Chapter 6 C. B. Wade, Research Director and Labour Historian, 1944–50

Workers’ Education

Claude Bates Wade’s road to Glace Bay started in upper-middle-class Edwardian England. He was born in 1906 near Liverpool, the son of a stationery wholesaler who became a manufacturer of fountain pens. He remembered a strict family upbringing, and at public school, mischief was punished with caning. Wade was expected to enter the family business, but in 1923, he visited an older uncle in Toronto and decided to remain in Canada. In his first years, he went west on the harvest excursions and was also hired out as a cowboy. He also picked up the lifelong nickname “Jim,” which was used by family and friends.5

Wade’s uncle insisted that the young man further his education and, to this end, funded his training in Toronto as a chartered accountant. When Wade completed the programme in 1933, he counted himself fortunate to find work at Queen’s University, which administered courses and exams set by the Institute of Chartered Accountants. His position there became more secure over time, and by 1939–40, he was listed in the annual Calendar of the School of Commerce and Administration as an instructor in chartered accountancy.6 Wade also began to publish professionally at this time, notably a series of articles in Canadian Chartered Accountant. These raised questions about accepted methods of calculating profits and evaluating assets as practised by major Canadian corporations. None of the findings would be surprising to specialists, but Wade highlighted the ways that financial statements could be adjusted, if not manipulated, to meet corporate needs.7

Meanwhile, the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) attracted Wade’s interest. This organization was founded in Toronto at the end of World War I on a model of collaboration between academic institutions and trade unions. By the 1930s, under full-time general secretary Drummond Wren, the association was not only pursuing “education for citizenship” but also providing training and assistance to unions. The WEA published research bulletins and pamphlets, participated in radio broadcasts, and distributed filmstrips and films to study groups.8 There is a reference to Wade’s activity in the Kingston branch as early as November 1939, when Wren refers to “our friend on the accounting end,” and Wren later visited with him during an Industrial Relations Conference at Queen’s.9 Following that, they were in continual contact, and in 1941, Wade agreed to write a regular page on finance and related matters for the WEA’s Labor News.10

During his time in Kingston, Wade interacted with a range of people on the political left. According to their daughter’s recollection, her mother considered Wade to be “only a Bertrand Russell socialist” when they first met. In Kingston, however, they both moved further to the left and belonged to a circle of intellectuals associated with the WEA and the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order as well as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Communist Party, later the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP). One of this group was Idele Wilson, a University of British Columbia graduate who had studied economic history and labour relations at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics before going to work for the WEA and then as research director for the United Electrical Workers.11 Wade’s associates were by no means all Communists, but he has stated that he came under the influence of faculty who were party members and soon was “with them.” “At the time everybody was in the CCF [Co-operative Commonwealth Federation],” his daughter has recalled, “and they were trying to move it to the left.”12

District 26

In the early 1940s, labour politics in District 26 of the United Mine Workers took a turn to the left. At a time when many unions were struggling to win recognition, the miners’ union was already an established organization with collective bargaining rights. These had been achieved at the end of World War I and were successfully defended in the labour wars of the 1920s. Under wartime conditions, traditions of militancy were reasserted in efforts to reverse the wage losses of the past decades. A number of rank-and-file actions, including a slowdown strike in 1941, challenged the incumbent union leadership, and in 1942 new officers were elected. Many came from the ranks of the rival “red” union of the 1930s, the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia (AMW), whose members had returned to the UMW. The most prominent officers were AMW veterans such as Adam Scott as secretary treasurer, John Alex MacDonald as international board member, and Tom Ling as vice-president. The president, Freeman Jenkins, was a less experienced twenty-eight-year-old activist from one of the Glace Bay locals.13

Before Wade, there was, briefly, Eugene Forsey, a McGill University graduate and Rhodes Scholar who had returned from Oxford in 1929 to lecture in politics and economics at McGill. After the university dismissed Forsey in 1941, primarily due to his political activism on behalf of the CCF, he became research director for the new Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL). When Forsey came to Glace Bay in 1943 to help prepare a union brief, he recalls welcoming the assignment with enthusiasm: “I had a burning desire to be of use to workers who, in my judgement, had long been oppressed, exploited, and swindled.”14 Forsey articulated the union’s themes clearly: first, that “maximum production of Nova Scotia coal is essential in the national interest,” and secondly, that “the mine workers must be paid decent wages, whether through higher prices, subsidies to private enterprise, or nationalization, with such subsidies from public funds as may prove necessary.”15

This was the context in which Wade was recruited. When Drummond Wren learned that District 26 was looking for a research director, he recommended Wade as “an outstanding authority on accounting, public and industrial finances.” After receiving an interested response, he informed Wade that President Jenkins wanted to know if he would accept the position.16 Wade has also recalled that A. A. MacLeod, one of the most influential organizers for the LPP, encouraged him to go to Glace Bay. MacLeod himself was a Cape Bretoner by origins and a regular visitor there; he was well aware of the situation in District 26 and hoped that the new officers would benefit from experienced and politically sympathetic staff.17 By November 1944, Wade was in Glace Bay.

He later summarized his “routine work” in a list of activities: unemployment insurance cases and old-age pensions; briefs, letters, and resolutions; data on cost-of-living and wages; analysis of legislation; clippings on the industry, unions, and provincial affairs; information for the Glace Bay Gazette; and bulletins to board members.18 He also undertook research on social security provisions for the coal miners. In 1945, he requested an estimate from Sun Life of what would be needed to provide a pension of $30 a month for all miners from age sixty. The answer was that a lump sum of $6.5 million would cover fifteen hundred men already on pension, plus an annual premium of $2.5 million to provide for more than eighty-five hundred men under sixty.19 Wade also helped sort out the financial arrangements for the Glace Bay Gazette, the daily newspaper that the union had purchased in 1942.20 In addition, he assisted in promoting public libraries in Cape Breton, working on town plans for Glace Bay and Sydney, and preparing local radio broadcasts.21

From the beginning, the most urgent task was to prepare for hearings of the Royal Commission on Coal, whose scope included questions of production and distribution, employment, industrial relations, government assistance, and other conditions affecting the industry’s future.22 A preliminary submission went forward in January 1945, signalling that the union planned to address issues from the standpoint of regional and national development on the grounds that “the fundamental interests of labor are also the basic interests of the great majority of Canadians.”23

