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This Modern and Civilised Slavery: Communist Organizing in the Camps

Spring on the slopes that ripple and gleam in the sun, And birds that voice the surprise of the new-born flowers Beholding the wonder of skies and the pure white silence of clouds, And below, in the harbor, a lean greyhound of the sea — A battleship, bristling with murderous guns! Who is the enemy? Why this menace of war and of death? And Canada answered, her words embittered and shamed: ‘My sons have dared, on the soil that brought them to birth, To ask for the freedom to work and to earn, by their toil, Bread for their children and wives. And this is the crime That has called the lean war-dog to crouch at my door.’

- A. M. Stephen, “Starve Quietly, My Sons!” 1 May 1932

According to a joint report drafted by four police constables who attended the 27 September 1931 meeting at the Avenue Theatre on Main Street, the opening speaker was “a foreigner, name unknown, 5’7”, dark, thickset.” This was probably J. Brodsky, an organizer for the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Labour Defence League, who began the gathering of the National Unemployed Workers’ Association (NUWA) with a call for a “united militaristic front to convict camps” and encouraged everyone to attend the meeting with Colonel Cooper at the Relief Department scheduled for the following morning. Tom Ewen spoke next — for sixty-five minutes, according to the wearied constables — and condemned the relief camps as well as the deportation policies of the Bennett government. Ewen proposed, and those in attendance eagerly passed, motions condemning sections 41 and 42 of the Immigration Act and section 98 of the Criminal Code. Next to speak was Jack Cunningham, just out of Oakalla Penitentiary after serving six months for sedition; he would be back in prison within a week, arrested on charges of inciting to riot. Finally, Mrs. Tom Bradley spoke, a “firebrand type,” according to the constables; she called for the movement to “organize women and children and get them out into the streets and fight.” The meeting ended with the singing of “The Red Flag.” At 8:30 the next morning, approximately six hundred collected on the street outside the Relief Department office at the corner of Cambie and Pender Streets. The group elected three men — Brodsky, Vandritin, and Andrews — to present their demands to Colonel Cooper. The creation of the camps they argued, expressed “the obvious intention of the authorities to compel us by a threat of starvation to accept work under such slavish terms.” The delegation issued a twelve-point platform that would “appl[y] to all workers, irrespective of race, creed or color; and to all unable to earn a living.” As they had in the past, these representatives of radical reconstruction demanded an “equal amount of relief” for all single workers, whether resident or transient. The first demand of the NUWA delegation, the reinstatement of all declared ineligible for aid because they refused to enter a relief camp, had become a fundamental precondition to any political discussion of the future. In order to truly consent to any government relief program, workers had to be assured of viable alternatives. The ninth demand articulated this with great firmness: “The action of workers entering those camps shall be considered as entirely voluntary, and no discrimination shall be exercised against those who refuse to go.”

In fact, many protesters seem not to have opposed the idea of work camps in principle. In late August, a nu wa gathering went on record in opposition to the jobless being sent to camps “unless on the basis of agreement between the Government and the organized workers, employed and unemployed.” And the NUWA continued to espouse this position after the camps opened, objecting to the substandard wages offered for work and not the camps themselves. In the initial stage of construction, wage rates were determined by marital status: married men received $2.80 per day and single men $2.00; eighty cents per day was deducted for board. Opposed to these rates, the six hundred protesters offered instead to sign on for work relief under the right conditions: “No worker will go out to camp unless on the basis of a specified agreement between the workers and the Government, said agreement to be on the basis of a standard scale of hours and wages, namely, five days to constitute a working week, four dollars to be a day’s pay at seven hours per day.”

