The Agrarian Struggle Rural Communism in Alberta and Saskatchewan 1926-1935 DavidMONOD During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Prairie Communists made their most conspicuous attempt to convert the Western farmers to revolutionary socialism. Their objective was to channel the growing conflict between the non-competitive small farmers and the emerging industrial producers along class-conscious lines. Restricted, however, by the demands of the International and by the Toronto-based executive of the Party, the Prairie Communists failed to develop either a programme or a local leadership which might win the support of smal/farmers.lnfailing to gain ideological and organizational legitimacy, rural communism condemned itself to remain a tool of the militant conservatism of the marginal producers. a C' est Ia fin des annees 1920 et au debut de Ia decennie suivante que les communistes des Prairies ont tente le p/usfortement de convaincre /esfermiers de /'Ouest et de les rallier au socialisme revolutionnaire. Leur but etait de ramener aI a question de Ia lutte des classes /e conjlit grandissant entre les petits fermiers et les pro ducteurs industriels, coriflit engendre porIa misere des unset/' emergence des autres. Neanmoins, retenus par a /' lnternationa/e et par Ia direction du parti situee Toronto, les communistes des Prairies ne purent ni lancer un programme politique ni mettre sur pied une direction regionale qui auraient pu leur valoir /' appui des petits fermiers. En manquant des' implanter, tant sur le plan ideologique qu' organisationnel, le communisme rural a s' est ainsi condamne ne rester qu' un instrument du conservatisme militant des producteurs marginaux. In the first volume of Capital, Marx wrote that "in the sphere of agriculture, modem industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere ... it eliminates the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him with the wage labourer ... The irrational, old fashioned methods of agriculture are replaced with scientific ones. Capitalism completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture". In Canada, this capitalization process was as disruptive of agriculture as in Europe. Though there was no North American peasant class, the impact of mechanization and rural depopulation on a people nurtured on the free land myth was revolutionary. Just as industrialization in an wban setting created deep social tensions and conflicts between classes and within classes, so too did it transform perceptions and relationships in the agrarian context. The chief man ifestation of this dynamic was the real and relative decline in the size of the farm population, coupled with a radical increase in the dimensions and outputs of the remaining production units. The psychological result of this process was rural dissent. Admittedly, agricultural and wban capitalism were differentiated by the fact that, unlike the worker, the farmer was both owner and labourer, capitalist and proletarian. To this extent, the industrialization of agriculture was a self-directed process; the farmer chose to mechanize and accepted the costs of that decision. But not all agriculturalists in Western Canada enjoyed the same David Monod is a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Histoire sociale-Social History, Vol. XVIIJ, N" 35 (mai-May 1985): 000-000. 100 HISTOIRE SOCIALE-SOCIAL HISTORY opportunities. For most producers, mechanization was impossible, either because their land was unsuitable, or costs were too high. Some simply did not recognize the need for change. Eventually, those who failed to adapt to the industrial mode of production lost their holdings. Between 1930 and 1960, over half of the farmers on the Prairies gave up farming and left the land. Historians generally have not concerned themselves with the rural economy or its influence upon farm protest. Though there have been many studies of Western agrarian dissent, there have been few attempts to link the farmer's political vision with his changing socio-economic position. Students of Canadian communism have been among the most urban and elitist in their disposition. Ivan Avakumovic's investigations of the Communist Party's associations with the Prairie farmers reflect this bias. Unable to admit that a "propertied class" could be drawn to communism, Avakumovic underestimates the extent of Party support and dryly dismisses the Farmers' Unity League as a minor sectarian or ganization directed from Moscow. Studies of the radical left have tended to perceive mass protest from an elitist perspective. Norman Penner, for example, describes the Communist Party as a "rigid military-like apparatus", successfully "controlling all the activities of its members, subordinating them to the higher committees ... making no allowances for adaptability to different ... traditions and cultures.'' While this is a reasonably accurate depiction of what the Party