History of the I.W.A.

_ Continued from previous page

of, and when he answered in the negative,
*\..the questioner told him to get out, and not
to come back until he did...the crowd in the
hall cheered and Woodsworth quit right then
and there and has not been around since.”

This theme of division between the political
arms of the social democrats and communists
was to plague forest industry labour for
decades, and there will be repeated refer-
ences to the dispute boiling up here and
there. Readers should bear in mind that this
division between Communists and Social De-
mocrats in Germany in the early 1930’s was
one of the reasons why Hitler's “National So-
cialists” were able to win the 1933 election.

So the poor old L.W.L.U., as it was then call-
ing itself, confronted declining lumber mar-
kets, a concerted effort by the Employers As-
sociation, the B.C. Loggers’ Association which
was a small part of a huge, continent-wide
campaign, led by giant U.S. corporations like
USS. Steel, to stamp out the post-war spread
of unionism, terribly split into three major
factions; Winch’s group, which was to coa-
lesce around the “Independent Labour Party,”
the I.W.W.- O.B.U. group who sought to pro-
voke the ONE BIG STRIKE out of whose ash-
es a new and better world would be borne,
and the R.L.L.U. group, led by J.M. Clarke

By the time of the January, 1921 Conven-
tion, the membership had plummeted from
23,000 to 13,722, and the major organizing
drive in Northern Ontario faltered.

Clarke, surely one of the most fascinating
figures in Canadian forest industry labour,
was of course to be guided by the new Com-
munist Party of Canada (C.P.C.), and to have
the very considerable advantage of support of
major Finnish and Ukrainian leftist organiza-
tions.

Following that leadership, the L.W.L.U. for-
mally affiliated to the R.I.L.U. in 1922, (The
Edmonton Local, heavily influenced by the
Wobblies, and by Gordon Cascaden in partic-
ular, refused, and was expelled). According to
Penner the Lumberworkers were the first
and only union ever to belong to the R.LL.U.,
which made a special exception of its rule
that, to join, “radical” North American Unions
had to disband and join the ‘A.F. of L. affiliate.
This association of forest industry unions
with the C.P.C. was to last until the fall of
1948 in B.C., and into the fifties in northern
Ontario.

During the early years of C.P.C. activity in
Canadian Labour (1921 to 1929), consistent
with its “united front” policy, with the decline
in lumber prices, and with its need to over-
come competition from the left (i.e., I.W.W.
and the O.B.U.), the “line” was careful, prag-
matic, and distinctly non-militant.

Clarke waged a war of pamphlets with Wob-
bly Norman Hatherly:

“Personally, I want wage slavery to
stop tonight, if possible, but I know if
the 0.B.U is going to put it out of busi-
ness it will take a hundred years be-
cause the largest majority of the mem-
bers of the O.B.U. are content to remain
wage slaves. If the O.B.U. came out with
@ clear cut revolutionary policy, which
would mean no reforms, no palliatives,
no compromises, that would be the rock
on which the O.B.U. would fonder be-
cause the majority are ready to compro-
mise,”

Edwin Suski, an organizer working among
Finns in Northern Ontario, said much the same
thing about the 1926-27 campaigns: “In the
camps when organizing, mainly you talked

and butter issues, not politics.”
All that was to change, or was supposed to
change, after the Sixth Communist Party of
Canada convention in June of 1929. Stalin had
come to power in 1924, after Lenin’s death. He
began immediately to turn the party and its
our organizations away from the “united
_ front” policy of infiltrating “reformist” North
ican unions, toward the establishment of
_ evolutionary unions under the leadership of
the Communist party.” Communist leaders

Who resisted this change, as in Britain, where

at

University of Toronto Archives:

e In 1929 a search party organized by the Lumber Workers Industrial Union of Canada removed the bodies

of Viljo Rosval and John Voutilainen from Onion Lake.

So the Sixth Convention adopted the fol-
lowing resolution:

“We accept entirely the line of the Commu-
nist International on our trade union work.
Our objective in this field must be the build-
ing of a Canadian (labour) centre, based on
industrial unions and linked up with the
world revolutionary trade union movement
by affiliation to the Red International of
Labour Unions.”*”

Thus the old C.P.C. labour organization, the
Canadian “Trade Union Educational League,”
initially led by Tim Buck and actually “District
4 of the American T.U.E.L.,” that guided left-
wing members of mainstream unions, was
changed in January of 1930 to the “Workers’
Unity League.”