As part of the preparations, District 26 contracted the country’s leading labour lawyer, J. L. Cohen, to prepare the union brief and act as counsel at the hearings. Wade assembled information and ideas for Cohen. In March 1945, for instance, he considered the problem of making a reasonable estimate of the coal reserves available for production. Wade underlined the idea that “Canada must have the largest possible domestic source of supply to take care of any stoppage in the supply of American coal” and that this would require subventions to assist in transportation. It was also important to continue urging industrial expansion and diversification in the Maritimes. Any temptation to limit coal production to regional needs would have to be resisted on the grounds that “a vast transfer of population” out of the region was objectionable and impracticable. Wade followed up with notes on the wasteful policy of extracting the highest quality coal while leaving large reserves of lesser quality coal untouched that could be utilized with improved attention to washing and treating coal and better burning equipment. The underlying criticism was that the coal companies were poor stewards of the resource: “All this, in my opinion, is a sign of apathy and lack of interest in expanding the market. It is the natural behaviour one would anticipate from a quasi-monopoly operating in isolation and in a one-industry, one-company area. It is BESCO all over again.”24

Later the same month, Wade commented realistically on the idea of “conservation” as applied to a nonrenewable resource such as coal: “There can be no possible sense in trying to make a coal mine last 150 instead of 100 years. To attempt to postpone the inevitable is like trying to grasp the infinite; alright for theologians I dare say.” He added, “We should strenuously oppose the notion of ‘prolonging the agony’ by stringing out Nova Scotia coal production as long as possible.” Although a change in the economic base was ultimately inevitable, “conservation” should mean efficient extraction and utilization in order to promote the fullest practical use of the resource.25

These were only a few of the elements needed for the full brief, but working with Cohen was difficult. The lawyer’s work for other unions and on civil liberties cases was overwhelming. As his biographer has shown, he was nearing physical exhaustion and personal collapse. In June one of the union officers worried that time was running short. Wade then took on more responsibility and worked with one of Cohen’s assistants to complete preparations for the hearings in Sydney.26 Cohen attended, but it fell to Wade to present and defend the seventy-eight-page brief.27

The union submission made a coherent, often eloquent argument for the place of the coal industry in plans for postwar social reconstruction and economic development. What the coal miners wanted was “a decent standard of living firmly based on continuous employment and decent wages, healthy social conditions and social amenities, ample cultural facilities and full opportunities for the advancement of their children.” Moreover, the miners claimed a vested interest in the success of the industry: “The fact that the company leases the coal and owns and manages the equipment is not the basis for an interest and pride greater than ours who spend one-third of our adult lives in the pit and whose food, shelter, wives, children and pleasures are so largely dependent on efficient coal production.”

Turning to the question of government assistance, it was in the public interest to promote the stability of the industry, both to ensure a reliable supply of fuel to the Canadian market and to prevent a massive depopulation of communities dependent on coal. Modernization would require mechanization, but new machinery would face less resistance if linked to the opening of new seams, new public works, and new industries. The union also argued that higher living standards were essential to attract younger men to go into the pits after they returned from the armed forces or finished school, and pension plans could offer retirement for coal miners at the age of fifty-five. As for industrial relations, the charge was that management refused to accept the union as an equal partner and continued to follow outdated policies: “The ‘Company’ is like the smoke and the soot: an endless, wearying, destructive, senseless battle must be fought against an unyielding enemy.” DOSCO and its predecessors had earned their reputation for poor management and failed leadership over many years, and the logical answer was to bring coal under public ownership as a public utility.28

Meanwhile, the union was preparing for an aggressive round of collective bargaining. The mood was apparent at the district convention in October 1946, which called for a wage increase of $2.50 a day, a reduced workweek, and a pension fund supported by the coal royalties. When the company refused to discuss a pension plan and insisted that any wage increases must depend on greater productivity, negotiations broke down. The union reduced its wage demand to $1.40 a day, but by February the strike was underway, and it lasted through to June. In their hopes for significant gains, the coal miners were adding to the high tide of strike activity across the country during the immediate postwar years. As Courtney MacIsaac has put it in her study of these events, “The coal miners’ expectations and views had solidified around the idea of major improvements in status and conditions, and neither the employers’ resistance nor the government’s efforts to stave off the conflict were succeeding.”29

In helping run the union campaign, Wade’s “strike publicity” included leaflets, releases, and widely distributed open letters. There were radio talks on the CBC network as well as on Nova Scotia stations and in union towns such as Hamilton and Oshawa in Ontario. He was particularly pleased with a half-page advertisement, “What Have They Been Telling YOU about US?” that ran in newspapers in British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia.30 Wade also wrote a short leaflet, Robbing the Mines, that drew on the royal commission evidence to document DOSCO’s failure to reinvest in the coal industry: “It is surely obvious that productivity must fall, sooner or later, when an industry already burdened with obsolete and worn-out equipment is robbed so efficiently.”31

When the strike ended, there was still an atmosphere of distrust. Members approved a settlement that gave them an increase of one dollar a day, and another forty cents if production levels increased. But Wade worried that the implications of the strike were not understood—that it was more than “a matter of dollars and tons of coal that might be earned and that might be mined.”32 From this point of view, the strike was not a success. The royal commission had failed to support public ownership, and the concerns about social conditions had not been adequately addressed. MacIsaac has observed that “the long-term goals of industrial democracy were not greatly advanced.”33

Meanwhile, as the largest union in the province, District 26 was also directing attention to issues of concern to other workers. Although the coal miners came under federal jurisdiction, when the Nova Scotia Trade Union Act was under revision in 1947, Wade attended the hearings on behalf of the union. His presentation outlined a set of principles to promote stable industrial relations. Employers should recognize the right of workers to union representation and “the highest standards of wages and other working conditions attainable.” Employees should accept the right of businesses “to plan, direct and manage the business so as neither health nor safety are endangered.” And to address the “inherent inequality of economic or bargaining strength” between workers and employers, governments should “enact labour relations legislation that will, in so far as legislation can, modify this inherent inequality, in favour of the worker.” This was a recipe not for social revolution but for accommodation, the integration of unions into the evolving labour relations system, and it would especially benefit unions with less bargaining power and political influence than the coal miners.34

