~ vi
wits las,

May Day tradition deep

in B.C. labor struggles

By HAL GRIFFIN

The celebration of May Day isas much a part of British Columbia as Hastings

Street in Vancouver, Commercial Street in Nanaimo, Columbia Avenue in Rossland, | ’

along which three generations of workers have borne their banners.

Wooden buildings aiong
Hastings Street have given
place to towering steel and
stone structures since the first

“May Day parade was held in

the years before the First
World War. Cambie Street
Grounds, where men and wo-
men now grown old in the la-
bor movement once assembled

to start their march, is gone. |.

And the parade itself no long-
er winds through a changed
West End to Stanley Park but
traverses the spreading East
End. working class districts to
end at Exhibition Park.

The setting has changed, the
marchers come and go, the
banners express new demands,
but the tradition endures des-
pite every attempt to erase it,
its purpose ever brighter with
the advance of socialism
throughout the world.

Only a few years after the
Second International, in 1999,
formally proclaimed May 1 as
international workers’ day and
the ‘first ceiebrations in many
countries the following year,
May Day meetings were being
held in Vancouver and Nan-
‘aimo.

Vancouver itself had a pop-
ulation of no more than 25,-
000 in 1900 when the Trades
and Labor Council decided to
mark May 1 as ‘‘international
labor day” with a mass meet-
ing.

But it was in the hard rock
mines of the Kootenays and
the coal mines of Vancouver
Island that the tradition took
strongest root in those early
years. From 1906 onward hun-
dreds of miners streamed in
from the camps every May
Day to take part in the parad-

es at Rossland. And in Nanai-
mo, Ladysmith and Cumber-
land, coal miners’ combined
the ceremony of crowning the
May Queen, derived from an-
tiquity, with labor demonstra-
tions in which the first social-
ists outlined the perspective
of a world without exploita-
tion and war.

Well might an unnamed
writer for the Western Clarion
declare in the issue of April
29, 1911:

“Modern May Day celebra-
tions are not to the liking of
the powers that be. Their ex-
clusive class. character, the
monster gatherings, the time
of the year when the months
of idleness for so many have
scarcely ceased, the sentiment
of the speeches, make a com-
bination which is little to the
liking of those whose only
hope lies in the division and
ignorance of their slaves.”

It_was not indeed tothe lik-
ing of the powers that be when
5,000-6,000 miners and their
families, after nearly two
years of the bitterest strike
this province has known, par-
aded their solidarity before
the bayonets of the militia at
Nanaimo in 1914. Nor did they
cherish, as the miners did, the
continuing tradition that led
Cumberland City Council in
the thirties to declare May
Day a civic holiday.

The banners carried in May
Day parades over more than
half a century réflect the ad-
vances labor has made and the
struggles labor has waged to
gain ground that must ever be
resolutely defended.

Those first meéétings and

~

Striking aircraft workers marching in the
‘May Day Parade in Vancouver in 1945.
BD ig a o

parades called for the eight-
hour day, compensation, the
right to organize.

A quarter of a century later,
with the eight-hour day and
compensation written into law
the right to organize, the right
fo a job, were the demands of
thé Hungry Thirties.

In 1935, 15,000 people
marched in the Vancouver
May Day parade, among them
thousands of young unemploy-
ed and some 3,000 university
and school students.. Vancou-
ver Technical School was clos-
ed for the day — its students
were marching in the parade.
—and the waterfront was sil-
ent, for the waterfront unions
had declared a one day strike
to support the parade’s de-
mand for “Work and Wages.”

In 1938, when Spanish dem-
ocracy was fighting for. its life
and the fate of world peace
hung in the balance, 12,000
marched and 20,000 gathered
at Lumberman’s Arch in Stan-
ley Park. to hear Ogier Prete-
ceille of the Spanish General
Union of Workers utter these
propetic words: ‘I contend
that democracy is not commit-
ting suicide — it is being mur-
dered.”

The following year when
the parade, headed by veter-
ans of the Mackenzie-Papin-
eau Battalion, marched under
the slogan “Stop Hitler and
Save Peace.” the betrayal of
democracy was already evi-
dent.

So, through the years of
war and years of uneasy peace
the May Day tradition has
been enriched by struggle.
Many of those who, as workers
in the aircraft and shipbuild-
ing industries, marched in
1943 with the pledge “Every-
thing for the Offensive’ and
the demand :“Open the Second

Front,” in the fifties were
carrying the demands “Ban
the H-Bomb” and “Peace,

Trade and friendship with All
Countries” that remain among
the central issues of the day.

From time immemorial man-

'|Kind has celebrated May Day
_|to mark the return of spring,

the growth of new life. What

‘|is more fitting than that the

organized working people, the
bearers of a new spring for
the world, should march on
this day to demonstrate again-
st the bearers of death for the
world, to secure the finest as-
pirations aof mankind itself?

Scenes showing last year’s May Day parade.

May Day Greetings
to all
Pacific Tribune Readers

May Day Greetings
from
Pender Luggage — 541 West Pender St.
MU 2-1017

i |
Best Prices on Gladstone and Flyte Bags,
Suitcases & Trunks

May Day Greetings
to All Workers

from

THE REGENT HOTEL
160 EAST HASTINGS

® The Workingman’s Meeting Place
® A Home Away from Home

April 29, 1960—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 2