Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35 by Michel S. Beaulieu, and: Working People in Alberta: A History by Alvin Finkel et al., and: Happyland: A History of the 'Dirty Thirties' in Saskatchewan, 1914-1937 by Curtis McManus (review)

I expected to find a common labour and radical history theme when I volunteered to review these three texts, but that prospect disappeared on receiving Curtis McManus's Happyland, which neatly sidesteps everything I know about Saskatchewan in the Great Depression: the struggles of the urban unemployed, the On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot, Communism, and the early rise of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. In their place the author inserts the 'Dirty Thirties' - the tragedy of the rural 'drylands' of South-western Saskatchewan - a story, he insists, that can be told 'without reference to the Great Depression' of which it is sometimes erroneously considered an effect, but which in reality was a continuum of 'drought, crop failure and land abandonment' which 'ran its own course with remarkable continuity' from 1914 to 1938. At least implicitly indicting the province's academic historians for their 'thunderous' silence, McManus seeks to fill 'an enormous historical vacuum in Saskatchewan historiography'. This was not only an ecological but also a political continuum, a 'ridiculous circus' of futility, of recurring federal investigations, plans for evacuation and relocation, and sometimes massive emergency relief aid. Only in 1937 did real action begin that would remedy Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver's fateful 1908 decision to encourage settlement on land best 'left to the cows'. Yet, McManus insists, the Dust Bowl Thirties were nothing special: the 39,995 settlers who abandoned the drylands in 1929-38 had been preceded by the 30,000 who left in 1917-24. He nevertheless presents its grimness in copious detail, showing proper respect for the gritty independence shown by many farmers who resisted becoming reliant on the state by refusing relief or by demandinga chance to prove their manhood on the rural road gangs that were an inescapable symbol of the drought years. (He is astonished that so little is known of the road gangs compared to the unemployed relief camps run by the Department of National Defence.) During the 1930s, 40,000 farmers did the heavy labour demanded by their Rural Municipalities (RM) in return for supplies of the seed grains they needed to continue 'to fail at farming'. Their assertions of personal morality were all the more remarkable given that the region was experiencing 'the temporary suspension and corrosion of moral codes and personal values', with rising rates of personal depression and suicide (922 Saskatchewan settlers took their own lives between 1929 and 1938) and 'the ubiquity of sex (both illicit and pre-marital)'. Though McManus is happy to join a fraternity of popular historians like James Gray (the last historian to break the silence on the tragedy), his lively, trenchant and well-researched monograph contains all the necessary scholarly paraphernalia demanded by academia, including 11 pages of black and white photographs and 24 pages of tables. It would surely get senior undergraduate and postgraduate students talking.

The remaining two texts return me to more familiar territory. Michel S. Beaulieu's Labour at the Lakeheadis a scholarly monograph (the book of the dissertation) rooted in the archives and close reading of labour periodicals in more than one language. One of its dominant themes is the struggle for working-class unity in a region where workers were more than usually divided by ethnicity and the local ruling class was intent on keeping things that way...