There was much more for unions to do. In an article on the “Unorganized in Nova Scotia,” Wade noted that only about 25 percent of the labour force was unionized: “They also require a union if they are to become active and influential as citizens in a way that the casting of a vote on election day can never by itself, make possible.” Wade’s discussion went on to single out the twenty-five thousand “girls and women” whose low wages limited the province’s purchasing power and undermined the standard of living. He reported that women workers were employed for average wages as low as thirty-seven cents an hour in textile factories and thirty cents an hour at telephone companies. “The obvious solution,” he concluded, “is to get these workers organized.”35

In another initiative, Wade prepared a set of questions to submit to C. D. Howe, minister of reconstruction and supply. The purpose was to urge Ottawa to investigate DOSCO’s failure to expand basic steel production and develop an export trade in secondary products. Howe’s predictable response was that “it is not considered a function of the Crown to compel a privately owned corporation to expand its operations beyond a point considered financially and economically sound by that corporation’s management.” Wade assembled Howe’s replies in a press release, which was distributed with a covering statement signed by Jenkins: “In wartime the Crown was willing to ‘compel’ corporations to do all kinds of things. But apparently it is quite unwilling in any way to interfere with private industry when a great social problem such as chronic unemployment in the Maritimes, demands such interference.”36

Some of Wade’s most striking analysis came in a series of articles published in the Glace Bay Gazette on “Centralization and Unemployment.” Here he applied the Marxist concept of the concentration and centralization of capital to the conditions of underemployment in the region:

The location of industry follows certain laws of capitalist growth. It is ridiculous to blame government for those laws; for they are brought into action by capital owners, not government. What can, and should, be done is to demand that government restrict the working of such of these laws as are harmful. But if one is to demand that government de-centralize industry in favour of a more even social and economic development of every portion of Canada, then it must be clearly understood that one is interfering with the autonomy and profit interests of large-scale industry.37

Moreover, Wade did not hesitate to state the political conclusions that followed:

It is essential that the Maritime people recognize that capitalism, by its own momentum of growth as it were, leads to centralization. But this centralization need not be merely geographic; it inevitably involves also a centralization of ownership, of control and of funds for investment in industry, in every area. Thus, the problem of the Maritimes is not one only of centralization of industry in Central Canada; it is also one of centralization of big business control both in Central Canada and Nova Scotia itself.38

This kind of language, pointing to capitalism as the essential cause of regional disparity, was rarely heard in the political economy of the region prior to the popularization of underdevelopment theories in the 1970s.39

During this period, Wade also produced radio programming under the title “Labour Leads the Way.” The script for a broadcast on CJCB on 11 June 1948 demonstrates Wade’s skillful use of radio in the service of local labour history. In explaining the origins of Davis Day, the coal miners’ annual day of “remembrance and tribute,” the text begins with a narrator reviewing the coal miners’ history as a struggle to harness nature and to achieve freedom from exploitation. The narrator then introduces a series of events from the founding of the Provincial Workmen’s Association on 1 September 1879 to the 1925 strike and the shooting of William Davis by company police on 11 June that year. The script is punctuated with cues for music and comments by witnesses to the history. A concluding statement by Jenkins is given in full (as written by Wade):

For at least 100 years many working people have dreamed of creating the kind of social and economic institution in which the man working for himself will know he is working also for the common good; and when he works for the common good he will know he is working for himself. So, just as we have built machines and mastered nature with them, we must now build a society which we control. . . . In this way we can carry on the work and bring true the dreams, of those we now remember.40

The Dismissal

There had been anxieties about Wade from the start. As early as December 1944, Silby Barrett (the former international board member for District 26 and now a key figure in the leadership of the Canadian Congress of Labour) wrote to UMW international president John L. Lewis about Wade: “He has been very active since taking his position with the District in regard to Communist Activities. I think that something should be done about it or later on we may have more trouble than what we anticipate.”41 Wade’s presumed politics also seemed to be general knowledge at Dominion Steel and Coal. In a 1968 interview, the company’s former director of public relations stated that Wade was a Communist and “under observation all the time he was here.”42 This was also the opinion of the Catholic Church in the mining districts, where even sympathetic clergy at the time of the 1947 strike were certain, as Peter Ludlow puts it, “that the leaders of those miners were communists (especially, so the priests argued, the researcher C. B. Wade).”43

Although no individual surveillance file was located, there were references to Wade in more general intelligence reports on “communist” or “subversive” activities in District 26.44 In retrospect, they seem scanty. No notice was taken of his appointment, and his name does not seem to appear until February 1945, when Communist organizers from Halifax arrived to discourage the union from going out on a wartime strike. After the 1947 strike, Wade attracted more attention. In March 1948, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer in Glace Bay stated that he was having “increasing influence” with the union leadership but that “thus far Wade has stuck to straight Trade Union and Worker-Political subjects, with no mention of Communism.” Shortly after that, “Professor Wade” was identified in a police report as a member of the LPP and described as “the intellectual force behind the Union.” A rumour that attempts would be made to have him removed from office at the union convention in August 1948 proved exaggerated. President Jenkins assured delegates that Wade was a valued employee and that there had been no criticism of him from the executive board.45

Things changed on the morning of Saturday, 20 May 1950, when Jenkins called Wade into his office and asked for his resignation. When Wade refused, Jenkins told him that he was dismissed, effective immediately. Within hours, his office door was padlocked. A Canadian Press dispatch went out across the country, stating that Jenkins had said the dismissal was “part of a showdown for the removal of Communist influence,” although Jenkins later denied making any statement to the press.46 At UMW headquarters in Washington, secretary treasurer Thomas L. Kennedy made a handwritten note: “Wade is supposed to be a Communist or fellow traveller. Jenkins told me over the phone last Friday that he fired him. He should have done it a long time ago.”47

When the district executive board met a few days later, Vice-President Ling introduced a motion calling for Wade to be reinstated. For his part, Jenkins claimed that “he never found fault with Jim Wade’s work” and that he defended him at conventions and before the international union: “I always stood up for him as long as he was keeping with the organization.” Ling then revised his motion to state that “because this Board has no knowledge of any activities on the part of C. B. Wade detrimental to the interest of UMW of A, the Board disapprove of his dismissal and ask for his re-instatement.” Jenkins added that he could not say that Wade was a Communist, but he said, “I have lost confidence in him and I know that he was not working in the interest of the Union.” Nonetheless, Ling’s motion was adopted by a vote of seven to two.48

