of the federation, provision would be made for the creation of an organization devoted to socialist education and study in the province. Such an organization, it was hoped, would “salvage as much as possible of what [socialists] considered to be important in the CCF.”⁵ Members of the CCF coordinating committee in Edmonton took responsibility for establishing the organization and began the process of creating what would become, in 1962, the Woodsworth-Irvine Socialist Fellowship (WISF), named for CCF founder J. S. Woodsworth and veteran Alberta socialist William Irvine. Irvine, for his part, openly protested the name to no avail at the fellowship’s first meeting. Membership in WISF was initially available for an annual fee of $1.50, and the fellowship quickly became home to more than a hundred members, mostly from the area around Edmonton, with some sympathizers from intellectual circles in Calgary.⁶ Among the best known of these were socialist activists such as Betty Mardiros, Nellie Peterson, and Floyd Johnson, as well as academics like Tony Mardiros and Ed Shaffer.⁷

For the first decade of its existence, until 1972, WISF had no formal association with the NDP. Many of the most principled and experienced socialist activists from the CCF chose to embrace WISF rather than the NDP, thus creating a situation in which there was no significant socialist caucus within the provincial party structure. Political scientist and historian Larry Pratt has described this period of WISF’s non-affiliation as “a retreat into political irrelevance.”⁸ But assessing WISF as politically irrelevant in the decade beginning in 1962 is troublesome in at least two senses. First, the suggestion that WISF retreated from the NDP ignores the reality that the fellowship applied for affiliation to the Alberta NDP in 1963. The WISF appeal was denied by the national party executive on the grounds that affiliated memberships were not intended to apply to groups composed of party members whose central aim was the promotion of particular viewpoints on policy matters.⁹ The party elite was actively trying to avoid the formation of a left-wing faction within its ranks, an issue that would arise again with the emergence of the Waffle movement in the early 1970s. If there was a retreat at all it was a forced one, and at any rate, a majority of individual WISF members were also, however reluctantly, individual members of the NDP.¹⁰ So WISF members did continue to participate in electoral politics, at least to some degree.

Second, and more importantly, to argue that the non-affiliated WISF was politically irrelevant requires assuming a rather narrow view of what can constitute politically important activity. While it is true that WISF spent the 1960s and early 1970s operating outside of the immediate terrain of electoral politics, it provided a platform from which socialist thought was promoted, studied, and refined in Alberta. Come 1972, when WISF finally became affiliated with the NDP, it was a group with a decade’s worth of development behind it and with rigorously developed perspectives on socialist theory and its societal applications. Over the first decade of its existence, then, WISF functioned in the politically essential task of preserving socialist thought in Alberta. Indeed, WISF’s determination to keep alive a socialist alternative posed an ongoing challenge to the NDP leadership. Noting this, the leader of the Alberta section of the Communist Party of Canada, Bill Tuomi, privately mentioned to a fellow communist in 1965 that the NDP was struggling to garner financial support from its extensive contacts in the province. While the NDP attracted little public support, WISF “was growing in membership and obtaining all of the left-wing element out of the N.D.P.”¹¹ A vacuum to the left of the NDP made room for a quasi-party, which is what WISF became. Perhaps the key factor curbing WISF’s influence was the limited ambition of its members, who typically remained loyal to the NDP.

Preserving socialist thought, independent of direct participation in electoral politics, was important in 1960s Alberta because economic conditions in the province were such that there was little general appetite for any form of counterhegemonic movement. Since the 1940s, the reactionary Social Credit government led by Premier Ernest Manning had overseen a stunning recovery from the economic doldrums of the 1930s, and most Albertans had experienced a material improvement in their lives as a result. In particular, after 1947, the government used windfall revenues from the rapid private development of the provincial oil industry to finance robust expenditure programs in health care, education, and other areas important to ordinary people.¹² Perhaps the best example of this was a five-year spending program commenced in 1959 that, in a televised address to the province, Manning described as “a gigantic five-year anti-recession development program that will be the boldest, most aggressive, and far-reaching program of its kind ever attempted by a provincial government in Canada.”¹³ The features of Manning’s program included fifty seniors’ homes that would house 4,100 people; community improvements like swimming pools, recreation centres, and camping facilities; the construction of the Foothills Hospital in Calgary; the renovation of the (now very controversial) Mitchener Centre for “mental defectives” in Red Deer; and the construction of a provincial museum and archives in Edmonton.¹⁴ This spending, coupled with the vehemently anti-communist politico-cultural environment of the Cold War, made the government very popular and seriously undermined the appeal of socialist politics in Alberta.