wanted to be, it is dangerous to make assumptions about actions on the basis of the policy-statements of the leadership. As Theodore Draper once put it, though "the party demanded complete, unconditional adherence to its full program from its members, relatively few gave it that total commitment in theory, and fewer still in practice." Just as it now seems vital for agricultural historians to return to the farm, so too is it important for students of Canadian radicalism to focus in on the radicals. There is far more to the story of rural dissent than marketing structures, crop prices and foreign agitators. Revolutionary socialism has enjoyed a varied existence among the farmers of Western Canada. It emerged from a confluence of two distinct streams: one comprised of Saskatoon-based free lance radicals, and another made up of purely local talent. The latter was concentrated in the Sturgis area of Saskatchewan, where a farm worker named Shannon introduced his employer, Fred Ganong, to socialism in the pre-war period. Ganong had taken immediately to Marxism and, along with his brother Ottie and some of their neigh bours, had organized a socialist debating club. When Louis McNamee brought the militant Farmers' Union of Canada (FUC) to Sturgis in the summer of 1923, the tiny group of home grown revolutionaries took charge of the local, and for the next three years they formed the backbone of the farm movement in the area. 1 In Alberta, the spread of communism was largely the work of Carl Axelson, a former wobbly from the U.S. who had settled on a small farm near Bingville. A handsome though unstable agitator, Axelson had used a dramatic endorsement of the contract wheat pool as a pitch for his first appearance at the 1923 Convention of the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA). 2 Within the year he had been I. Walter WIGGINS, "Pioneers" (unpublished MS, copy in author's possession). Mr. Wiggins' daughter, Ms. Cathy Fischer, hopes to have this valuable manuscript published. Thanks are due to Ms. Fischer for allowing access to the memoir. 2. Ivan A v AKUMOVIC, ''The Prairie Farmer and the Communist Party of Canada: The Interwar Years'', Western Perspectives, Vol. I, ed. D.J. BERCUSON (Toronto: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1974), p. 81. RETHINKING PRAIRIE COMMUNISM 101 joined by John Glambeck, a Dane who had come to socialism via the Postal Clerks' Union in Chicago, and together they set about advertising agrarian socialism through the medium of a Progressive Farmers' Educational League (PFEL)-3 Originally, neither the Sturgis group nor the PFEL had any direct contact with the Communist Party (CPC); their phi losophy was one of praxis, differing from that of the mass of farmers only in the tone of their propaganda and the aggressiveness of their tactics. 4 The Saskatoon-based socialists were a more diverse and cosmopolitan collection. Some, like H.M. Bartholomew and Ben Lloyd, were professional radicals who had been prominent in the Socialist Party of Canada. 5 Others, such as George Stirling, traced their Marxist roots to the Non-Partisan League. A final group, which organized itself into the "Economic and Educative Committee of the FUC", under the leadership of Ernie Bolton and J. W. Robson, was comprised of proto-social creditors who believed that communism could be achieved by nationalizing banking and credit. 6 Like their Sturgis-based com patriots, these Saskatoon radicals found their way into the Farmers' Union, quickly emerging as a powerful force within the movement. The Farmers' Union of Canada was an organization divided. Originally a movement of militant debt-ridden farmers, the Union began to change after its unsuccessful campaigns on behalf of a contract wheat pool in 1923 and 1924. In those years, a new group of farmers, drawn largely out of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association, entered the organi zation. These farmers were financially more secure than were the Union's original members, and consequently, less interested in a radical response to the debt problem. "Two schools of thought" thus began to develop, one favouring the continuation of militant struggle against the banks and mortgage companies, the other opting for a moderate response which emphasized debt adjustment rather than debt amortization. As entry of new members into the FUC meant expansion, to many in the Farmers' Union, the solution to the escalating conflict between these two views was not difficult to find. If the FUC were going to become powerful it had to become a "solid one hundred percent organization," which could appeal to all elements in the farm population. 