As Michael Earle has noted, “blatant red-baiting” had not been popular among the coal miners, but Jenkins was clearly feeling the pressure of the deepening Cold War, which was coming to full force with the expulsion of several left-led unions from the Trades and Labour Congress and the Canadian Congress of Labour. The most dramatic example came in the spring of 1949, when the striking “Communist-dominated” Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU) was broken by the collaboration of shipping companies and government authorities and replaced by the Seafarers’ International Union (SIU). When DOSCO ore carriers arrived at the Sydney steel plant with “scab” SIU crews, union solidarities were severely tested. District 26 had already donated $1,000 to the CSU, and the secretary treasurer, Adam Scott, went on local radio to denounce the SIU crews as strikebreakers. There were tense scenes at the docks until the leader of the steelworkers union local, under pressure from union headquarters, announced that they would not interfere with the unloading of the ships.49 With Jenkins reluctant to support the CSU, his credentials as a militant leader were in question. This, in turn, encouraged former AMW secretary treasurer Robert Stewart to challenge Jenkins for the presidency, as he had also done in 1946.50

This was the immediate context for Wade’s removal. Jenkins had come to office “from the pits” with a reputation as “a fighter,” Wade recalled, but “his position got to him, as happens often with union leaders.” Wade was not alone in believing that his dismissal was part of a deal by Jenkins to win support from the Catholic Church in return for getting rid of the alleged “red” in his office.51 Was Jenkins further provoked by word of the discussions at a meeting on 14 May, where Cape Breton LPP members gathered to hear the visiting A. A. MacLeod discuss the situation? According to the police report of the meeting, MacLeod told members that the party wanted to see Jenkins defeated and replaced by Stewart.52 The announcement of Wade’s removal was followed the next day by the declaration that Stewart was not eligible for office, and in this, Jenkins was supported by the UMW international office.53

After the district board called for his reinstatement, Wade appealed to the union membership. His dismissal, he said, was contrary to the district constitution, which stated that suspensions were subject to approval by the executive board. Jenkins was attempting to use charges against him, said Wade, in order to demonstrate that he was sufficiently “anti-red” to continue in office as president.54 Meanwhile, in Steelworker and Miner, the local weekly edited by M. A. Mackenzie, Wade was described as “a modest self-effacing man whose sole desire was to serve the union and its members well.” Now he was the victim of Jenkins’s unscrupulous wishes to advance his ambitions by repudiating “the man who has literally carried Jenkins on his back for the past five years, the man who wrote every speech Jenkins ever delivered, who prepared all the able briefs presented in the name of the union to governments and other public bodies.”55

Still, the damage was done. Jenkins was returned to office unopposed, and the June election saw several leaders associated with the left go down to defeat. The Sydney Post-Record described the results as a victory for “safe and sane and responsible leadership.”56 The Wade case did not go away, however, and was still on the agenda when the executive board met in September. The union’s solicitor, Louis Dubinsky, explained that Wade’s lawyer had already secured a writ for payment of wages and had initiated a suit for reinstatement and damages of $10,000. After further consultations, Wade agreed to submit his resignation and accept a cheque of $1,050 for three months’ pay.57

With Wade’s departure, a page was turning. Nonetheless, the union’s need for a research director had been established. Wade’s successor, James Morrison, held degrees in English and economics from Acadia University. Moreover, as the son of the former District 26 president D. W. Morrison, he must have been considered a politically reliable choice for the deradicalization and normalization of labour relations in the 1950s.58

The History

Meanwhile, there was the “History of District 26,” literally left behind in Wade’s locked office. At the time of his dismissal, Wade identified the manuscript as one of his major accomplishments: “The first history ever written of any Canadian trade union.”59 The project may have had its genesis in 1945, when Cohen asked Wade to prepare “a very careful historical account” on industrial relations for the use of the royal commission, but neither he nor Cohen was pleased with the result.60 By early 1950, Wade was more satisfied, and his research was attracting wider interest.61 The pending completion of the manuscript is confirmed by a letter in early 1950 from the steel union veteran Forman Waye, who read the manuscript and returned it with several notes.62

As we have it, the “History of District 26” is not in final form. There are references to an introduction, bibliography, and appendices that do not appear in known versions. The surviving manuscript, about three hundred pages in length, consists of twelve well-developed and footnoted chapters covering the history of District 26 from 1919 to 1941.63 The dates are a little misleading, as by the bottom of the first page of the first chapter, “1919: Recognition,” we are already circling back to a discussion of the early origins. The chapter uses a methodical approach: a central question—namely, the recognition of the UMW in 1919—followed by an account of the events leading to that outcome and an analysis of the implications. Buried in the middle of the chapter is an articulate statement of the purposes of writing this kind of people’s history:

The heroes in our history books are nearly always the generals, the “empire builders,” the industrialists and the politicians who associated with them. No one would wish to deny to some of these an honourable place in our history. But in the coal towns of Nova Scotia, as in scores of other industrial towns in Canada, there have lived and died thousands of union men and women who have shown courage and made sacrifices far greater than many of our history book heroes were ever capable of.64

The chapters continue more or less in the same mode: a major development explained through an elaboration of context and story. “Top Wages in 1921” is followed by “1922 Wage Cuts: Slow-Down and Strike,” “1923: Steel-Coal Strike,” “1924 Strike and Restoration of Autonomy,” and “1925: One Hundred and Fifty-Five Days on Strike.” A long chapter (“1925–1926”) on the Royal Commission on Coal chaired by Sir Andrew Rae Duncan slows down the narrative to explore several issues, including the checkoff, company stores, housing, relief societies and workers’ compensation, and safety in the mines, all of which are traced back into the nineteenth century. The narrative resumes with the crises of the early 1930s and the rivalry between District 26 and a new AMW. Other developments of the decade are covered in a chapter on Sydney Mines and Stellarton. Another traces the story of the union in the New Brunswick coalfield down to 1938, although recognition was not achieved until several years after that. The last chapter introduces the years of wartime mobilization and labour regulation.

