Riding to the Rescue: The Transformation of the RCMP in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914–1939 (review)

In 1973, when Lorne and Caroline Brown produced their Marxist, muckraking book, An Unauthorized History of the RCMP, spokespersons for the Mounties denounced its cutting conclusions as unfair and unwarranted by the Browns’ evidence. They rejected any suggestion that the Mounties existed to ruthlessly suppress workers’ efforts to improve their lives and to spy on left-wing radicals. Instead, the Mounties were defended as simply being loyal servants of governments, busily engaged in a variety of efforts to maintain order for all Canadians. Some historians of the RCMP lent their support to the force’s carefully created self-image and either denounced or simply ignored the Browns’ claims. Indeed, the sources available to the Browns were relatively limited. Steve Hewitt, by contrast, has benefited from a now plentiful set of primary sources and works within a theoretical tradition that is somewhat richer than what was available when the Browns wrote their exposé. However, though he rarely mentions the Browns, he essentially has vindicated their general arguments.

If the Browns’ study of the RCMP had the feel of outsiders looking in and defending the victims of RCMP repression, Hewitt’s work is an effort to create a sense of how the RCMP, including both the leaders and the ordinary officers, viewed themselves and tried to shape their institution. The Mounted Police, he argues forcefully, while they cannot be divorced from the capitalist state that produced the organization, cannot easily be reduced to being simply puppets of the state. It was a state body that worked assiduously to make itself seen by the leaders of government as indispensable enough to state objectives as to merit a fair degree of autonomy, rather than needing state direction in order to achieve government objectives.

Hewitt indicates ‘that the police, in this case the Mounted Police, have always served the interests of the state by maintaining the status quo’ (7). While the RCMP had a broad mandate, they focused on spying on Communists and arresting Chinese opium dealers, activities that earned them more brownie points with their political masters than enforcing federal statutes that lacked undertones of class and race did.

The federal government created the RCMP in 1918 by merging the Dominion Police, a puny federal security operation, with the Royal North West Mounted Police, which had recently lost much of its purpose when Alberta and Saskatchewan established their own provincial police forces during the First World War. In the years that followed, RCMP commissioners emphasized military discipline and a peculiar manliness in which both athleticism and celibacy were demanded. Recruits were largely of British origin, and the force sought to use police power to suppress lower-class rebellion, which they interpreted as the product of the uncivilized attitudes of non-British immigrants.

Hewitt punches many holes into the arguments of scholarly defenders of the RCMP. While some suggest that RCMP spying upon and arresting of communists reflected a general opposition to radicalism of all kinds, Hewitt demonstrates that the RCMP largely ignored fascists and racists. Its officers shared the nativist values of the Ku Klux Klan and were unconcerned about the threat that the KKK might pose to individual civil rights. By contrast, the force’s hatred of Communists extended as far as preventing qualified teachers with radical connections from being hired, by writing to potential employers that the individual in question was a suspected Communist.

Hewitt is particularly damning of the RCMP’s brutal suppression of the On-to-Ottawa Trek in Regina, on July 1, 1935. While defenders of the RCMP insist that the commissioners always obeyed their state masters, this was less than evident in Regina. The RCMP supposedly answered to the government of Saskatchewan during the trek, and that government opposed using violence to prevent the trekkers from going beyond the province. However, RCMP Commissioner J. H. MacBrien instructed his subordinate, S.T. Wood, to be prepared to...