7 This required disproving the common belief that the "mentality behind the Farmers' Union of Canada was Communistic and promised nothing but evil. "8 In mid-1924 Lou McNamee, the loud and autocratic president of the FUC, turned on the radicals and announced that socialism was just "damn fool work. "9 In August, McNamee forbade Hugh Bartholomew to speak at FUC lodges, and by year's end he had expelled both him and the leading socialist on the Union's executive, N.H. Schwarz, from the organization. A. C. Weaver, the editor of the Union's newsletter si- 3. UFA, 15 October 1924; The Worker 20 November 1926. 4. 111e CPC appean; to have been unaware of the existence of the Sturgis group, reporting its activities for the first time in The Worker in July 1925. As for the PFEL, one recent study presents convincing evidence that the Party had little to do with the League's formation and often actually restrained it. SeeM. Ann CAPLING, "The Communist Party of Canada in Alberta, 1922-1929" (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, 1983), p. 94. 5. Examples of the writings of both Lloyd and Bartholomew may be found in the Western Clarion from the early twenties. 6. For more on Stirling, see The Western Labor News, 18 June 1920. Also, George F. STIRLING, "Mind Your Own Business'' (Saskatoon, 1926); for the Economic and Educative Committee, see its various pamphlets in the Saskatchewan Archives; A.E. BOLTON and N.S. BERGREN, "The Dawn of Freedom for Farm Slaves" (Saskatoon, n.d.), and J.W. ROBSON, "Our Monetary System" (Saskatoon, n.d.). 7. The Progressive, 31 July 1924; Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB), Farmers' Union of Canada (FUC) Papers, B2 V18, G.H. Williams to L.P. McNamee, 25 January 1924. 8. Regina Leader, 4July 1925; see also D.S. SPAFFORD, "The Left-Wing, 1921-1931 ",in Politics in Saskatchewan, eds. Norman WARD and D.S. SPAFFORD (Don Mills: Longmans, 1968), 47-48. 9. SAB, FUC Papers, B2 Vl5, L.P. McNamee toW. Thrasher, 8 February 1925. 102 HISTOIRE SOCIALE-SOCIAL HISTORY multaneously turned on the "Economic and Educative Committee" and announced that "it had no right to misrepresent the Union cause." 1be real problem, as both Weaver and McNamee realized, was that prosperous farmers were hostile to the socialist message. Since this was the very element which the leadership was trying to attract into the movement, Marxism was ''making impossible Union organization for the future.'' 10 In both the Regina Leader and The Winnipeg Free Press, McNamee denounced socialism and confidently predicted that the radical element in the movement would be ''smashed''. 11 Saskatchewan socialists met these developments with confusion. Disunified and isolated from each other, they were unable to challenge the attacks of the Union's leaders. Despite their professed skill at "boring from within", the radicals were incapable not only of resisting the conservative offensive, but also of preventing the 1925 merger of the FUC and the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association.121be socialists organized too slowly. In the summer of 1925, they formed a Farmers' Political Association to aetas a lobby group within the new United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan Section) [UFC (SS)]. The Po litical Association represented a broad fusion of social democrats, such as George Williams and Lewis Gabriel, Sturgis communists, like Walter Wiggins and George King, and the Saskatoon radicals, Bartholomew, Lloyd, Stirling and Schwarz. 13 The goal of the As sociation was similar to that of the PFEL in Alberta; it sought to unify all left-wing elements and to prevent the moderates from "directing the farmers into the hands of their class enemies ... merchants, lawyers, bankers and the like." 14 To implement this programme, the radicals moved to transform The Furrow, a broadsheet founded in February, 1926, as an organ for the nascent Saskatchewan hog pool, into a mouthpiece for agrarian dissent. 15 The Saskatchewan radicals' higher profile brought them to the attention of a Toronto based group determined to direct left-wing activity across the Dominion. For some time, the Communist Party of Canada had been under pressure from the Comintern to develop an agrarian programme that would conform to the agricultural line delineated by Lenin at the Second Congress of the International in August, 1920.16 The CPC's first agrarian programme had been adopted in 1923, but for several years the Party had done little more than propose unfulfillable resolutions.17 Finally, with the appearance of a unified left-wing under the auspices of the Political Association and the PFEL, the CPC roused itself from its slumbers and in the summer of 1925 moved to press radicalism into its prefabricated mold. The Party's policy was to manage local socialist activity and subordinate each in dividual group to the Toronto decision-making apparatus. To accomplish this task, the Party began assisting the Sturgis group and the PFEL. The leverage gained through this financial 10. SAB, N.H. Schwarz Papers, "Declaration"; The Worker, 2, 9 August and 13 November 1924; SAB, FUC Papers, B2 VIS, A.C. Weaver to L.P. McNamee, 3 October 1924. II. SAB, FUC Papers, B2 VIS, L.P. McNamee toW. Thrasher, 8, lS February 1924. 