By any standard, the “History of District 26” was a substantial achievement, written with a level of authority and commitment that seems to have been characteristic of the man. There was only a limited amount of published work for him to use, and Wade’s treatment goes well beyond what was available.65 His research drew on the sources at district headquarters—union files, newspaper clippings, and government documents and reports, including the extensive evidence from the hearings of the 1925 Duncan Commission. And Wade also absorbed details of local history from the union veterans with whom he worked.66

The quality of research and analysis is evident in his account of the chain of events leading to the shooting of William Davis on 11 June. The confrontation is placed in context, and the lasting historical significance of the 1925 strike is also underlined. Wade stresses the fact that by early June, the strike was at a critical point and that the union leadership had decided to adopt more aggressive picketing. This led to the shutdown of the power plant at Waterford Lake and the loss of power to the mines and the town of New Waterford. This development is sometimes described incorrectly as an attempt by the company to intimidate the coal miners by cutting off the town’s water supply. But on 11 June, the coal miners were attempting not to restore water and power service but to maintain the 100 percent picketing that would prevent the company from trying to resume operations.

For the events of that day, Wade relied especially on two of the board members with whom he worked, Thomas Ling (a “leader of the affair”) and Douglas MacDonald (a “witness”). They provided details that could come only from those with first-hand knowledge—pickets sleeping on a rainy night under shelters built of railway ties and a train loaded with company police and officials advancing slowly toward the plant, removing obstructions from the track as they proceeded. After the force of police and officials recaptured the power plant from the union pickets that morning, they rode into town on horseback, parading on Plummer Avenue to boast of their victory. Then came the legendary march of some eight hundred strikers through the woods to the power plant. When the coal miners were met by gunfire, they retaliated with sticks, stones, and bare hands. After the shooting subsided, the miners managed to rout the police, pulling them off horses, chasing them into the woods, and marching captives back into town. In the course of the mayhem, coal miner William Davis was shot and killed by a police bullet, and two other men, Gilbert Watson and Jack MacQuarrie, were wounded, casualties of a struggle to defend their strike.67

Wade also brought his understanding of industrial relations to bear on the larger situation. He introduced the 1925 strike as an example of “how in some circumstances the employer’s position is so strong that he can force a union into a strike.” Attempts at negotiation and conciliation had failed, in part due to uncertainty about the status of the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act after a ruling of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was announced in January.68 The strike started in March, after the company reduced operations and cut off credit at company stores. “Let them stay out two months or six months, it matters not; eventually they will have to come to us,” BESCO vice-president J. E. McLurg famously told a reporter. His offhand remark—“They can’t stand the gaff”—conveyed the company attitude. Almost at once, “standing the gaff” became a rallying cry for the strike: “There is not a miner who has forgotten it. They ‘stood the gaff’ for one hundred and fifty-five days.”69

By May the hard-pressed union leadership was prepared to accept an arbitrated settlement, but the company was now refusing to deal with the UMW at all. This impasse was broken by the events at Waterford Lake—an outcome reinforced by the looting and burning of company stores, the return of troops to the coalfield, the defeat of the provincial government, a temporary settlement, and the appointment of a royal commission. Wade concludes that the strike had failed in its main objective: “Basically the strike was lost because people were poverty stricken and they were hungry and terribly tired. In other words, BESCO was willing and able to starve the men and their families into submission and the union was unable to prevent this.” And yet there was also an achievement worth underlining: “The strike was lost in terms of the immediate issue; it was won, in terms of establishing the union: after 1925 all serious efforts to destroy the union were abandoned.”70 From this perspective, the “reluctant recognition” of 1919 was superseded by a more permanent commitment, supported by the province, to the preservation of union recognition and collective bargaining in the coal industry. As Wade’s analysis makes clear, this was understood as a necessary compromise that anticipated the state-supported formula of industrial legality that would be more widely adopted across Canada in the 1940s.

There is much more to appreciate in the manuscript. Wade’s training equipped him to analyze changes in wages, prices, and profits that were at stake in disputes of the past as well as in his own time, and his familiarity with corporate behaviour was useful in understanding the strategies followed by the coal companies. Discussing contract proposals at one stage in the 1920s, for instance, Wade explained the situation in these terms: “The familiar argument, used so persistently over the years by BESCO (and afterwards by DOSCO), is merely a demand that the workers submit themselves to the ungovernable forces of capitalism; that they permit their wage rates to fluctuate with and be determined by the profit needs and expectations of their employers.”71 Similarly, in a later chapter, he brought a critical eye to the history of government intervention: “At least so far as the miner is concerned, all the thirty odd boards and commissions that had dealt with his wages and working conditions from 1907 to 1943, had based their findings on the same principle; wages must be determined, no matter how great the miner’s need, by the ability to pay of the individual firm involved.”72 His discussion of social conditions noted too that wealth tended to concentrate far from the resource hinterlands, leaving the coal districts with few resources for social improvements: “Wealthy Canadians tend to congregate in Central Canada and pay their local taxes there no matter how much of their wealth may have been extracted from East or West.”73 From this perspective, the history of the union to date was a long preparation for the transition to a more responsible economics of remuneration and reinvestment based on public ownership of the industry.74

There are not many large generalizations in the manuscript, but the author knew that the “History of District 26” had a didactic purpose for those who would carry on the work of the union. He encouraged readers to reflect on the underlying differences between radical and moderate leaders who appeared in the pages, represented almost archetypically by J. B. McLachlan and Dan Willie Morrison:

The one was guided by the principle: stop fighting only when you must; the other by: never fight until you really must. McLachlan was motivated by the belief that capitalism must be, could be and was going to be, superseded by socialism; Morrison (though no fervent supporter of private enterprise) by the belief capitalism was here to stay, if not for ever, but at any rate for an indefinite period.

It is easy enough for a third party to say that both went too far in their opposite directions. Which was more fundamentally in the right the reader will decide for himself.75

In leaving the reader with this challenge, Wade was content to present himself as a witness to the conditions and opportunities of history rather than as an authority on strategies of social change. In this, the director of research and education was deferring to his constituency. It would be up to the miners’ union and its members to determine the course of action ahead.

