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Reviewed by:
  • Champagne and Meatballs: Adventures of a Canadian Communist
  • Stefan Epp
Bert Whyte, Champagne and Meatballs: Adventures of a Canadian Communist, ed. by Larry Hannant (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press 2011)

On the surface, Bert Whyte does not seem like the typical communist. A cigar-smoking ladies-man who enjoyed the bourgeois pleasure of high class Rideau Hotel shaves while undercover, Whyte was also a committed communist who not only contributed to the party’s work in Canada, but also spent many years in China and the Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent. Champagne and Meatballs, written by Whyte with an introduction by Larry Hannant, brings us a deeply personal look at what it meant to be a communist from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Whyte begins his memoirs with a lengthy recollection of growing up in small-town Ontario. Interestingly, this is the story of how someone from a British background came to the Communist Party, a party primarily composed of Finns, Ukrainians, and other eastern European immigrants. The Whytes were not rich, but they were better off than many of those who would eventually turn to the Communist Party. Whyte’s father worked as a skilled labourer in several Ontarian mines. Whyte himself spent stints employed in the mining industry, interspersed with periods riding the rails across Canada. Whyte does not seem to have had much of a political education prior to joining the Communist Party, at least not one that he deems worthy of his memoirs. He learned about the communists after riding the rails to Vancouver and was eventually recruited while working at the Noranda mine by a Ukrainian who simply asked, “You wanna join the Party?” (163) Whyte explains that he thought the ccf was not about to be “doing anything very revolutionary” and that the iww was “either grey-headed or bald.” (163) Yet while Whyte dismisses other parties on the left, he does not put forward any ideological justification for joining the Communist Party other than its revolutionary nature. This is indicative of the rest of the book. Unlike other communist memoirs, there is very little discussion of ideology or politics in Whyte’s writing.

Particularly interesting from a historian’s perspective is Whyte’s discussion of his underground organizing activities while the Communist Party was illegal. Whyte gives us a detailed depiction of what life was like as an organizer. Posing as a salesman, Whyte travelled throughout eastern Ontario. He relates the story of how he blended into society, joining the ymca’s bridge club, befriending a vehemently anti-communist Catholic newspaper editor, and getting his haircut at the Chateau Laurier. (178) This is not the typical image one has of an underground communist organizer.

While in Ottawa, Whyte began to publish the Clarion newspaper twice monthly, hiding the illegal publication, among other places, in books in the public library. (179) After Germany attacked the Soviet Union and the communists supported the war effort, Whyte joined the army and had a successful military career. (187–236) Whyte’s postwar career provides an illuminating glimpse into communist history as he discusses life as a communist during the postwar years, particularly as a Labour-Progressive Party organizer in Toronto, a city where several communists held elected office. (237–40)

One of the strengths of this book is a series of letters written by Whyte to his wife while stationed in China as a columnist for the Canadian Tribune, providing insight into the life of post-revolutionary 1960s China. Whyte describes the challenges of being one of few foreigners in China at the time and his personal [End Page 209] interest in witnessing the development of a Communist state. Whyte was particularly interested in personal stories – although these stories, he admitted, were not what the Canadian Tribune was most interested in reporting. (295) His letters often focus on these personal moments in the midst of post-revolutionary fervour, whether it is buying pants or watching Chinese take an escalator for the first time. (306) Hannant did well to include these letters in this book.

Hannant’s introduction stands out in this work, tying together the story of Whyte’s life and filling in many...

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