12. The SGGA and the FUC merged to form the United Farmers' of Canada (Saskatchewan Section). The Fu"ow, 18 April and 22 July 1927; Carl AxELsoN, "Educating the Farmer", in The Canadian Forum, IX (September 1929): 417. The only widely accessible work on the FUC is D.S. SPAFFORD's "The Origins of the Farmers' Union of Canada", in Saskatchewan History, XVill (Autumn 196S): 89-98. Unfortunately, Spafford bases his analysis almost entirely on the Union's constitution and reports of Union activities in The Progressive, neither of which provides information on the penny auction movement. 13. Western Producer, 2S June 192S. 14. The Furrow, 13 February 1926. lS. RCMP Records, Farmers' Unity League file, "The Furrow", p. 3. 16. Public Archives of Canada (PAC), Department of External Affairs Papers, Vol. 3130, file 89, "Letter from the E.C.C.I. to tit.: Workers' Party of Canada" (n.d.). 17. PAC, Communist Party of Canada (CPC) Papers, Convention Series, contains minutes of the annual conventions of the CPC. See the records of "The Third National Convention of theW .P.C. ", 18 April 1924. RETHINKING PRAIRIE COMMUNISM 103 and organizational support, enabled the CPC to press the Political Association into a merger with the Educational League. Unity alone was not sufficient, however, for the Party was anxious to direct agrarian radicalism along the lines dictated by the International. According to the Comintem' s ''Thesis on the Agrarian Question'', communist agitation was to identify the class struggle inherent in agricultural production. The object was to reveal the four fold division of small and middle peasantry, agricultural proletariat and Kulaks, and to promote the union of the poorer elements with the urban proletariat. This, it was stated, could only be achieved "by persuading the middle peasantry to maintain a neutral attitude and by gaining the support of a large part, if not the whole, of the small peasantry.·· 18 Un fortunately, the local radical elite rejected the Party's line on the agrarian struggle. Hugh Bartholomew, who as editor of The Furrow had become the de facto leader of the radical fringe, had already reached his own conclusions on the character of rural capitalism. Bartholomew attempted to base the left-wing's policies upon the conflict "between agrarian capital and industrial capital, rather than upon the class struggle on the farm.'' 19 A for midable theoretician and a loyal Communist Party member, Bartholomew nonetheless rejected the notion of a divided countryside and insisted that the ''overwhelming mass of farmers'' shared the interests of the proletariat because debt had alienated them from their land. In fact, ''they are completely divorced from the land they till though that divorcement is still concealed from their eyes by fictitious land titles ... they have actually been reduced to the level of landless peasants and are completely at the mercy of finance capital. "20 Obviously, if the CPC was going to establish its control over Western farm radicalism, the editorial policy of The Furrow had to be changed. To achieve the ideological cohesion it desired, the CPC secured a letter of resignation from Bartholomew and contracted J.M. Clarke to move from Vancouver, "much against his will", into the editorial office of The Furrow. 21 A shy, awkward young Scot who had earned his reputation for being a loyal Leninist while serving as secretary of the Lumber Workers' Industrial Union, John Magnus Clarke was seen to be the force that would pull the farmers into the Comintern's orbit.ZZ But he was to dissapoint the Party's hopes for Clarke was not only an unwilling resident of Saskatoon, but also too gifted a socialist thinker to become the docile instrument of the CPC' s policies. From the outset, Clarke strove to acquire a firsthand understanding of agricultural conditions irrespective of the Party line. 23 From his cramped office-apartment on the second floor of the Grainger Building in downtown Saskatoon, Clarke churned out a steady flow of polemic which developed with his research discoveries. He quickly realized that the Comintem's approach to the agrarian question was inapplicable to the Canadian context and he criticized Party ideologues who attempted to make the "facts fit into an existing theory. "24 In a series of "Draft Agrarian Programs" and in his editorials in The Furrow, Clarke moved to correct the inaccuracies in the Communist Party's policy. Thus he began a process that might have transformed ll!. A copy of the "Draft Thesis on the Agrarian Question" may be found in The Communist, X (De cember 1931): 1047-52; an abridged version was first printed in Canada in the Western Clarion, 16 May 1921. 19. PAC, CPC Papers, Convention Series, "Minutes of the Sixth National Convention of the Com munist Party of Canada, 1929", p. 16. 