The NUWA delegation also rejected the possibilities of military or semi-military rule, foreshadowing what was to come, and demanded that the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, and organization be “recognised in all camps.” In addition, delegates called for bedding to be provided free, for other basic supplies to be provided at cost, and for “constant, competent, and sufficient medical supervision.” Finally, the delegation demanded that access to this program be guaranteed “to all workers, irrespective of race, creed or color; and to all unable to earn a living.” Such a program took the core elements developed in the winter of 1929–30 and added demands specific to the realities of late summer 1931. The NUWA combined attention to the economic dimension — the demonstrable fact of exploitation — with a detailed exploration of the coercive aspect of political rule — the fact of oppression. Cooper responded to the delegation’s program by claiming that the Relief Department was “simply that of Agent of the Provincial Government” and that W. A. McKenzie, chair of the provincial Committee of the Executive Council on Unemployment Relief, the ultimate regulatory body, had instructed the Relief Department to discontinue relief to those “who refuse to go to camp.” Taken narrowly, this statement had an element of truth, but the unspoken reality was that Vancouver’s government freely chose to deny relief to these men. True, McKenzie declared that the province would not fund relief for those who refused the order for camp. But no provincial policy obligated the Relief Department to do the same until January 1932, when, after persistent lobbying by civic politicians, the Province ruled that those who did not “avail themselves of the opportunity of going to camp” were to be declared ineligible for relief in the municipalities. In September 1931, cities still had the power, albeit one bounded by financial exigencies, to provide relief to transients. The relief officer also positioned himself as the one who determined the value of unemployed lives in another sense. The question posed by the unemployed delegation, he explained, “narrows down solely to a change in the locality where relief is provided”: “It is obviously an improvement for [the] unemployed to received three meals a day under conditions such as exist at the Allco camp, rather than to remain in the City on the present basis.” We might note, however, that jobless men might have viewed the camps in varying ways as entailing more than just a change in “locality”: some may have preferred the camps because they would be able to work for their relief at higher rates than that allotted them with bed and meal tickets, while others may have objected to what they viewed as forced labour. No doubt more reasons on both sides were assessed. Nonetheless, the choice was not theirs to make, nor was the issue theirs to name. Two days after meeting with Cooper, a massive crowd of between two and three thousand assembled on East Hastings Street, again at the invitation of NUWA organizers. Demonstrators were dispersed by police, only to re-form at the Powell Street parade ground. After a few speeches, the meeting ended of its own accord. The headline of the 3 October 1931 edition of the Unemployed Worker read “WAGES — NIL!” Beneath it was a cartoon depicting workers being trucked to the camp in Allco, while policemen lined the streets to ensure their orderly progress. The article accompanying this picture addressed the question of coercion, referencing the “protection” provided by the police as well as the broader context of economic deprivation and human need. Cast off by the Relief Department and thrown out of the missions and refuges, many saw no option but to resort to this “particular form of slavery.” This view of the coercive intent behind the relief camps only intensified when three miners were shot dead in Estevan, Saskatchewan, on 29 September, one day after the protest at the Relief Office. The stark headline in the Unemployed Worker declared, “WORKERS SHOT TO MAINTAIN PROFITS.” Originally offered as part of the Loggers’ Association’s plan, Allco was a “feeder” or distribution camp where workers were initially taken before being dispersed to other locations. Beginning in September, more than ten thousand men found themselves herded into trucks and deposited at Allco for processing and a physical assessment. Once declared fit, they were sent to camps based on the demand for labour on each project. Allco also functioned as a depot for unemployed men considered to be “in an emaciated condition,” who were maintained there until fit for manual work. One of the initial unfortunates sent to Allco described it as an “old deserted logging camp entirely in the wilderness.” This feeling of isolation was a standard trope in writing from the camps that was published in the Unemployed Worker, as were complaints about basic living conditions: one writer reported that “the toilets and washrooms are not fit even for the use of pigs,” adding, “This place with its dirt and scrap piles which breed thousands of flies to torture us has an outlook of a great city dumping ground, with our camp upon it, like the former Vancouver harbor jungle.” While urging workers to organize, he also advised others to avoid the camps altogether if possible because residents were subject to the “ruthless mercy of the boss.” He concluded:

“Let our slogan for the coming winter be: A general strike of the workers in relief camps all over BC followed by a hunger march into the nearest town.”

Owned by the Abernethy Lougheed Logging Company Ltd., Allco had been rented for $625.00 per month. An eighty-eight-building structure, the camp housed 350 men, with bunkhouses, wash-houses, a laundry house, and a dining hall. Most lived in bunkhouses with eight beds. The company provided beds, sheets, and stoves; arranged for a supply of water; and covered insurance costs. One bureaucrat argued that the lease arrangement was “in the interests of the Tax payers”: to build a camp of this size would, according to estimates, cost more than $13,000. In addition, Allco was “practically isolated,” which was ideal for “housing this class of men.” Defending his government against conflict-of-interest charges involving Nels Lougheed, Tolmie argued that Allco could immediately house the bulk of transient men in “the most economical way.” According to Tolmie, one of the key reasons for the high cost of camp construction was the NUWA’s campaign against what they called “slave camps.” In June 1931, Tolmie pleaded his case to H. H. Stevens. “Things are becoming very acute,” he cautioned, “and we do not desire to give these men a chance to riot and have to call out the militia, but would prefer to give them reasonable relief work where they can be comfortable, reasonably well fed and give them some cash.” The premier also conveyed to the prime minister his grave concern about the rising tide of radicalism. In a February 1932 letter to Conservative members of Parliament and other notables, Tolmie stressed the importance of context in understanding his government’s actions during the summer of 1931. Municipalities had faced a “grave situation” and insisted that the province intervene. In Vancouver, parades and meetings of the unemployed served as proof of “a distinctly communistic spirit.” Chief Constable W. J. Bingham had feared “wholesale damage to property,” but City Council had balked at the expense of building its own camp. Minister of Labour Gideon Robertson had concurred with the assessment offered by western politicians and supported the program to remove the transient unemployed from the cities. “Possibly there was a little too much speed shown” in the construction of the camps, Tolmie allowed in a letter to Bennett, “but this is hardly surprising in view of the urgency of the situation.” Repeatedly, he stressed that radical propaganda set limits on his government:

No doubt we could have built cheaper camps but they would not have complied with the Health regulations of the Province. Remember that the unemployed, especially the Communists, were using the expression “prison camps.” They were enlisting public sympathy when they stated the Government was preparing camps not fit to live in.

During Philip’s testimony before the Select Committee, Liberal A. M. Manson suggested that money could have been saved by erecting temporary camps. Philip disagreed, arguing that the “propaganda” of the National Unemployed Workers’ Association about the “slave camps” required the province to build permanent camps, since such structures were required under the Health Act. “These men were very critical as to the accommodations we were going to provide,” Philip maintained. The camps already in existence were simply “not sufficient to carry out a siege of unemployment such as we have had.” This was one of the consequences of the gold standard crisis: governments took on an increasing debt burden in order to spend money on projects intended as an antidote to radicalism. At year’s end, Tolmie cabled Leon Ladner, a longtime Tory MP (defeated by Angus MacInnis in 1930) and his primary conduit to Bennett: “Banks will not advance a dollar for unemployment relief. Won’t even carry direct relief. Vancouver demanding three or four thousands men be removed to camps at once. Impossible to do this unless finances forthcoming. Desire avoid any possibility riots which beginning to threaten.” The desire of provincial politicians to suppress radicalism, then, both necessitated and legitimated the expense of the camp system.

But if Communist organizing indirectly led to the adoption of a minimum standard for camp conditions, as implied by Tolmie and others, it could not close the camps themselves. For six months following the destruction of the jungles in early September 1931, Communists called for all recipients of relief to reject the camps and instead to maintain the unity of unemployed workers in the cities. One undercover constable suggested that, on occasion, some Communists characterized those who went to camp as scabs. In general, NUWA organizers emphasized the fight “for immediate emergency relief in town, and for wee[k]ly cash relief administered by the unemployed themselves that will enable them to live in comfort and decency whether employed or unemployed.”

“DEMAND RELIEF IN TOWN! DEMAND CASH RELIEF! FIGHT FOR NON-CONTRIBUTORY UNEMPLOYMENT INSUR ANCE!” one headline in the Unemployed Worker exclaimed. Consistent with the Communist platform of two years earlier, this appeal stressed workers’ entitlement to a standard of living that, in economic and cultural terms, greatly differed from that provided for by public and private charity. Workers could only control their standard of living through collective action, which would enable them to administer relief based on their own notions of “comfort and decency.” Finally, the struggle against impoverishment could best be organized by rejecting the camp system and its separation of unemployed workers in the camps from their brethren in the cities. As late as February 1932, Communists maintained that the situation demanded that “unemployed workers should not only refuse to go to the camp. They should stay in mass [at] the Relief Office, and refuse to be cut off.”

While Communist propaganda on the camps was rarely mentioned in the jungles, it is clear that Communists’ demands would have also benefited those who sought to live temporarily outside of liberal-capitalist social relations. As already discussed, access to cash relief in itself enabled mass participation in jungle-building because of the well-nigh universal recognition of money as the medium through which the value of goods could be abstracted and made equal (or identical) and thus exchangeable. Cash could purchase the would-be transient a measure of autonomy and freedom in comparison to those fed and housed with tickets or through their own exploited labour in the camps because it allowed them direct access to the capitalist marketplace. Yet cash could also purchase autonomy from this market: the voluntary collective management of resources manifested in the groups that inhabited the jungles offered the option of almost complete withdrawal to those willing to live in this manner.

Groups ranging across the political spectrum joined Communists in their criticism of the relief camp scheme. The Independent Labour Party passed a motion opposing “prison camps for unemployed workers” at a mass meeting that June. The members of Vancouver Branch No. 19 of the Canadian Legion lamented the fact that one of their brethren, who had lived in the city for thirteen years and was “well known and highly respected,” had been ordered to camp. The most dedicated opponents of relief camps were, not surprisingly, those who were sent to them. On 13 January 1932, fifty spots for single men opened up in the camps; Cooper later admitted that “of the 161 questioned, only nine accepted, and two of this number changed their mind.” In the first two weeks of March 1932, 323 men were “warned” but only 157 were reported.