A growing awareness that socialism was no longer particularly appealing to Canadians, including Albertans, was the immediate impetus behind the creation of the NDP. Accordingly, the draft program adopted at the party’s 1961 national founding convention bore little resemblance to the CCF’s founding document, the Regina Manifesto. Gone were enthusiastic calls for the eradication of capitalism in Canada, abandoned in favour of advocating moderate welfare-state goals such as increased employment, national health insurance, sick benefits, free education, and a progressive taxation system to accommodate egalitarian redistribution of wealth.¹⁵ In Alberta, the NDP leadership was particularly willing to embrace moderate politics, combining with them the search for a personal scandal that might do political harm to Manning and Social Credit. Political scientist Howard Leeson describes the leadership of the NDP during the early 1960s, especially Grant Notley and then party leader Neil Reimer: “Their interests were organizational, their approach competitive, and their focus provincial. There was little time for philosophical debate about policies and issues. [. . .] Instead there was a deliberate concentration on short-term tactics, the advantage of position on immediate issues, and a new policy of direct attack on Manning and Social Credit.”¹⁶ In other words, the NDP did not appear to be a party well suited to socialists for whom politics was inseparable from an ideological appeal to a fundamentally different kind of political economy.

In this way, socialists in Alberta found themselves up against a powerful conservatism in two senses. One was the broadly popular conservative government of Social Credit, underpinned by a flourishing economic order, which rendered the practice of mass socialist politics all but impossible. At the same time, because of the stability of this conservative order, the NDP—ostensibly the proper home for Alberta socialists—turned its back on ideological politics altogether in an attempt to pose a more immediate electoral challenge to Social Credit. The NDP became a conservative social-democratic party. The relative conservatism of the NDP, then, was a primary point of conflict between the party and socialists, especially those who had come out of the CCF tradition, which represented a committed leftist alternative within Alberta’s political landscape. This antagonistic relationship was manifested in a final decision made by the CCF to transfer all of its assets to WISF and not to the NDP. This decision cemented a degree of acrimony between socialists and social democrats in the province and led directly to WISF’s formal isolation from the NDP until 1972.¹⁷

The asset transfer came about as a direct result of the decision made at the final provincial CCF convention to both dissolve the party and create the educational group that would become WISF. In other provinces, the CCF had dissolved and transferred its assets to the new party. But Alberta socialists’ suspicion of the NDP’s political character made them dubious about a simple asset transfer. The main item of value was Woodsworth House in Edmonton, which had been bought in 1949 through unsecured loans from CCF members and was owned by the Alberta Woodsworth House Association. For thirteen years, it had served as the headquarters of the provincial party.¹⁸ After the acrimonious parting from the NDP, WISF retained Woodsworth House, and it became the site of many of WISF’s regular meetings.

Even though the financial prize was far from enormous, NDP leaders saw losing it as a serious slight. Reimer, who assumed the NDP presidency, was particularly offended and opposed WISF’s 1963 application for affiliation with the NDP.¹⁹ Leeson, a friend, assistant, and, later, biographer of Notley, described the asset transfer as a “last act of defiance” made by “‘armchair socialists.’”²⁰ A fairer analysis might identify an act of preservation determined not so much to spite the NDP as to ensure, in some form, the perpetuation of a vehicle for socialism in Alberta. But at any rate, organizational isolation appeared to be the price of socialist preservation, and WISF embarked upon its first decade removed from direct participation in electoral politics. In this way, WISF functioned almost as an Albertan iteration of the New Left, emerging as a political force without formal ties to conventional political parties and espousing an unapologetic brand of socialism. While it lacked the youthfulness of the prototypical New Leftist formation, it certainly functioned as a prominent critical voice to the left of the NDP.

Separated as it was from the institutional activity of the NDP, WISF embraced its orientation as an educational group devoted to the study and promotion of socialism. Initially, WISF’s educational mandate was met mostly by holding regular meetings for members and for the general public, as well as by its creation of a book club that made recommendations for texts on politics, philosophy, and history. Later, WISF would begin publishing a monthly newsletter, The Nutcracker, the name of which harkened back to the tradition of prairie radicalism and a publication of the same title that Irvine, along with J. H. Ford, had established in Calgary in 1916.²¹ The Nutcracker served as both a tool to circulate relevant organizational updates and a forum for short, lively essays on issues ranging from public ownership of the provincial oil industry to the fallout from the military coup against Salvador Allende’s Chilean government in 1973. In 1965, these activities began to be supplemented with annual “summer seminars” designed to allow “socialists of all kinds, together with interested non-socialists, to engage in discussion and reasonable debate of questions concerning the thought and practice of socialism.”²²

