were a career path. That left the thesis.
My topic was the Denver-based Western Federation of Miners, a union that at the turn of the century extended into southeastern B.C. The thesis focused on how the WFM had played a key role in the founding of the radical Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, yet only two years later withdrew from the organization.
My engagement with labour history had been Dr. Bulgy’s brainwave. He was more enthusiastic about my thesis topic than I was. “The ideological tensions that led to the WFM’s change of heart,” he had insisted, “are still present in the workplace and employee organizations today.”
Dr. B.’s nickname reflected his appearance — short and bloated. Unlike most UCI profs, he sported a tie, though it was usually askew atop his dishevelled short-sleeved dress shirt, whose buttons scarcely drew the cloth together over his paunch. He was also one of the few Irvine profs who didn’t invite us to call him by his first name. I had been assigned Dr. Bulgy by the department, since I expressed no particular affection for any historical specialization. As my thesis supervisor, he was delighted to discover — after some probing — that my family had a trade union background. He had seemed unmoved by my parents’ upward mobility. My father had progressed at the paper mill from the mill yard to digester operator to minor office functionary. My mother had returned to school when my sister and I were in junior high to bring her clerical skills up-to-date; she was now employed by the North Vancouver school board, helping to deal with truancy cases.
The current status of my parents hadn’t dented Dr. Bulgerak’s enthusiasm for what he had seen as the perfect fit between my parents’ lives and the specialty he had decided should be mine. “Labour history, after all,” he had told me, “is the story of your own family, your people.” His area of expertise was retention or loss of community in urbanized areas; he probably would have thought it impertinent if I had asked whether his field had a familial link. I had tried to tell him that my parents, while positive about their own unions and the union movement, were realists about shop stewards and business agents scrabbling for careers in the hierarchy. He had brushed my quibbles aside. “History —” his arm had flailed toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and papers that lined his office “— isn’t a connection with the dead. History is our connection with living men and women. The conditions of your father’s job, whether as factory hand or in his present white-collar status, are due to history. How much time, money, and energy he has at the end of a shift, his views on a host of topics, who his friends are, the very design of the subdivision he lives in, all are a specific consequence of history.” When he paused for breath, I had reflected on whether I should mention that my parents’ house wasn’t in a subdivision. But I had kept my big mouth shut.
As I composed myself to knock on Dr. B.’s door nearly three years later, I had forty-three pages completed of the sixty new pages I had promised to hand him at the end of the summer. But I hoped to convince him I had learned my lesson and was finally intent on graduating in June. To butter him up, I would quiz him on possible grad schools for a Ph.D. I had also assembled a fund of stories to confirm his belief that the issues surrounding the WFM’s history still resonated.
My examples of ideological differences among workers were collected over the summer mainly in the Waldorf Hotel beer parlour on East Hastings in Vancouver. I had stayed for July and August with friends at a communal house near Nanaimo Street and Kingsway. All six other occupants were left-wing activists of one shade or another. To varying extents they were heads, as well. Half were, like me, working at summer jobs. The others had already fully merged into the city’s industrial workforce: one was employed at a plywood plant on the Fraser River, another shipped out as a tugboat deckhand, the third had hired on at Hayes Trucks, where logging and highway tractors were assembled.
My friends’ experiences confirmed my sense that the unionized blue-collar world was closer to college student existence in Vancouver than in California. Perhaps this was due to B.C. being highly unionized, with a third of the province’s jobs covered by labour contracts. Or perhaps this was because many elected B.C. union leaders were born in the United Kingdom, where the social change aspect of unionism was still present and where ties to leftie academics were part of a belief in organized labour’s mission to create a more equitable society. Maybe the proximity between students and organized employment was simply a consequence of the province being a primary resource industry economy. Logging, fishing, and mining were still the major generators of wealth, and these industries were bastions of the union movement. Without a large tertiary economic sector, almost everybody either was employed or had close relatives at work in the woods or mills, at sea or in canneries, or in mines or smelters. A strong trade union participation in the city’s End the War Committee also facilitated acquaintanceships between students and union militants.
In California, agriculture and defence duked it out for the state’s main industry. Despite the population of the Golden State equalling all ten provinces and two territories of the Frozen North combined, I had yet to befriend anybody in California who had worked in either the fields or an aircraft plant. Our connection at UCI with unionism began and ended with support for César Chávez’s United Farm Workers: distributing UFW literature, publicizing their grape boycott, and participating in occasional information pickets outside large Safeways in Santa Ana or up in L.A.
During the summer, I had met through my Vancouver housemates a number of rank-and-file union members who considered themselves revolutionaries. Many of these interactions had taken place at the Wal-dorf Hotel, whose giant pub was a favourite drinking spot for the city’s labour radicals. Also for ordinary longshoremen, since their union dispatch hall was only a few blocks away. The ’Dorf bar, like every other Vancouver pub we drank at, was one vast room filled with a myriad of small round tables covered with terry cloth.
The province’s liquor laws were still based on a fundamentalist Christian belief that drinking was sinful, and thus should be undertaken in surroundings as unpleasant as possible. By law, windows in beer halls were forbidden, as these would permit passersby to observe unrepentant reprobates consuming alcohol. By law, patrons were forbidden to carry their drinks if, once seated, they subsequently elected to join acquaintances at a different table. Such a transfer had to be effected by a usually begrudging waiter. A PA system blared over the often-deafening roar of conversation in the hall: “Phone call for Dave Ronson, Dave Ronson” or “Taxi for Arnie Black, Arnie Black.” The only sanctioned activity, besides drinking oneself insensible, was a table shuffleboard game. A few pubs had also installed a jukebox, but the music could scarcely be heard over the swirling bellow of sound.
Yet on a hot summer evening in Vancouver, the Waldorf bar was our regular destination after a solidarity meeting or a protest rally, or simply when we had a night off. If we were at the ’Dorf the evening of the weekly meeting of the Vancouver and District Labour Council, we invariably would link up with activist delegates. Our tablemates would have adjourned to the pub to rehash the defeat of yet another of their motions.
The Labour Council, I quickly learned, was dominated by a bloc of representatives from unions whose leadership was under the sway of the Communist Party. The CP played a conservative role: its concern to appear respectable resulted in muted official union pronouncements against the war, or in weak expressions of support for beleaguered independent unions excluded from the Labour Council. On social change issues, CP members resisted endorsing Vancouver organizations outside the party’s control, such as ones that supported U.S. draft evaders and deserters from the military, or a nascent local anti-poverty group that was garnering headlines with its confrontational style. The exceptions to this CP timidity were in areas where Moscow had flashed the green light. An annual antinuclear peace march, and petitions to have Vancouver declared a nuclear-weapons-free zone, received enthusiastic approval and financial aid from the council.
The military suppression of the Czechs the previous summer, occurring only a week before the attacks on protesters at the Chicago Democratic Convention, had further undermined the Communist Party’s