Epilogue

He waited for me, at the exit from a subway stop in one of the older suburbs in Toronto. He was at the wheel of a small white sports car, a dapper gentleman, relatively short and square-shouldered. He spoke in what we might call a mid-Atlantic accent. We went for lunch, and then to his modest bungalow in Scarborough. When I tried to reach him again, I learned that he had suffered a stroke and passed away, only a few years after my visit.

After he left Glace Bay in 1950, there was no question of Wade returning to Queen’s. The family moved to Toronto, where he worked as a chartered accountant and later opened a practice of his own. He continued to do work for unions, but most of his practice consisted of small accounts, and he was known to be generous with his time for people. The family rarely discussed politics, but his daughter recalls that her parents encouraged her to be an independent thinker. Her father invited her to debate propositions such as “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need” and “Is the brotherhood of man really possible in a world of scarcity?”76

When I met Wade in the 1970s, I had the powerful impression of a man who had moved on. He had no copy of the District 26 manuscript in his possession and had not been active politically for many years. When I visited him, though, he mentioned that he and his wife, Christine, were planning to attend a new play about the overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in Chile in 1973. Indeed, Christine had a long-time interest in theatre, acting, for instance, in a Chekhov play and later directing an Ibsen production in Toronto’s little theatres of the 1950s. In some productions, Wade had small walk-on parts as a butler or servant.77

Our reconnaissance ends here, but there is enough evidence to identify the place of C. B. Wade in the history of District 26 and more generally in the field of regional history and labour studies. He emerged as a politically engaged intellectual who made common cause with organized labour in the hopeful period of transition from wartime mobilization to postwar reconstruction. His professional background and his experience with the Workers’ Educational Association prepared him to answer the call from District 26, where he became one of the first members of a cohort of union staff across Canada who were navigating the terrain of industrial legality and promoting an expanded definition of working-class citizenship.78 Wade was also among the small number of researchers who made lasting early contributions to labour studies, and his historical work can be associated with the activists of the 1940s who were discussing the need for a “people’s history” of Canada.79 Once on the ground in Glace Bay, Wade was energized by the militancy of the coal miners. His responsibilities as research director were always pressing, but he understood that the coal miners saw their history as a necessary explanation of the origins of current conditions. Consequently, he applied his skills to documenting the contradictions between economic exploitation and social progress that were so visibly demonstrated in the history of the coal miners. And in step with union policy and dominant thinking on the left, he promoted solutions based on collective bargaining and social planning.

To be sure, Wade was writing his political economy and labour history at a time when coal remained the leading source of energy in Canada. The coal miners believed they were well placed to protect the stability of the industry and their communities and the future of the province and region. As a labour intellectual, Wade was participating in a long war of position, readying union members and the public for a better world to come. By the end of the 1940s, however, Cold War conditions encouraged unions to set aside, if not repudiate, the more radical implications of their own history and seek a favourable accommodation with capital and the state, and Wade fell victim to the associated internal politics of the miners’ union.80 Soon it would also be clear that King Coal was being displaced more rapidly than anticipated, and by 1960 the logic of regional underdevelopment led a royal commission to propose an orderly reduction of the industry.81 It would fall to another generation of activists and intellectuals, and even the next wave of historians, to respond to the conundrums of capitalism and underdevelopment in the region. For the time being, the dominant culture of modernist industrial capitalism prevailed, and the people and communities called into service for the production of industrial energy were considered increasingly redundant. Given the legacy of residual and oppositional traditions, however, there would continue to be resistance, and with it a search for alternative strategies of development.82

Notes

This chapter first appeared in Labour/Le Travail 79 (2017). It is reprinted here in revised form with permission.

1. 1. Logan, Trade Unions in Canada, 605–6. Logan identified five union research directors in Canada, all named since 1942, as well as the appointment of Eugene Forsey at the Canadian Congress of Labour. For an extended version of the present chapter, see the journal Labour/Le Travail 79 (Spring 2017): 9–52.

2. 2. Wade’s influence on local labour history was acknowledged in the wave of publications that began to appear in the 1970s. Paul MacEwan drew on the manuscript for columns on local history in the Cape Breton Highlander (1965–69) and named it a major source for his book, Miners and Steelworkers: Labour in Cape Breton.

3. 3. See Cuthbertson, Labour Goes to War. The new industrial unions often placed a priority on public relations staff, journalists, researchers, and educators as part of a larger strategy of “unionizing” as well as “organizing” members and influencing the larger working-class public.

4. 4. On the transition to a new order in labour relations, see McInnis, Harnessing Labour Confrontation. As McInnis shows, labour leaders narrowed their agenda at this time in order to achieve the stabilities of industrial legality, a self-limiting trend that was accelerated by the anti-communism of the period.

5. 5. Biographical information on C. B. Wade (1906–82) is drawn from an interview with his daughter, Martha Wall, 24 July 2015, as well as this author’s earlier discussion with Wade himself, 23 December 1974. I am grateful for information shared, 4 April 2016, by Peter F. Wade, whose father was the uncle referred to here. Additional details on family history were provided by Peter Backman, 2 and 5 June 2016.

6. 6. Before moving to Kingston in 1933, Wade married Laura Christine Hugill. Her abilities and perseverance had brought her to the University of Toronto, where she recalled being in classes with Northrop Frye. Both Christine and C. B. came from relatively unorthodox religious backgrounds: Christine’s family members were Plymouth Brethren, and C. B.’s family members were Swedenborgians; however, their daughter recalls her parents as confirmed atheists. Wall, interview by author, 2015.

7. 7. These appeared in issues of Canadian Chartered Accountant: February 1941, 98–108; August 1942, 86–88; and January 1943, 66–70.

8. 8. Radforth and Sangster, “Link between Labour and Learning,” 41–78. See also their chapter in Welton, Knowledge for the People.

9. 9. Drummond Wren to Idele Wilson, 14 November 1939; Wilson to Wren, 3 April 1940; file 84, MU4030, fond F1217, Workers’ Educational Association Fonds (WEA Fonds), Archives of Ontario (AO), Toronto, Ontario.

10. 10. Wren to Wade, 10 October 1941; Wade to Wren, 15 December 1941; file 85, MU4030, WEA Fonds, AO.