20. Public Archives of Ontario (PAO), CPC Records, Box 14, file I, H.M. Bartholomew, "The Agrarian Question in Canada" (n.d.). 21. RCMP Records, FUL file, The Furrow, p. 3. 22. Canadian Tribune, 14 June 1972. 23. In 1927, Clarke headed a "Research Board" of the PFEL "for the purpose of gathering and filing all available statistics relative to agriculture.'' Through this agency, he developed his understanding of the prairie economy. TheFurrow,22July 1927. 24. The Worker, 13 April 1929. 104 HISTOIRE SOCIALE-SOCIAL HISTORY the communist movement into the leading agent of agrarian dissent. His contribution was two-fold, for in creating an attractive programme of struggle for the impoverished fanners, he also developed what remains among the most insightful and original analyses of the process of capitalist development in Canadian agriculture. II According to Clarke, the problem with the Comintern's approach to the agrarian question was that it based the mobilization of the rural poor on two fundamental miscon ceptions: the direct class exploitation of small by large fanners and the harmony of interest between the debt-ridden producers and the agricultural proletariat. 25 Clarke asserted that an optimistic concentration upon mobilizing farm workers ignored the overwhelming difficulties involved in their organization. Farm labour in Canada was migratory and sea sonal in character; generally it worked the woods of B.C. and northern Alberta, the cities, mines and railroads of the west, and when the demand warranted, the wheat fields at harvest time. All efforts to mobilize migrant workers had been undermined by this geographical dispersion and Clarke had sufficient experience with the mobility of lumber work to ap preciate the difficulties involved. Furthermore, an alliance of small farmers and workers was infeasible because of the mechanization process which aggravated the conflicts implicit in contractual employment. Mechanization created a deflationary price pressure which effectively undermined the economic position of the non-competitive small fanners. Unable to limit unit production costs by technological adaption, the poor fanners were compelled to lower overheads by reducing expenditures on labour. Rather than drawing small fanner and worker together, the dynamics of capitalism increased tensions by forcing the employer to assume a progressively more exploitive attitude towards his employees. In this sense, the poor producers and the farm workers confronted each other not as allies, but "as class enemies, as exploiter and exploited. "26 In addition to criticizing the Comintem's depiction of the rural proletariat, Clarke attacked the belief that the class struggle in the countryside was derived from the direct exploitation of the "poor peasants" by the "kulaks". Though he did not deny the existence of ''class'' conflict in the rural community, he proposed that its clear expression was muted by a pervasive bourgeois ethic. In his view, all farmers were deluded by a Tumerian "free land myth'' which served to muffle social conflict and maintain an illusion of unlimited economic expansion and upward mobility. One consequence of the dichotomy between this myth and the reality of rural life was that the ideology of the lowest stratum of fanners "wavers between that of the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and finds its expression in a multitude of demands for more or less utopian reforms". 27 This ideological misper ception was anchored in the particular character of agrarian class relations which were a product not of internal but of indirect conflicts. ''The theory that in Western Canada, rich fanners directly exploit poor fanners is a delusion," Clarke wrote. "It does not exist except in the very few isolated cases where a fanner has bought up a considerable amount of land and then rented this land to his less fortunate neighbours, or in the even fewer cases where 25. Canadian Labor Monthly, March 1929; The Worker, 16 March 1929. 26. University of Toronto Library (UTL). Robert Kenney Collection, Box 9, file: Agrarian Reform, Leslie Monis and J.M. Clarke,"Draft Agrarian Program of the Communist Party of Canada" (1930), p. 12. 27. The Worker, 13 Aprill929. RETHINKING PRAIRIE COMMUNISM 105 a rich farmer holds a mortgage on a poor farmer's land. "28 Altering the focus of analysis, he then argued that rather than exploiting each other, all farmers were at the mercy of the finance capitalist and that the different positions each class of farmer occupied in relation to the urban bourgeoisie determined its social interests. "Usury", Clarke wrote, "is the main avenue for the control of agriculture, the toiling farmers and their families by the lords of finance. This control extends to all sections of the rural population and includes the rural bourgeoisie. "29 But while similarly enslaved by finance capitalism, the rich farmer, in contrast to the poor farmer, was ''the class rep resentative of finance capital.' '30 This