A Very Red Life: The Story of Bill Walsh (review)

Canadian working-class history has developed a rich and varied texture that extends far beyond the parties of the Left, but Communists still fascinate us. Maybe it was their dash and daring in leading major struggles of wage-earners, or maybe their uncompromising class analysis that so many labour historians still share in some form. Whatever the motivation, many scholars have helped to generate a steady stream of biographies and autobiographies of former Communists over the past twenty years. Many have been collaborative efforts between a historian and an elderly radical to produce a first-person account based on lengthy interviews, but when Winnipeg political economist Cy Gonick proposed such an arrangement to the aging Bill Walsh, he demurred. So Gonick undertook his own biographical treatment based on interviews with Walsh, his family, friends, and comrades, and a limited archival record.

Although Walsh seemed to lack the charismatic spark of figures like J.B. McLachlan, Annie Buller, Joe Salsberg, Jack Scott, or C.S. Jackson, he certainly lacked none of the commitment and passion for the cause. His route into the Communist movement did not follow the familiar path of radicalization within a working-class neighbourhood. Born as Moishe Wolofky, he started out as an apolitical youth from a middle-class Jewish family in Montreal, who innocently hitchhiked his way into the Soviet Union in 1931, along with his inseparable sidekick Moe Kosawatsky (later known as Dick Steele). There they took factory jobs in Minsk and were swept up into Communism. Two years later, under pressure from his father and with the blessing of the Communist International, Moishe reluctantly returned to Canada. Within months he began what would stretch into three decades of full-time work for the Communist Party and the unions in which it was a prominent leader, first in Toronto, then Kitchener, and finally Hamilton, where he was attached to the United Electrical Workers (UE) for two decades. That political engagement got him jailed with other Communists in 1940, but also put him at the centre of some major strikes in the rise and consolidation of CIO-industrial unionism, notably those of Kitchener rubber workers in 1937 and Hamilton electrical workers in 1946. In fact, union work was his real passion, and he stayed out of the upper echelons of the Communist Party to concentrate on organizing, and played no major role in the party's internal battles.

Gonick's account of Walsh's life does not fundamentally alter the received wisdom on labour and the Left since the 1930s. He relies on the standard secondary literature to sketch in background and more or less fits the man into that narrative. The book nonetheless does give more texture and complexity to the inner life of the Communist movement. The unswerving loyalty and discipline expected of party members certainly framed Walsh's life, and he hung in doggedly through major crises inside the organization, particularly the wild swings of party policy in the early 1940s and the devastating splits of 1956. But it seems that there was some space for both personal initiative and dissent. The book gives lots of space to the stories of the ingenuity and creativity demanded of party officials like Walsh, who typically had limited resources at hand and only a handful of supporters to sustain their efforts. At the same time, Walsh was never a completely compliant comrade, and from time to time his argumentative style raised the hackles of party leaders. At the end of the Second World War, after returning from three years of military service, for example, he pestered the party leadership about the flip-flops in its political line on the war (and consequently got a public dressing down at the party school by its major theoretician, Stanley Ryerson).

Many of those tensions revolved around the dual allegiance to party and union that perplexed those Communists who worked in the labour movement and that became a central theme...