That was the backdrop against which a
group of left-wing loggers began to meet in
October of 1928, in a Vancouver rooming
house. Myrtle Bergren, in her excellent book
“Tough Timber” lists Glen Lamont, Jack Gill-
banks, Jack Brown, Andy Hogarth, Frank
Stewart, E. Duban, and Arne Johnson. Many
were veterans of union activity dating back at
least as far as the O.B.U.. But the state of
B.C. forest industry organization was at the
time so bad that, according to Bergren, they
had to send “back east” (probably Northern
Ontario, or perhaps C.P.C. headquarters in
Toronto) for pamphlets, union cards, and so
on. Very little had happened on the west
coast, at least since 1926.

Thanks to left-wing ethnic organizations,
especially Finnish groups, northern Ontario
was very different. They suffered from all the
divisions that had cursed the west coast, but
with great determination and energy and in-
ventiveness, they survived and struggled on.
In Port Arthur, this meant building one Finn
union hall for Wobblies and one right next
door for Finnish followers of the Third Inter-
national.

Key members of the latter group (the
Finnish Organization of Canada) were A.T.
Hill, Alf Hautamaki, Kalle Salo, Edwin Suski.
With financial assistance and sometimes di-
rect help from Clarke, Glen Lamont, Jack Gill-
banks, and others from B.C., they toiled away
through those lean years. There were seven
major Northern Ontario strikes during the
1926 to 1929 period, involving up to 850 mem-
bers and 26,000 lost man days, in which the
Lumberworkers made major gains.

THE SHABAQUA STRIKE: THE DEATHS
OF ROSVALL AND VOUTILAINEN

One of those strikes, called by the
L.W.U.I.C. against the Pidgeon River Timber
company to protect the five dollar a cord rate
that they had won in the big 1926 strike, will
go down in our history as the cause of the
murder of two union organizers, Viljo Rosvall
and John Voutilainen. The union sent the two

organizers to Onion Lake on November 18,
1929, hoping to strike that camp and thus to
strengthen a strike that was jeopardized by
lack of support from the I.W.W. group.“

Rosvall, a “tough, resilient, impetuous man
who had earned his credentials in the Finnish
Civil War,” and Voutilainen, “quiet experi-
enced woodsman who had kept trap lines (at
Onion Lake) for several years,” never arrived
at their destination.“

When it was clear that something had hap-
pened, the union sent a delegation of “five
brave men” to the camp to inquire. The Onion
Lake camps were run by sub-contractor “Pap-
pi Maki,” a noted Finn Conservative. He said
that he had seen them on Nov. 19th, warned
them to stay away from his camps, and last
saw them crossing the ice toward his camps.

The strike was called off essentially lost,
but the union kept a constant patrol of the
area were the men were last seen throughout
the winter. On April 19, 1930, as the ice and
snow began to melt, the body of John Vouti-
lainen was found. Four days later, Rosvall’s
body was found a short distance away. The in-
quest ruled that Voutilainen, an experienced
trapper walking on a deeply frozen lake that
he knew “like the back of his hand,” was the
victim of “accidental drowning.” And later, af-
ter deliberating for eight minutes, that Rosvall
also drowned “accidentally.”

The union’s lawyer, J.L. Cohen revealed
startling inconsistencies, especially in the tes-
timony of Maki and others at the Onion Lake
camps, to no avail.

On April 28, 1930, a joint funeral was held.

“An estimated 500 people of different
nationalities marched in the procession
which wound its way through the city
street from the funeral parlour on
Arthur Street up the hill to the Riverdale
Cemetary. The procession was headed
by a Finnish Organization brass band,
augmented by players from the Finnish
I.W.A.... Silently the six pall bearers,
each one of them, two or three inches
over six feet, grabbed hold of the coffin
and began to march. The band ahead of
them played ‘The International.’ Every-
body, even the burghers (on the side-
walk) uncovered their heads, willingly
or unwillingly. After the coffin marched
18 stern looking men, waiting to provide
a last service for their comrades who
had died for a‘common cause. The two
sturdy woodsmem, walking in front of
the procession, carrying between them a
broad red sash with the union cards of
Rosvall and Voutilainen attached to it,
also made a strong impression.”

1.W.A. CANADA members celebrating in
this holiday season should drink a toast to

Continued on page nineteen

LUMBERWORKER/DECEMBER, 1995/17