paradoxical situation was produced, according to Clarke, by the degree to which the rich farmers profited from the dominationof the urban capitalist. While poor farmers were unable to pay the interest charges on debts and mort gages, and suffered evictions and foreclosures, wealthy farmers profited from their loss. Decreases in the number of small producers meant that rich farmers could expand their holdings, improve the cost effectiveness of their machinery, and thereby increase the productivity of their operations. Furthermore, large farmers benefited from the credit system, which allowed them to borrow the necessary money to continue expanding and they shared with the urban bourgeoisie a common interest in technological innovation. Clarke saw these divergent interests reflected in the policies of the various farm organi zations, for ''it is chiefly inside of these bodies that the clash finds its expression.'' Within organizations such as the UFA and the UFC(SS), "the rich farmers advocate policies which coincide with their class interests, and the class interests of the rich farmer are almost in variably the opposite of the class interests of the poor farmer. '' 31 The object of communist agitation in the countryside, Clarke asserted, was the mobilization of the poor farmers for militant struggle. However, owing to the indirect nature of class rivalries, he rejected the Comintem's belief in the direct struggle between rich and poor farmers and instead argued that the real battle for economic emancipation must be fought against the finance capitalists. Clarke believed that the farmers should be induced to organize a general resistance to foreclosures and evictions, which he argued was similar to that of taking strike action in industry. He further advocated that the radicals adopt a programme calling for the issuance of interest-free state credit, the legislation of a standard price for all agricultural commodities based on the small farmers' cost of production, the abolition of the Board of Grain Commissioners and the control of the grading process by the farmers themselves. 32 Clarke's agrarian thesis was a sharp departure from the official policy of the Com munist Party and it was clearly designed to align revolutionary theories with existing conditions. 33 Noting that the poor farmers did not see the rich farmers as their enemies, he charged that radicals must reveal to them the subtle collusions inherent in agricultural economics. He understood the antipathy between the farmers and their employees, and he recognized the difficulties which the Party would face in attempting to bridge their di- 28. lJIL, Kermey Collection, Box 9, Agrarian Reform, J.M. Clarke, "Memo on the Agrarian Question for Comrade Morris", p. 3. 29. UTL, Kenney Collection, Morris and Clarke, "Draft Agrarian Program ... ", p. 7. 30. UTL, Kenney Collection, Clarke, "Memo on the Agrarian Question ... ", p. 4. 31. lbid.,p.5. 32. UTL, Kenney Collection, Morris and Clarke, "Draft Agrarian Program ... ", p. 45. 33. For an alternate view see Ivan AVAKUMOVIC, "The Communist Party of Canada and the Prarie Farmer", p. 79; or Norman PENNER, The Canadian Left: A Critical Analysis (ScarlJorougb: Prentice-Hall, 1977), pp. 82-84. 106 HISTOIRE SOCIALE-SOCIAL HISTORY vergent interests. Perceiving the basic conservatism of the small fanner, he argued that the radicals must design a progranune of immediate demands that would be ''objective enough to lead the farmers to struggle and, at the same time, evade the pitfalls of reformism.'' 34 He knew that the poor farmers had not developed a revolutionary consciousness despite their "rising discontent" and he emphasized that for all their militancy, they continued to be "beclouded with all the usual humbug, though perhaps to a lesser degree than formerly.'' 35 In October, 1930, the leaders of the Fanners' Educational League transformed their organization into a "militant body" designed to unify "debt-ridden farmers around a program of immediate action and united struggle.'' 36 The Furrow was given a more ag gressive tone and prominent socialists began elaborating Clarke's call for "committees of action, pledged to resist any attempt to throw debt-ridden fanners out of house and home''. 37 Pressure for a change in League strategy had been accumulating for some time; the demand had been increasing for the PFEL to ''adapt ... to the situation'' by separating itself from the established farm organizations-the UFA in Alberta and the UFC (SS) in Saskatch ewan-and launching a direct "appeal to the people. "38 The stimulus for the League's reorientation came both from the Communist Party, which had adopted a progranune calling for greater direct involvement in the fanners' movement, and from the Depression, which had created the conditions demanding "radical change". Radicals across the country predicted that the Depression signalled "the breakdown of the capitalist economy" and they moved to develop strategies which would prepare the select ''for their future eman cipation''. 