Fighting for Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story (review)

In September 2001, the signs marking a stretch of highway on Vancouver Island near Cumberland as 'Ginger Goodwin Way' were surreptitiously removed, reportedly at the behest of Stan Hagen, a former Socred cabinet minister then serving in Gordon Campbell's government. This is but the latest controversy in which socialist, union organizer, and draft-dodger Goodwin has been shrouded since a bullet shattered the spinal column in his neck more than eighty years ago. In Fighting for Dignity, journalist Roger Stonebanks dissects the legend that Goodwin was murdered, arguing that 'freed of the narrow perspectives of conspiracy paranoia, Goodwin's life may be seen in a fuller and richer context.' Building upon the work of Susan Mayse and others, Stonebanks demonstrates an impressive array of research. The result is a detailed narrative infused with the author's passion for his subject.

One of the author's more valuable contributions is his account of Goodwin's youth. From his formative years in the Yorkshire village of Treeton until his death on Vancouver Island, Ginger spent the bulk of his life in mining towns. He began following his father to work in 1899, at the age of twelve, and worked his way through a series of positions from pit corporal to pony driver. He experienced his first strike in 1902, during which the coal company evicted over 2000 men, women, and children, including the Goodwins. This was a childhood lived amid the dark satanic mines of England.

Goodwin emigrated to Canada in 1906, ending up in New Aberdeen in the employ of the Dominion Coal Company. Over the next eleven years, he would take part, to varying degrees, in three of the most significant strikes in early twentieth-century Canada: the 1909-10 campaign for union recognition waged by Cape Breton members of the United Mine Workers; the 1912-14 strike of UMW locals on Vancouver Island; and the 1917 Mine-Mill strike at the Cominco smelter in Trail. The evidentiary record for the period 1906-12 is scant. We know more about Ginger's athletic accomplishments - he was a football player of some renown - than of his life underground. In 1910, he settled in Cumberland, where he was befriended by Joe Naylor, UMWA organizer and secretary of the local Socialist Party branch, who became a political mentor. Ginger would eventually become a party organizer in the Crows Nest Pass region, and by May 1916, he had taken up residence in Trail, where he stood as Socialist Party candidate in that fall's provincial election, after which he turned his attention to the battle of the smelter workers of Cominco.

Half of the book's 180 pages are devoted to recounting the key elements of the conspiracy myth: the suspicious change in Ginger's draft status, his death in the woods at the hands of Dan Campbell, and the failure of the grand jury to bring back an indictment of manslaughter. Goodwin was initially classified in Section D - temporarily unfit, but subject to future recall. While he was not tubercular, as is often claimed, Goodwin was underweight, his ulcerated stomach making it difficult if not impossible to eat. Eleven days after Mine-Mill launched its strike in November 1917, he was ordered for re-examination by an unnamed member of the local tribunal, an act made doubly suspicious by the prime minister's statement six days previous that those classified as D would not be called up in the immediate future. The subsequent denial of Goodwin's appeals struck many as evidence of the political influence of Cominco managers, and the author allows for the possibility of their complicity.

Stonebanks exhaustively analyses the circumstances of Goodwin's death and the evidence for Campbell's claim of self-defence. He also situates the forensic aspects of the case within the broader political context, exploring the jingoism of local patriotic societies - 'Murderous Disloyalty' screamed one headline about Goodwin in the bc Veterans Weekly - as well as...