11. 11. On Wilson, see Guard, “‘Woman Question’ in Canadian Unionism,” esp. 185–88. Wilson’s publications included pamphlets such as Citizen Trade Unionist.

12. 12. Wade, interview by author, 1974; Wall, interview by author, 2015.

13. 13. Earle, “Down with Hitler and Silby Barrett,” 56–90. See also Earle, “Coalminers and Their ‘Red’ Union,” 99–138. The miners’ rebellion also increased support for the political left at a time when the Communists endorsed CCF candidates in return for their support for labour militancy. CCF MLAs were elected in Glace Bay, Sydney, and New Waterford in 1941. The coal miner Clarie Gillis, a former AMW member, was elected to Parliament in 1940 for the CCF and continued to serve until 1957.

14. 14. Forsey, Life on the Fringe, 76–77.

15. 15. For the union submission of 15 November 1943 to the National War Labour Board, see “DOSCO—Miscellaneous,” vol. 10, part 3, MG30 A25, Eugene Forsey Fonds, Library and Archives Canada (LAC). His preliminary notes included a stronger statement of the case for public ownership: “If the people of Canada are to go on providing public money to assist this enterprise, isn’t it time they took it over and ran it for the benefit of the workers in it and of the community generally?”

16. 16. Wren to Jenkins, 20 April 1944; Jenkins to Wren, 23 April 1944, file 10.48, MU4011; Wren to Wade, 29 April 1944, file 85, MU4030, WEA Fonds, AO.

17. 17. Wade, interview by author, 1974. MacLeod came to prominence as the organizer of the Canadian League against War and Fascism in 1934. In 1943, he was elected to the provincial legislature in Ontario, where he served two terms. He had worked on the steel plant at Sydney Mines in his youth and was well regarded by the leftists in District 26 and other local unions.

18. 18. “Notes for Report to Board, September 16/47,” reel #10027, series #1134, United Mine Workers of America, District 26, Public Archives of Nova Scotia (PANS), Halifax, Nova Scotia.

19. 19. A. J. Moore to Wade, 7 September 1945, Reel #10023, PANS.

20. 20. See, for instance, district executive board minutes, 8 January 1948, MS 9.32, UMWA no. 4514 Papers, Dalhousie University Archives (DUA), Halifax, Nova Scotia. For a discussion of the newspaper, see Earle, “People’s Daily Paper,” 63–81.

21. 21. Sydney Post-Record, 30 May 1950.

22. 22. The royal commission was announced in March 1944, and the report was tabled in January 1947. See Report of the Royal Commission on Coal, 1946 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1947).

23. 23. Jenkins et al. to Coal Commission, 16 January 1945, with document, Reel #10023, PANS.

24. 24. The reference is to the British Empire Steel Corporation. See Frank, “Cape Breton Coal Industry,” 3–34, which is helpful in explaining the corporate history of the industry and the origins of Dominion Steel and Coal in 1928.

25. 25. Wade to J. L. Cohen, 12, 16, 26 March 1945, Reel #10024, PANS.

26. 26. Adam Scott to Cohen, 25 June 1945; Cohen to Wade, 11 July 1945; W. R. Dymond to Cohen, 26 July 1945, file 3120, vol. 40, Cohen Fonds, LAC. See MacDowell, Renegade Lawyer, 203–4, 269, and chap. 8 generally.

27. 27. Glace Bay Gazette, 13–14 September 1945. The headline in the Gazette underlined the union’s main message: “UMW Coal Brief Recommends Nationalization of Industry.”

28. 28. United Mine Workers of America, Submission to the Royal Commission on Coal. The summary here draws on MacIsaac, “Coal Miners on Strike,” chap. 1, esp. 14–23. The plan for nationalization attracted a vigorous cross-examination of Wade by DOSCO’s long-time general counsel, Lionel Forsyth, who later became president of the corporation. See testimony, 13 September 1945, Royal Commission on Coal, RG33–63, vol. 37, file 40, LAC, 3556–653.

29. 29. MacIsaac, “Coal Miners on Strike,” 47. The royal commission report aggravated the union’s discontent, as only limited government intervention was proposed. Wade’s response repeated the argument that a full programme of modernization and social reform could be achieved only under a national fuel policy supported by public ownership. See Wade, “Coal Should Be Public Utility,” 334–43.

30. 30. “Notes for Report to Board, September 16/47.” In one initiative, the union invited a Toronto graphic artist to visit the mining district. In addition to several cartoons, he drew human-interest views of the social landscape. Some sketches appeared in the Glace Bay Gazette, 23 May 1947. Four lithographs based on this work were included in a folio published in 1952. See Frank, “Looking for Avrom Yanovsky,” 37.

31. 31. Wade, Robbing the Mines.

32. 32. Glace Bay Gazette, 31 May 1947, as quoted by MacIsaac, “Coal Miners on Strike,” 75.

33. 33. MacIsaac, “Coal Miners on Strike,” 78.

34. 34. Glace Bay Gazette, 10 May 1947; 30–31 March 1948. The act was notable for excluding fishermen from the category of “employees” at a time when the Canadian Fishermen’s Union was engaged in a struggle for collective bargaining. See the chapters by Abbott, “Coal Miners and the Law,” and Nisbet, “Free Enterprise at Its Best,” 24–46, 170–90.

35. 35. C. B. Wade, “The Unorganized in Nova Scotia,” July 1947, Reel #10027, PANS.

36. 36. C. D. Howe to Jenkins, 21 September 1948, and additional documents in this file, MG19.6, E1, Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University, Sydney, NS.

37. 37. C. B. Wade, “Centralization and Unemployment” column, Glace Bay Gazette, n.d., Reel#10027, PANS.

38. 38. Wade (emphasis in original).

39. 39. Wade.

40. 40. “Radio Script,” 1948, MG19.6, E2, Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University, Sydney, NS.

41. 41. See President’s Correspondence 1944/1945, United Mine Workers of America Archives, formerly in Washington, DC, now at the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

42. 42. Ernest Beaton interview, T-159, Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University, Sydney, NS.

43. 43. Ludlow, Canny Scot, 235–38.