The seminars—ultimately ten of them in all—were held at the School of Fine Arts in Banff on all but a few occasions until 1974 and were arguably the most significant undertaking of WISF each year. Indeed, the seminars were sufficiently important socialist gatherings that the RCMP maintained surveillance on attendees and linked them to other activities in their home communities.²³ The fellowship devoted significant time and effort to advertising the seminars, both to members and non-members, and while it may be difficult to assess the degree of influence of these events in any concrete way, their orientation was clear. Examining the nature of the summer seminars—the speakers who were invited and their topics—reveals much about WISF’s socialist outlook. Contrasting this with the main priorities of the NDP at the time reveals the degree to which the two organizations differed and makes clear that WISF did indeed function to perpetuate socialist thought in Alberta.

The summer seminar of 1966, titled “The Real World of Democracy,” was based on the 1964 Massey Lectures of C. B. Macpherson. A political scientist from the University of Toronto, Macpherson was well known at the time for his theory of “possessive individualism” as well as his 1953 book, Democracy in Alberta.²⁴ Alvin Finkel, while not wholly taken with Macpherson’s argument, has deemed Democracy in Alberta “a brilliant work of political theory” that situates Social Credit ideas “in the context of debates on the larger meaning of democracy in the western world”; until the release of Finkel’s The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta in 1989, it was the most significant text on the Social Credit era in the province.²⁵ Macpherson’s scholarship on Alberta has come under sustained criticism in the decades since its publication, mostly for socio-demographic errors, but because he injected the issue of social class into the debate about the province’s political makeup, Macpherson was well suited to address the seminar.²⁶

The focus of Macpherson’s address to the seminar was not merely provincial in scope. Rather, as the title of his Massey Lectures suggests, Macpherson was concerned with democracy at a global level. He considered the state of democracy in three distinct contexts—illiberal communist countries, illiberal underdeveloped countries, and liberal capitalist countries—in order to reach certain conclusions about the probable outcome of the global struggle between communist and capitalist nations that was then the defining geopolitical issue in the world. Macpherson argued that because communist and underdeveloped countries had by the 1960s shown definitively that “market behaviour is no longer the sole source of power,” the balance of power between nations would have to be determined according to “the degree to which their economic and political systems satisfy the desires of all their people.”²⁷ In light of this conclusion, he anticipated that the relative global power of capitalist liberal democracies in the West would depend on their ability, or willingness, to abandon a moral order based on acquisitive market principles.²⁸ For socialists in Western countries, like members of WISF, the implications of Macpherson’s lectures would have been obvious: the continued existence of capitalist markets as the fundamental economic structure in any country threatened the moral authority of that society.²⁹ Given the Cold War political environment in which such ideas were deemed to be subversive, it is little surprise that the RCMP monitored the seminars.

Other speakers at the 1966 summer seminar included Guyanese politician and writer Cheddi Jagan, as well as former president of the Saskatchewan New Democratic Youth James Harding.³⁰ Pursuing further the themes of Macpherson’s lectures, both Jagan and Harding advanced radical visions of the future, calling for a renewed commitment to socialist politics. Speaking in particular about developing countries, Jagan advocated a robust and simultaneous struggle against all forms of imperialism and colonialism, a struggle that would include

nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy—factories, mines, plantations, banks, insurance companies, import-export trade; monetary and fiscal reforms aimed at preventing the outflow of capital and the redistribution of wealth; land reform for the development of agriculture and laying the basis for industrialization; and democratization of all social and governmental institutions so as to involve the mass of the people more intimately in the process of government and development.³¹

Jagan’s presentation—reminiscent of the CCF’s 1933 Regina Manifesto—suggests an interest on the part of WISF in socialism not just as a domestic struggle but as an international ideal. And indeed, socialist internationalism, an enduring focus on countries throughout the world, was a central interest of WISF throughout its existence. The WISF publications list includes numerous works on nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, for example.³²

Where Jagan emphasized developing countries, Harding’s address to the seminar—“Liberalism, Social Democracy, and the Danger of Totalitarianism”—took a more domestic perspective. He put forward a noteworthy critique of social democracy and suggested a strategic political model for what he termed “relevant radicalism.”³³ Regarding social democracy of the sort that the NDP was practising at the time, Harding concluded that it had become largely indistinguishable from welfare-state liberalism and that it therefore offered no genuine hope for the transformation of society. He stressed the pressing necessity to oppose the liberal welfarism of the NDP and instead to develop a mode of politics that would begin with the inculcation of a political consciousness based on “freedom and brotherhood.”³⁴ For Harding, politics of this kind involved looking directly to the legacies of WISF’s namesakes, Woodsworth and Irvine, and retaining their foundational political ethos, despite the enormous historical changes that confronted socialists in the 1960s.³⁵

