| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

John Boyko, Into the Hurricane: Attacking Socialism and the CCF (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing 2006)

THERE ARE MANY reasons to view the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation as a benign group of "liberals in a hurry," to use Louis St. Laurent's famous quip. Yet such a judgment would be very much at odds with the assessments made by its enemies who viewed the CCF as a serious threat in the 1930s and particularly the 1940s. The nature of the threat varied according to the fears of the authors but, by any measure, the language of attack was unrestrained. John Boyko has examined the "hurricane" of abuse directed at the CCF from a phalanx of conservative propagandists, business people, newspaper editors, clergy, and even Communists. He suggests that the cumulative effect of this unrelenting barrage was to erode the CCF's base of support and eventually relegate it, and socialism generally, to the margins of Canadian society.

The strength of this volume lies in Boyko's documentation of the extraordinary campaign undertaken by several sectors of Canadian capital to discredit the CCF. The insurance industry is a prime example. Speaking to a popular distrust of the growing wealth and power of finance capital, the insurance industry had been singled out by the CCF in the Regina Manifesto as a prime target for socialization. The industry, not surprisingly, defended itself with a sweeping propaganda campaign. Equally predictable were the similar activities of any number of broader business organizations such as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. The seriousness with which they took the CCF challenge can be measured in the scale of their activities as hundreds of thousands of pieces of literature were distributed across the country. This impact was multiplied by the role of the daily press. Not only did editors jump on the anti-CCF bandwagon, they often refused to print CCF advertising during election campaigns and rejected letters to the editor responding to attacks on the CCF. Canadian liberal historiography that celebrates the role of high-profile Canadian journalists and their connections with those in power should pay particular heed to the manner in which they managed to squelch other voices by means of slander and innuendo.

Special mention has to be made of Gladstone Murray and Burdick Trestrail, two individuals who could probably be best described as propaganda entrepreneurs who built careers as anti-socialist gurus. Standard accounts of the CCF have placed considerable weight on the ability of these two to mobilize right-wing sentiment and, more broadly, create uncertainty about the character of a potential CCF government. Boyko has carefully plotted their campaigns and provides a striking picture of both their reach and the nature of the message. Most interesting is the precocious Cold War language they used from the moment the CCF hit the peak of its popularity in 1943. Very quickly, they conflated the CCF with communism and, significantly, fascism, suggesting that they all constituted similar threats to freedom. This was the message, for instance, of Trestrail's tract Social Suicide that was mailed to every English-language household in Canada as well as adapted for advertisements in newspapers across the country. On the day of the 1945 federal election, drawing on still-intense wartime sentiments, he ran a nation-wide advertisement arguing Canadians were facing another "D-Day" in which, should the CCF win, "we would lose our individual freedom just as completely as though we had lost the war."(82)

Such hyperbole, and the political analogies of the moment, help explain what several historians have considered the CCF's greatest blunder. Ontario CCF leader Ted Jolliffe denounced Ontario Premier George Drew's illegal clandestine use of the Ontario Provincial Police to spy on the CCF as "Gestapo tactics." His evidence was overwhelming and Jolliffe's choice of language very much in keeping with that of his adversaries. Yet the CCF's lack of access to the press allowed its enemies to paint both the accusation, and the language, as outrageous. Indeed, Boyko carefully reconstructs some of the connections between these professional red-baiters and the Conservative Party including those who are generally overlooked in this regard, such as John Diefenbaker.

Less successfully explored here is the Communist Party's campaigns against the CCF. This is simply a different kind of issue than the class-based attacks of the CCF's bourgeois enemies and it requires a different kind of discussion. Key to explaining this contest on the left is an understanding of the histories of both the CCF and the Communist Party, and the international movements with which each was associated. This is no small task, and Boyko tends to oversimplify the issues at stake. For example, while the Communists' response to the emergence of the CCF was, in many ways, sectarian, the notion that the Regina Manifesto's call for the eradication of capitalism "should have" put Woodsworth "in good stead" (120) with the Communists ignores both the histories and self-perceptions of both parties. Similarly, the debate about the possibility of a popular front between communists, socialists, and liberals was an extremely complex one and requires a much more nuanced understanding of both the Communists' strategy as well as recognizing that the CCF was far from a homogeneous entity. Boyko wrongly assumes that red-baiting attacks on the CCF were always effective and the CCF had little choice but to react defensively to them. Boyko documents Communist slanders and questionable maneuvers, but it is equally necessary to recognize that these two parties had clashed during the Depression and the legitimacy of the Soviet Union as an ally in World War Two gave credence to Canadian Communists. Communist appeals for working-class unity could have wide appeal and the increasingly narrow electoral strategy of the CCF was incapable of challenging the Communists' strengths in areas of the labour movement and elsewhere. There were many in the CCF who were highly critical of the Communist Party, but sought to turn the CCF to more active extra-parliamentary struggles and would have, quite explicitly, rejected the "social democratic" label that Boyko assumes can be applied unproblematically to the CCF. In fact, anti-socialists had reason to be wary of a potential new wave of radicalism and labour unity.

Boyko makes much of the Communists' support of other parties against the CCF in the 1940s. The point is well taken and is crucial to understanding the evolution of the Communist Party away from an earlier notion of principled class politics. But how widespread, and public, were these alliances? And why was the Liberal Party not tarred with the same red-baiting brush as the CCF? Most well known is the case of Windsor where the Liberals, particularly Paul Martin, benefited directly from Communist support rooted in the automobile plants. But the chapter reads as if there were a general Liberal-Communist alliance to stymie the CCF, which more than overstates the situation.

Generally speaking, Boyko's discussion of the Communists is extraneous to his focus on bourgeois opposition to the CCF. Given the general theme of the book, it would have made more sense to attend to more liberal anti-socialism and to the Liberal Party which generally eschewed the kind of attacks by the Gladstones and Trestrails and instead, famously, fought the CCF by adopting elements of the CCF's program around social security. As dramatic as the "hurricane" was, the main beneficiary of the CCF's decline was not the Conservatives or the Communists, but the Liberal Party. Studying reaction to the CCF requires recognizing the growing hegemony of a welfare-state- identified liberalism in the decades after the Second World War.

The other consequence of failing to recognize the salience of the liberal opposition to the CCF is to ignore the consequences of the CCF's response to the red-baiting attacks, for the CCF increasingly took shelter under liberalism's ideological umbrella. In the face of red-baiting attacks, the CCF leadership took great pains to distinguish itself from Communism. While this made sense – the CCF did have a distinct political program – they did so extremely defensively by minimizing the disruptions that a future CCF government might cause. Whereas the CCF, in the 1930s, claimed, as a matter of course, that a CCF government would "revolutionize" society (albeit, hopefully, peacefully), such language could not be a part of the CCF's defensive posture a decade or two later. The missing element here is an appraisal of the ways in which the "hurricane" helped sweep away an alternative politics.


JAMES NAYLOR Brandon University

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