One of the ironies of the camp system lay in the composition of its population. When the Department of Public Works ceased work-based operations in November 1931, they also began removing those considered residents from the camps and returning them to the municipality from whence they came. As a consequence, while many transients sought to avoid being sent to camp, many residents criticized the fact that labour camps were now reserved for itinerants. Public Works Minister R. W. Bruhn warned Premier Tolmie that “to discharge [residents] in favour of transients and others would be political suicide, as well as unfair.” W.S. Simpson of Sweetwater conveyed to Tolmie his “indignation” over the government’s relief policies: “Alien single men getting relief, British single men refused.” This type of favouritism toward transients amounted to little more than “a crying shame” in Simpson’s mind: “Conditions in Russia compared to conditions here, in favour of Russia.”

That transients protested in large numbers served only to heighten conflicts over entitlement to relief. Repeatedly, the same complaint was made: residents were denied places in the camps so that transients, including those involved in revolutionary plots against the government, could be housed in comfort. Initially, the battle for cash relief in the cities as an alternative to the camp system was strongest, not surprisingly, in the cities, directed by unemployed workers who had not yet been sent to the camps. While camp activists did raise the larger questions surrounding unemployment in the pages of the Communist press, most of the initial organizing work focused on improving living conditions.

In October 1931, food costs averaged 60.5 cents per man per day for 140 camps, an extremely small amount compared with the Loggers’ Association’s estimate of $1.50 per day. Overhead costs for the same period came to 26.6 cents per man per day. Since every “inmate” saw 85 cents deducted daily from his pay, the province lost 2.1 cents per man per day on the basic costs of labour reproduction. After work was halted in November, however, the province dramatically reduced its costs to 29.5 cents for food and 11.5 cents for overhead per man per day.

Along with reductions to the per unit cost, the Department of Public Works looked to increase its revenue. One resident of a camp near Squamish pointed out the high cost of goods in the government store: a blanket that cost $2.00 in town was priced at $5.25 and a $5.00 rain slicker cost $8.00. Blankets cost $10.00 at the camp in the Boston Bar region. One man who had resided for thirty-two days in a camp near Jones Hill complained of having “often done hardest manual labor in mud and rain, with insufficient clothing.” He added, “As wages for those 32 days being out I got a pair of rubbers, a thin blanket, a pair of socks, and two pieces of soap, for which I still owe $3.45 to the camp bosses.” His message was simple, if graphic: “If it keeps going on like that we will spend here a very ‘soft’ winter, after which we will be entirely nude.”

The Unemployed Association of Prince Rupert launched a protest against the deduction of 85 cents per day for board, and prepared a petition to “run their own cookhouse from beginning to end.” The group, most of whose members resided in the Cloyah Bay relief camp, continued to protest the quality of the food, even after changes to the menu: “It is believed that the penitentiary ration would compare favourably.”

In December 1931, workers in a camp on the outskirts of Kamloops formed a council and won improvements in the form of mattresses and tobacco. A worker in the Jones Creek camp enthused, “We now have a camp committee, and are bettering things as we go.” In the Rock Bay camp, a Communist reported that attempts to organize were proceeding slowly because his brethren were “an indifferent lot.” Workers in “Prison Camp” No. 4 at Hope initially had difficulty persuading the foreman to secure more and better food, prompting “some of the boys [to] get disgusted and throw a few dishes around the dining room.” Within a couple of weeks, an organization had been formed. “The work has been done quietly and efficiently,” one activist noted, “so that none of the delegates have been discriminated against.” The local committee strategized that it would form the backbone of the NUWA’s drive against sweated wages. Democratic to the core, at least in theory, the committee was described by one member as “a Camp Committee, elected by the workers in camp, and responsible to them, whose function it is to mobilise the discontent and give it direction.”

Despite the establishment of rudimentary organizations, early struggles for better living conditions appear to have been disjointed and scattered, the result of the standard department practice of transferring radicals and troublemakers. This was particularly evident in Allco, where protests over basic amenities often led to those identified as “agitators” being shipped to a remote location in the dead of winter. After one particularly bitter strike, an inmate wrote to the Unemployed Worker suggesting that this tactic on the part of camp supervisors would come back to haunt them:

“The authorities succeeded temporarily in breaking the workers up and transferring them to other camps. The struggle has been transferred also.”

While there was some truth to this assessment, relocation meant that workers had to rebuild their committees, a time-consuming process that had to be done covertly for fear of discrimination.

