Into the Hurricane: Attacking Socialism and the CCF (review)

The Second World War proved to be a turning point for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), or so it seemed at the time. Public opinion surveys showed that 21 per cent of Canadians polled favoured the CCF by September 1942; a year later, the CCF was the most popular party in the nation (with 29 per cent support). The CCF became the official opposition in Ontario for the first time in 1943 (and won only four fewer seats than the victorious Progressive Conservatives’ thirty-eight). In 1944 Saskatchewan voters elected a CCF government.

But 1945 proved to be a disaster: in the Ontario and federal elections, held a week apart in June, the CCF fared badly. In the provincial contest the CCF won only eight seats; in the federal election it won twenty-eight, but none in Quebec or Ontario, the key to the CCF’s becoming a legitimate national party. The Liberals’ embrace of many of the same labour and social welfare measures the CCF had been proposing has frequently been cited as the key reason for the outcome of the federal contest, but some scholars (notably Walter Young) have also pointed to the massive barrage of anti-CCF propaganda (financed by big business) in 1944 and 1945.

The principal focus of Into the Hurricane is to more fully document the planning, financing, and execution of this campaign to discredit socialism and the CCF. What is remarkable about it, Boyko argues, ‘is the many avenues through which the anti-socialist/anti-CCF messages, words, and images were presented to Canadians’ (17). There were speeches and sermons; editorials, cartoons, and advertisements in the nation’s daily newspapers; and inserts in business newsletters. Short films were produced to be shown in Canadian movie theatres. There was a book (Stand Up and Be Counted, written by Burdick Trestrail in 1944) and pamphlets (one of these – Social Suicide – was mailed to millions of Canadians during the 1945 federal election campaign). Employers also stuffed subtle warnings into pay envelopes. Boyko makes effective use of the collection of newspaper clippings, advertisements, cartoons, and pamphlets found in the national CCF party records. He is also the first to use the papers of two of the chief architects of this anti-CCF advertising campaign, Gladstone Murray and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. (The third major anti-CCF propagandist, Burdick Trestrail, appears to have left no papers.)

One wonders, though, why the author did not undertake an independent canvass of the Financial Post and perhaps some other major Canadian newspapers for the period 1943–5. An extensive collection of clippings of newspaper articles and editorials would certainly be an appealing prospect for any researcher, but one is left with this nagging question: did the individual(s) who did the clipping do a thorough job? Including a sample of the editorial and other cartoons that were a key part of this sophisticated advertising campaign would also have enhanced Boyko’s analysis of its nature, scope, and impact.

In the last years of the Second World War, Boyko concludes, Canadians appeared willing to consider the CCF and the ideological alternative it offered. However, the CCF was not able to effectively counter the ‘multi-faceted, well-financed, brilliantly orchestrated, and ruthlessly executed campaign’ that was undertaken to destroy the party and its ideology (158). The CCF never recovered.

There are a few factual errors that ought to have been caught before this book went to press. It is erroneous to state that ‘M.J. Coldwell shared J.S. Woodsworth’s Winnipeg upbringing’ (4). Coldwell was born in England and taught school in rural Saskatchewan and Regina before becoming involved in left-wing politics in 1930. It was Blairmore (not Blairmount), ab, where the Communists won all the seats on the town council in 1933 (not 1935) and proceeded to rename the main street in honour of Tim Buck (121). The date Boyko gives for the founding of the League for Social Reconstruction is incorrect; in one...