44. 44. “United Mine Workers of America, District 26, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Communist Activities Within,” file A-2006-00529, RG146, Canadian Security Intelligence Service Records, LAC (hereafter RCMP file). The material was released following an access to information request. After an appeal to the information commissioner, a second release with additional material followed in 2015. Internal evidence indicates there was a separate file on Wade, but it is believed to have been destroyed.

45. 45. Reports in RCMP file, 22 September 1945, 4 December 1946, 22 March 1948, 31 March 1948; clipping, Sydney Post-Record, 4 September 1948. There was an attack on Wade at the district convention in 1946, but a motion of confidence was adopted, with Jenkins’s support.

46. 46. Globe and Mail, 22 May 1950; Sydney Post-Record, 22 May 1950.

47. 47. President’s Office—Correspondence, District 26 1950/1951, UMWA Archives.

48. 48. District executive board minutes, 26 May 1950, DUA. The UMW had long maintained an anti-communist clause in its constitution, but it was not enforced with any consistency during the CIO period. Moreover, Robert Stewart and other leftists often described themselves as agreeing with the LPP on many issues without being members or accepting party discipline.

49. 49. Earle, “Cold War in Cape Breton.”

50. 50. There was a complication in early 1950, when Stewart led a two-day walkout at the mine where he worked. This gave DOSCO grounds to terminate his employment, but Stewart was careful to maintain his union membership while the decision was under appeal.

51. 51. Wade, interview by author, 1974.

52. 52. Report on meeting of 19 May 1950, RCMP file. Wade was not listed among those in attendance.

53. 53. District executive board minutes, 26 May 1950.

54. 54. “Statement Issued by C. B. Wade,” 30 May 1950, RCMP file.

55. 55. Steelworker and Miner, 27 May 1950.

56. 56. Sydney Post-Record, 15 June 1950.

57. 57. District executive board minutes, 1–2 September 1950, Reel #10024, PANS.

58. 58. Morrison’s 1950 Acadia University MA thesis in economics was titled “A History of Labor [sic] Management in the Coal Mining Industry of Nova Scotia.” The bibliography cited an interview with Jenkins dated 26 May 1950, which apparently took place in the midst of the controversy over Wade’s dismissal.

59. 59. “Statement Issued by C. B. Wade,” 30 May 1950, RCMP file. The claim that there were no previous histories of individual unions may, like all historical “firsts,” be difficult to establish.

60. 60. Cohen to Wade, 12 May 1945; Wade to Cohen, 12 October 1945; Cohen to Wade, 17 October 1945; with “Notes on Relations between the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation and the Coal Miners,” file 3120, vol. 40, Cohen Fonds, LAC.

61. 61. The programme for the Maritime Labour Institute at Dalhousie University in May 1950 included a lecture by Wade on the union’s history. Events intervened, and the lecture was not delivered. Report, 21 June 1950, RCMP file.

62. 62. Waye suggested a parallel between the events of 1923 and a famous episode in English history, in 1381, Wat Tyler’s rebellion. See Waye to Wade, 16 February 1950, Reel #10032, PANS.

63. 63. The status of the text has been unstable. Over the years, this researcher has reviewed five typed copies of the manuscript. For a detailed discussion, see the extended version of this chapter in Labour/Le Travail 79 (Spring 2017): 42–44. The citations below are to the “Beaton” and “Fergusson/ Morrison” copies. The first is at the Beaton Institute in “C. B. Wade 1950,” MG19.16, file 2; the second is in the PANS library as HD8039 M879.

64. 64. Wade, “History of District 26,” chap. 1, 17. Wade’s statement is repeated, without attribution, in MacEwan, Miners and Steelworkers, ix–x.

65. 65. An incomplete version of Eugene Forsey’s MA thesis was published as “Economic and Social Aspects of the Nova Scotia Coal Industry.” See also Logan, History of Trade-Union Organization, chap. 3 and 143–48. Internal evidence indicates that Logan’s research was completed in 1924.

66. 66. He was also influenced by McAlister Coleman’s Men and Coal, a sympathetic journalistic account of the United Mine Workers of America.

67. 67. Wade, “History of District 26,” chap. 6 and esp. 12–16. The most reliable brief account is Don MacGillivray’s biography of William Davis in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, accessed 17 January 2024, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/davis_william_15E.html. See also MacKinnon, “Labour Landmarks in New Waterford,” esp. 13–20.

68. 68. The Privy Council’s decision reinforced the trend toward “industrial voluntarism.” See Fudge and Tucker, Labour before the Law, 140–41.

69. 69. Wade, “History of District 26,” chap. 6, 10–12.

70. 70. Wade, chap. 6, 30.

71. 71. Wade, chap. 5, 5.

72. 72. Wade, chap. 11, 3, 97.

73. 73. Wade, chap. 7, 30.

74. 74. The Labour government in Britain adopted a Coal Industry Nationalisation Act in 1946, and the mines were transferred to public ownership on 1 January 1947. Public ownership of coal was also the policy of the CCF and the LPP, who, despite their rivalries, shared the same state-planning approach to natural resources and a gradualist transition to some form of socialism.

75. 75. Wade, “History of District 26,” chap. 4, 25–26. On McLachlan, see Frank, J. B. McLachlan.

76. 76. Wade, interview by author, 1974.

77. 77. Wade, interview.

78. 78. On the expanding role of the research director, see Levine, “Economic Research in Labour Unions,” 49–64; and Stinson, “Tribute to Gil Levine,” 173–87.

79. 79. Kealey, Workers and Canadian History, chaps. 1–3, including the discussion at 71–75 of the “people’s history” initiatives. There is no evidence that Wade participated in those discussions.

80. 80. Unions across the country purged staff, and the labour centrals expelled “red-led” unions. See Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, chaps. 14 and 15.

81. 81. Report of the Royal Commission on Coal. In 1950 the coal miners in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick produced more than seven million tons of coal, about 37 percent of the country’s production at a time when coal, both domestic and imported, was the predominant energy source. Although Canadian coal was always in a weak position in Central Canada, the coal miners believed that a national fuel policy would bring stability to the industry. However, the production levels of 1950 fell rapidly in the next decade as hydroelectricity, oil, and gas replaced coal as the principal sources of energy in Canada.

82. 82. See Parnaby, “Roots, Region, and Resistance,” 5–31; MacKinnon, Closing SYSCO.

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