To this point, radicals still saw the struggle against relief camps as best fought outside the camps themselves. In late December 1931, Communist organizations such as the National Unemployed Workers’ Association, the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League, the Workers’ Unity League, and the Women’s Labour League began planning for a Hunger March to Victoria involving workers from across the province to be held on 4 February 1932. Explained one Unemployed Worker reporter:

“The attitude of the workers in the Prison Camps, who are now becoming openly rebellious, should act as a warning to the authorities. The more economising and suppressive they become, the greater will be the reaction of the workers.”

The march was rescheduled for 22 February because the legislature would not be in session on the original date. This move was an incredible stroke of luck for organizers, as it was revealed in early February that the Province planned changes to its policies. R. W. Bruhn announced that camp residents would now have to work 120 hours every month in order to receive their “allowance,” which was to be reduced to $7.50 per month. In an attempt to quell outrage at the drastic reduction in the value accorded to work on relief projects, Bruhn framed the decision in terms of state paternalism rather than the logic of capital and labour. “It should be clearly understood that we are not paying wages in our road camps,” Bruhn stated. “We are only giving relief to destitute men.” Pat Philip explained the system to a bureaucrat with the federal Department of Labour: the province supplied jobless men in the camps with room, board, and $7.50 per month, and “in return for the foregoing the recipient is expected to perform a ‘work test.’” While Bruhn represented the $7.50 as “an allowance for luxuries,” this pittance was insufficient to allow the destitute to purchase clothing, blankets, and other necessities, now considered by the provincial government “luxuries” and thus a matter of choice for the jobless. One irate worker in the McBride camp noted the irony: “Signs everywhere advocated cleanliness, but no soap was provided.” The seventy inmates at McBride organized a committee to raise the question of soap and other amenities. After two weeks, they had won free soap and blankets, and improvements to the amount and quality of food.

The significant shift in policy to the exchange of 120 hours of work per month for $7.50 per week prompted men in camps to organize more than ever before against the deterioration of relief. Within several days of notification, three hundred relief workers at Allco elected a committee of eight to present their rejection of the new system and launched a two-day strike, refusing to commence road work. As provincial police travelled from camp to camp, at times choosing to evict those who refused to work, some strikers opted to leave of their own accord and seek food and shelter elsewhere. The Unemployed Worker reported, “Prison camps have been deserted by the workers . . . in order to expose their hostility to the camp system, and their determination to secure adequate cash relief.”

Approximately one hundred relief workers building the Hope-Princeton highway left camp and proceeded to Princeton, where they managed to secure direct relief from the municipality. Of “this army of homeless, penniless men,” sixty hopped a freight train to Vancouver, according to the Nelson News, while forty remained on “the streets of Princeton, uncertain of their plans.” According to a correspondent with the Vancouver Province, the “orderly” nature of the protest could not conceal the threat that lay beneath the surface:

“The men have been entirely orderly and there has been no disturbance. Strong sentiments, however, approaching Communism have been voiced. The Red element appears to be strong. A good majority of the men are transients and a considerable proportion foreigners.”

This description brands radicalism as a “foreign” doctrine, one not related to conditions in the camps but emanating from abroad.

That the announcement of the reduction in relief came in the middle of winter, dramatizing the need for suitable clothes and thus the inadequacy of the $7.50 “allowance,” helped to extend the strike campaign widely across the camp system. Early one morning at “Relief Camp Canoe,” one worker reported, “The big boss put his head into the bunk-house door and hollered, ‘all right.’ Not a man turned out.” According to the worker, the foreman could not comprehend why “we wouldn’t go out in two feet of snow with a pick and shovel pounding away in frozen ground at the rate of $7.50 — with soup and two meals a day.” Refusing to work for less than the old rate for single transients of $2.00 per day, the strikers decided to send five delegates on the road to the other “prison camps” at Sorrento and Tappen, both on Shuswap Lake. One radical in Camp No. 4 at Hope, where workers had been on strike against the rate of $7.50 per month for several weeks, lamented the fact that the official in charge had ordered that “no supplies are to be given from the store.” He also mused that workers expected the camp “to be shut down, and all the radicals fired from Camps 7 and 9.” These collective walkouts signalled the beginnings of the great migration of more than one thousand inmates to Vancouver. In less than six months after the inception of the camps, Communists had brought about a mass movement that brought together thousands of camp residents and jobless itinerants in the cities to fight under the same banner. - Todd McCallum, Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival images of a new world in 1930s Vancouver. Edmonton: Athabaska Univesity Press, 2014. pp. 223-232.

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