J.B. McLachlan: A Biography – The Story of a Legendary Labour Leader and the Cape Breton Miners by David Frank (review)

376 The Canadian Historical Review J.B. Mclachlan: A Biography - The Story ofa Legendary Labour Leader and the Cape Breton Miners. DAVID FRANK. Toronto: James Lorimer 1999. Pp. 592, illus. $39.95 James Bryson Mclachlan was born in 1869, two years after Confederation , and died in 1937, two years before the start of a war that elevated Canada's standing among world nations. Yet his life of sixty-eight years did not mirror the path ofnational maturity, but instead reflected the ongoing struggle ofa working class inside Canada. As David Frank writes in his introduction, McLachlan's tale 'is also the story of a society that was struggling with the consequences of industrial capitalism and in which workers fought long and hard to enrich the meaning of democracy .' J.B. Mclachlan is a bold and impressive attempt to weave these two stories - the personal and the political - together. The very richness of McLachlan's life - coal miner, union organizer, socialist, agitator, immigrant, author, politician, husband, father - lends itselfto this end, for few aspects ofearly twentieth-century Canadian labour history are not intertwined with Mclachlan at some point or other. With considerable deftness, Frank retells familiar stories through the prism ofMcLachlan's own experience: the 1909 Glace Bay strike, the rise and fall of the Provincial Workmen's Association, the labour unrest of1919, the rise of industrial unionism, and the Communist Party's uneasy relationship with the Canadian labour movement. This is most definitely not just a book about Cape Breton coal miners. More than twenty years in the making, J.B. Mclachlan is a model of meticulous research and careful synthesis ofevidence. Through a careful and thorough search of archival material, published sources, and oral testimony, Frank has produced not just a fine biography ofan important labour leader but one of the most comprehensjve biographies of any Canadian to appear in recent years. At 500-plus pages, J.B. Mclachlan defies any quick or casual reading, and students new to labour history may find this length somewhat daunting. Still, Frank sensibly follows McLachlan's life in chronological order, subdividing it into four separate books, each consisting of three self-contained chapters. The prose is clean and generally graceful, although the scene-setting vignettes that begin each chapter perhaps owe a little too much to Raymond Chandler. Set in the context of Frank's massive achievement, however, such criticism borders on the churlish. More serious questions may be asked of the nature and purpose of biography itself, as they relate to Frank's telling of McLachlan's story. Frank describes the book as 'a study in social biography,' its aim being to Book Reviews 377 'locate and explain the history ofone man's part in the modern struggle for social, political, and economic justice.' Any biography needs to balance the ·role of the individual against the force of circumstance, agency against structure, but this is especially true ofa book that explicitly situates its protagonist within the context ofclass conflict. Yet there is always a temptation to conflate the two, to see in the life ofone individual a microcosm ofgreater social developments. Frank is well aware of this danger - 'No claim is made here that Mclachlan's personal history was typical of the coal miners or of the working class as a whole' - yet he does not always succeed in resisting the temptation. Mclachlan died in 1937, a time when 'the outcome ofso many struggles was uncertain and the revolution had not arrived.' But Frank is unwilling to let Mclachlan depart without establishing an enduring legacy for the man's life, including the postwar advent of industrial legality, social welfare reforms, and public ownership of the coal and steel industries. These links are somewhat strained and, in any case, such achievements, welcome though they were, fell far short ofthe more radical vision that Mclachlan had espoused throughout his life. No such claims are necessary, for a study of Mclachlan's life is justified on its own terms. Frank's biography is an eloquent testimony to the man's dedication and commitment to building a better world, and a valuable reminder that Canada's history flows in many directions. DAVID BRIGHT University ofCalgary...