The distance between the concerns of WISF and the NDP in 1966 was arguably the greatest that it would ever be. While WISF was concerned with the wide-ranging and internationally significant issues raised by speakers at that year’s summer seminar, the NDP had adopted a relatively narrow attitude, concerning itself with little more than the most immediate exigencies of Alberta politics. The NDP’s focus in the years prior to the provincial election of 1967 was on negative, sometimes personal, attacks on Manning and other members of the Social Credit government. The provincial economy, still riding a seemingly endless wave of growth propelled mostly by an oil industry that by then directly or indirectly employed about half of all workers in the province, did not provide good fodder for material criticism of the government.³⁶ So the NDP concentrated its efforts on episodes like the so-called Turcott Affair. Garth Turcott was a lawyer from Pincher Creek who, in a 1966 by-election, became the first elected NDP MLA in Alberta. In his short stint as an elected legislator, Turcott became famous as a muckraker who, first upon his entry to the legislature and later in his reply to the 1967 Speech from the Throne, relentlessly highlighted allegations of corruption against two prominent Social Credit insiders. He accused minister of municipal affairs A. J. Hooke and former treasurer E. W. Hinman of engaging in “business and land dealings which were in conflict with their public duties,” and, at the direction of Reimer and Notley, Turcott devoted his every energy to steering public attention toward these accusations.³⁷ Manning’s response was politically shrewd. He forced a censure vote against Turcott in the legislature and called the election of 1967, which did not unfold well for the NDP. The Turcott Affair illustrates the NDP’s political approach at the time. It ignored fundamental questions of the sort that WISF was concerned with and concentrated on seeking to gain any sort of political edge on Social Credit.

The ethos that drove the Turcott Affair also drove the NDP’s provincial election campaign in 1967. The campaign was an overwhelmingly negative one, oriented around the issue of governmental corruption. Ideological matters were avoided but so were issues like the consequences of farm mechanization on rural families, land prices, urbanization, and the provincial industrial strategy.³⁸ This approach resulted in a resounding defeat. The NDP did not win a seat—not even Turcott’s—and Social Credit won another enormous legislative majority. Indeed, the one substantial development of the election was a significant increase in the vote share for the reorganized Progressive Conservative Party, which won six seats.³⁹ Ken Novakowski, a socialist and leader of the New Democratic Youth at the time, attributed the failure of the election to the fact that NDP leader Reimer “neglected to tell the people of Alberta just what he proposed to do in Mr. Manning’s place and how the election of an NDP government would bring changes to the economic situation of the province.”⁴⁰

Novakowski’s critique prefigured a schism that would emerge within the NDP after the election, as an increasingly vocal and youthful socialist minority in the party began to question its moderate, non-ideological character. This schism later resulted in the emergence of the Alberta Waffle caucus, which pressed for “an independent socialist Canada.”⁴¹ More immediately, left-criticism within the party seemed to present a new opening for WISF to exert influence inside the NDP. Some of the socialists in the party at the time were WISF members—though Novakowski was not—and the fellowship began to orient its educational activities, especially the summer seminar, around questions of how young socialists, increasingly evident in society in the late 1960s, might play a role in the radicalization of Canadian politics.⁴²

The 1968 WISF summer seminar was organized around the theme “Radical Reshaping of Canadian Society: Ways and Means.” Among the issues considered were the role of political parties in fomenting transformative social change, the prospects for socialism in Canada, and the significance of youth in radical social movements. This last issue was addressed by Novakowski in a speech entitled “Radical Youth and the Reshaping of Society.”⁴³ Novakowski was likely the best-known socialist in the Alberta NDP at the time, and inviting him demonstrates WISF’s excitement with the shift in the political tone of the moment. There seemed to be new potential for the NDP, both nationally and provincially, to accommodate genuinely socialist politics after having resisted it since the party’s inception. The NDP might, it seemed after all, be a viable political vehicle for socialists. In subsequent years, as Novakowski and the Waffle caucus became increasingly prominent influences in the party, WISF’s enthusiasm would be confirmed and increased.⁴⁴

