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  • When the State Trembled: How A. J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike
  • Benjamin Isitt
Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, When the State Trembled: How A. J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike (Toronto: University of Toronto 2010)

It is difficult to say something new about the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, that high-water mark of working-class unrest so many scholars of Canadian labour and the left have interrogated. In When The State Trembled, Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell deftly and elegantly exceed this objective.

Challenging a prevailing historiography focused on the role of the state in crushing the militant and radical moment of 1919, Kramer and Mitchell illuminate the opaque entity known as the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand and its leader, Winnipeg lawyer and onetime “boy mayor” A. J. Andrews, who for nine decades has lurked in the shadows of the historiography of the strike.

Through meticulous use of previously untapped correspondence between Andrews and acting justice minister (and future prime minister) Arthur Meighen, Kramer and Mitchell depart from the usual protagonists of labour and working-class history: the workers, their unions, and their political parties. Their 322-page interpretive narrative, illustrated with photographs and a selection of printed material, is structured chronologically, offering a day-to-day, play-by-play account of a city where class relations had been turned upside down. This detailed narrative illuminates the actions and motivations of both the Citizens and the strikers, augmented by frequent and valuable analytical forays on the role of Andrews and the Citizens during and after the strike.

What emerges is a compelling case study of a local bourgeoisie in a state of crisis, and how it mobilized closely knit associations and an array of ideological and legal tools to respond to a defiant and mobilized working class. The book provides a powerful, critical, and long-overdue contribution to the fields of labour and working-class history, legal history, and the political history of Winnipeg, Canada, and beyond.

Initially organized to restore the distribution of bread, milk, and petroleum in the strike-bound city (and informed by earlier “Citizens” movements in Winnipeg, Minneapolis, and other North American cities), the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand deployed the universalist language of citizenship to restore prevailing property and labour relations and defeat the potential of the widest sympathetic strike Canada had ever known. Andrews and his cohesive group of three dozen businesspeople challenged the language and logic of class in their newspaper the Winnipeg Citizen, appealing to middle-class sympathies in favour of law, order, and “constituted authority,” as well as racist stereotypes against Eastern Europeans and “enemy aliens.”

As the strike unfolded, Andrews and the Citizens expanded their ambitions and operations, entering into a private correspondence with Meighen that deftly presented and shaped information on the unstable events in Winnipeg. Warning of a Bolshevik conspiracy (at times amplified into an apprehended “insurrection”), which threatened to descend Canada into the red ruin the country was combatting militarily in nascent Soviet Russia, Andrews was appointed as Meighen’s personal “representative” in Winnipeg. This amorphous role remained ill defined from the middle of the strike to the conclusion of the privately initiated but publicly financed prosecution of the leaders (which cost the federal government nearly a quarter million dollars [in 1919 currency] in legal fees for Andrews, Isaac [End Page 273] Pitblado, and other Citizen-affiliated lawyers).

Rather than Meighen, provincial Attorney General T. H. Johnson, or Winnipeg Mayor Charles Gray directing the state’s response to the strike and the alleged seditious conspiracy of its leaders, Andrews and his class-tinged Citizens (note the capitalization) effectively filled the legal and political vacuum occasioned by the strike, delicately positioning themselves as the legitimate custodians of law and order in Canada’s third-largest city.

Navigating the distinct interests and responsibilities of local, provincial, and federal authorities, Andrews and his private organization came to wield important state powers (if not entirely in fact, then crucially in appearance). From the decision to deputize special police constables to replace Winnipeg’s labour-friendly police force, to persuading federal and provincial authorities against brokering...

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