39 For John Magnus Clarke it seemed as though the long years of journalistic agitation were finally reaching fruition. ''There is no doubt about the rising tide of discontent of the Prairies,'' he confided in his old friend, Tom McEwan, ''it compensates for living in this howling wilderness for three and a half years. "40 With great vigour, the revolu tionaries seized the opportunity and moved to transform the poor fanners' reviving militancy into class war. Since the First World War, the position of the small farmers in Western Canada had been steadily deteriorating. As Clarke realized, the crux of the small farm problem was that the unit of a quarter-section, and in many cases of a half-section, was unable to produce wheat on a competitive basis with the larger, more mechanized and cost-efficient farms. As one western economist noted, ''because the price of wheat is [being] forced down ... by the lower selling possible on the larger acreage ... reasonable returns on a half-section cannot be assured. "41 The industrialization of wheat farming was creating a situation under which an individual's income was directly linked to the size of his unit operation. 42 By the 34. UTL, Kenney Collection, Morris and Clarice, "Draft Agrarian Program ... ", p. 39. 35. PAO, CPC Records, 1A0530, J.M. Clarice to Tom McEwan, 17 December 1930. 36. The Furrow, November 1930. 37. TheFurrow,Octoberl930. 38. The Furrow, 30 April1930. 39. G. VAN HOlliEN, Canoda's Party ofSocinlism: History of the Communist Party ofCanoda, 1921· 1976 (Toronto: Progress Books, 1982), p. 90; PAC CPC Papers, Convention Series, "Sixth Plenum of the Central Executive Committee: Resolutions of the Enlarged Plenum", February 1931, p. 35; The Furrow, November 1930. 40. PAO, CPC Records, IA0530, J.M. Clarice to Tom McEwan, 17 December 1930. 41. Glenbow-Aiberta Institute (GAl), Walter Norman Smith Papers, Box 2, tile 26, A.H. Brinkman toJ.G. Gardiner, 7 December 1939. 42. S.C. HuDSON, "Factors Affecting the Success of Mongage Loans in Western Canada" (Ottawa: King's Printers, 1935), pp. 26-27; R.W. MURCHIE, Agricultural Progress on the Prairie Frontier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1936), pp. 218-40 and 260. RETHINKING PRAIRIE COMMUNISM 107 early thirties, analysts were concluding that a one hundred and sixty acre farm was unable to meet its operating costs without a diversification into dairying or market gardening. 43 For the administrators of Saskatchewan's Debt Adjustment Board, the position of the smaller farmers was quite simply "hopeless" and they grieved over their inability to develop a "debt paying capacity. "44 Lacking in an income adequate to meet expenses, the small operator was unable to maintain his equipment or risk experimenting with new technological innovations. Consequently, his economic position worsened over time and his continued existence carne increasingly to depend upon his creditors' tolerance. Not surprisingly, small farmers became militant during periods of economic inst ability, when credit was tight and prices were falling. The first outbreak of mass unrest carne in the early twenties, when the FUC led a resistance to foreclosure movement and called for a moratorium on debt. The protest was short-lived, however, for with the economic recovery of 1924-25, the movement collapsed and the FUC was absorbed into the Sas katchewan Grain Growers' Association. In June, 1929, the Wheat Pools announced that they would be forced to reduce their initial payments to an unprecedented low of sixty cents a bushel and six months later, the price had fallen to such a level that the Western premiers could petition Ottawa to peg wheat at only seventy cents. 45 Small farmers, whose costs of production exceeded the value of their goods, found themselves again confronted by the problem of having to pay previously acquired fixed charges with sharply declining incomes. Confidence in rapid recovery faded quickly. As one farmer remarked, "there has been no time during the twenty-four years we have been in Canada, that the moral [sic] of country folk have been so low. "46 Familiar faces, whose appearance was the traditional harbinger of revolt, began to reappear on the Prairie. In Alberta, George Bevington, the monetary reformer who had first made a name for himself in the radical days of the early twenties, ''began to stage a come-back'', and he stumped the Province with a call for the nationalization of the banks and a moratorium on farm debt. 47 Far to the east, in Kelvington, Saskatchewan, a much radicalized Louis P. McNamee emerged from retirement and unsuccessfully attempted to organize a National Farmers' Union, a movement pledged to the resistance of foreclosures, the ''nationalization of money'', and socialism. 