The Waffle played a small but significant role in the Alberta NDP from 1969 to 1971. And while it is difficult to precisely set out the degree to which the Waffle caucus influenced the provincial NDP leadership to become more amenable to socialist politics, there can be no denying that the party leadership had become so by the early 1970s. Notley, who had replaced Reimer as party leader in 1968, was no longer quite as convinced of the primacy of non-ideological politics—though he certainly remained more moderate than people like Novakowski—and consequently a new place for socialists opened up in the NDP.⁴⁵ By 1971, WISF had become openly supportive of the party, believing that it was the only viable political organization to further the cause of democratic socialism in Canada. A contingent from WISF attended the 1971 provincial convention of the NDP, and an article in The Nutcracker recapped the experience in highly optimistic terms. Jointly written by members of the convention contingent, it noted a palpable change in “both direction and emphasis,” remarking with particular approval upon the party’s newfound preference for the terminology of “democratic socialism” rather than “social democracy.” Referring to youth-led criticism of the Canadian capitalist system and the injustices it created, the article praised the NDP for “responding as a ‘people’s party’ should . . . to the ‘winds of change’ that are blowing from many directions.”⁴⁶ The article concluded with expressions of hope that Notley would be elected as an MLA in that year’s election and that even if he were to fail to win election, the NDP would continue to serve as an ally in the movement for socialism. The animosity that had characterized WISF’s early relationship to the party had all but disappeared, and the ideological chasm between the organizations that had existed throughout most of the 1960s had shrunken considerably.⁴⁷

Given this support, it was no great surprise that by early 1972 WISF had begun to anticipate becoming an official affiliate to the party. In the January 1972 issue of The Nutcracker, Nellie Peterson, a former CCFer and well-known WISF member, predicted imminent affiliation, and within a month her prediction proved correct.⁴⁸ By February 1972, at the urging of a “great majority” of members, WISF applied for and was granted affiliation to the NDP.⁴⁹ Over the following months, the fellowship held a number of meetings at which members discussed their new role within the framework of the party. At one meeting, NDP party secretary Bill Dryden was invited to answer members’ questions about the various ways in which WISF could participate in and influence the party.⁵⁰ By the middle of 1972, WISF had settled into its new role, capping a decade during which the fellowship had gone from being resolutely at odds with the provincial NDP to becoming an affiliate and supporter.

WISF’s affiliation came at an important time, given that it followed closely on the heels of the disintegration of the Waffle’s organization and influence within the NDP. At a national level, the Waffle became embroiled in sectarian conflicts after the party conventions of 1970 and 1971; provincially, the Waffle movement declined after Novakowski, its leader, left for British Columbia in 1971.⁵¹ The decline of the Waffle left WISF as the primary socialist influence on the Alberta NDP, elevating the political significance of the group. The main avenue by which WISF could play this new role was to encourage the NDP to adopt socialist policies at both provincial and federal conventions, where WISF delegates put forth resolutions and proposals. At the 1973 federal NDP convention, for example, WISF submitted eighteen separate resolutions, which advocated a more critical political stance vis-à-vis the federal Liberals, wholesale nationalization of public transport and commercial banks, and a guaranteed annual income, among other things.⁵² It certainly was not true that WISF’s proposals were always or even usually embraced by the party—for example, Notley fought stridently against a policy of widespread nationalization that WISF put forward at the 1973 provincial party convention—but the fellowship had become a socialist fixture within the party apparatus.⁵³

WISF lasted into the twenty-first century, its operations ceasing around 2007 because its membership was aging and shrinking and increasingly lacked the energy to keep the fellowship afloat.⁵⁴ It was certainly not the only socialist organization to suffer a decline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the 1960s and early 1970s, though, WISF was a vibrant organization that functioned as a tool of survival for a small group of socialists in Alberta. In 1962, when WISF was established, the Social Credit government had successfully quelled any broad popular impulse for transformative social change, and to cope with this reality, the NDP accordingly abandoned any open support for such change. The result was that socialists were left politically isolated in the province without an obvious electoral ally in their ideological struggle.

In this context, WISF appears not as an organization defined by political insignificance but as one that redoubled a commitment to socialism in the most active way it could, given prevailing historical conditions. While it would be an exaggeration to suggest that WISF posed a serious threat to conservative hegemony in Alberta, it no doubt functioned to hold back the willingness within the NDP to shift increasingly to the right in order to operate within a seemingly entrenched reactionary political culture. Had WISF not carried out “political education as a means of enquiry into and spreading awareness of socialist solutions to Canada’s problems,” the NDP might have been poised to disavow its socialist lineage.⁵⁵ It turned out that WISF offered both an intellectual community oriented around the theory and practice of socialism and an institutional platform from which a group of more than a hundred Alberta socialists could maintain a critical position vis-à-vis the NDP’s conservative tendencies in the 1960s. Far from irrelevant, WISF’s contribution to ensuring the endurance of socialist thought was of real political and intellectual significance.