48 In December, 1930, the communists moved to harness this rising discontent through the formation of the Farmers' Unity League (R.JL), an independent, militant replacement for the Educational League. At a series of conferences held on successive days in Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon and Edmonton, the revolutionaries set out their programme of struggle. The ideology of the new organization reflected Clarke's theories on the class division in agriculture and presented the poor farmers as the "sole power in country districts for the struggle against all forms of capitalism." The League's immediate demands included a minimum income of one thousand dollars to be paid by the state, free medicine and hos pitals, non-contributory social insurance and old age pensions and a moratorium on farm 43. Baldur KRISTJANSON, "Land Settlement in Northeastern Alberta" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1949), p. 50. 44. SAB, George Edwards Papers, George Edwards, "The Problem of the Quarter-Section Farm" (n.d.), pp. 4-5. 45. Western Producer, 4 September and 27 November 1930. 46. GAl, George Coote Papers, Box 7, file 53, J.C. Meledy to G.C. Coote, II June 1931. 47. GAl, Smith Papers, Box 3, file 23, W.N. Smithy to N.F. Priestly, 7 August 1930. 48. The Furrow, December 1930. 108 HISTOIRE SOCIALE-SOCIAL HISTORY debt. 49 The League's strategy was the brain-child of Jack Clarke and his distinctive vision of agrarian economics. Unfortunately, it was not to be implemented without a struggle. Socialists protested from the outset against Clarke's attempts to dilute the League's agitation and called for a more doctrinaire application of the Leninist line. George Williams, who had left the PFEL in 1928 when it failed to officially endorse his nomination for the pres idency of the UFC(SS), attacked the communists for their preoccupation with the "im mediate struggle''. Calling for ''scientific socialism'' and not militancy, Williams urged the two hundred and fifty farmers attending the Saskatoon Foundation Conference of the FUL not to be obsessed with local issues, but to search for comprehensive political solutions. Williams had failed to consider the real character of the new movement, however, and his appeal was rebuffed. 50 Economically anxious and socially excoriated, the poor farmers who joined the FUL were ·not concerned with achieving the cooperative commonwealth, but rather with preventing their expulsion from agriculture. They were interested not in revolutionizing society but in saving their homes. Realizing this, the communists eagerly sought to build the FUL into a potent instrument of small farm dissent. The challenge was to be whether they could transform that dissent into class-conscious struggle. It was on this battleground that Prairie communism would stand or fall. III In Moscow, everyone was perturbed. For years, the International had been pestering the Toronto leadership of the CPC to develop a programme of struggle for the countryside, but no one had expected anything like this. In early October, 1930, Stewart Smith, Canadian communism's seemingly permanent contribution to the International, had received a copy of J .M. Clarke's "Draft Agrarian Program" from Tim Buck, the new General Secretary of the CPC. Smith, whose mind had already benefited from too many lessons at Moscow's Lenin School, was understandably shocked by Clarke's approach. "I feel ... it has to be rewritten from the first to the last line,'' he told Buck, and he then dutifully presented the document to the Krestintem, the reigning authority on agrarian socialism. 51 As Smith had expected, the delegates to the Peasant International were exceedmgly disturbed by Clarke's discussion of the agrarian problem and they hastily warned the executive of the CPC to revise the "Draft Program". 52 It was, Smith explained, studded with "great shortcomings and gross deviations," and it revealed all the "opportunistic theories" and "basic deviations of Comrade Clarke." For the communist ideologues, Clarke had committed the venal sin of reviving the ''old opportunistic theory of the class antagonism between the proletariat and the poor farmer'' and he had further dishonoured himself by advocating debt adjust ment, state credit and a minimum farm wage. This, Smith cautioned, was little other than "pink reformism" and he advised Buck to remember that "the only solution we have to offer [the farmers] ... is the abolition of capitalism. "53 49. The Furrow, January 1931. 50. Interview withJ.L. Phelps, 16January 1983; PAO, CPC Records, IA0530, J.M. Clarke to Tom McEwan, 17 December 1930. 51. PAC, CPC Papers, file: Tim Buck, Correspondence, 1930-31, Stewart Smith to Tim Buck, 7 October 1930. 52. PAC, CPC Papers, Convention Series, "Minutes of the Sixth Plenum of the C.E.C.", February 1931, pp. 34-35; PAO, CPC Records, Transcript: Rex vs Bucket a/., Vol. II, Evidence, pp. 341-42. 53. PAC, CPC Papers, file: Tim Buck, Correspondence, 1930-31, Stewart Smith to Tim Buck, 20 October 1930.