Assembly Lines: Researching Radical Print Networks

On 11 august 1931, the rcmp led a coordinated raid on the Toronto headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada and the private homes of several of the party’s key members, seizing large numbers of files, books, and other publications. Party leader Tim Buck was arrested under Section 98 of the Criminal Code for intention to carry out the act of sedition, and over the next few days related raids in both Ontario and British Columbia resulted in a series of further arrests, with eight men (including Buck) eventually brought to trial.¹ The mass of print seized was never used at trial. It remained in the hands of the Attorney-General of Ontario,² eventually entering the Public Archives of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada) through the ago’s institutional fonds (“Preliminary Inventory” 1, 25).

Canadian Labor Defender September 1931, cover.

Within this seized material was a collection of pamphlets and periodicals, including Canadian publications and those obtained from radical organizations and other groups. The Canadian Labor Defense League (cldl), a fledgling offshoot of the International Red Aid formed to support the legal defense of workers in Canadian courts, was certainly represented among these texts. Given the proximity of the group’s headquarters to those of the Communist Party, as well as references to correspondence with its leading members, it is likely that the cldl’s publication, the Canadian Labor Defender, was found among the seized documents. In typical fashion, the Defender’s first response to the raids and arrests was rough but thorough. Although the cover for the September 1931 issue of the magazine is a thrice-repeated linocut image of a man gripping a set of prison bars against a background of a massed crowd brandishing cldl banners, nearly every page inside is given over to the story of the Communist leaders, including Buck’s own account and responses from International Red groups in other countries (cld 2.5: 5–6, 10). By the time of the October issue’s release, which bears a cover photomontage depicting the so-called “Kingston Eight,” the magazine is dominated by an intense scrutiny of the case.

Canadian Labor Defender October 1931, cover.

The images of the accused and the slogans accompanying them mark the swift solidification of the ways in which the radical left represented itself in the period following the Communist trial. Most significantly, a short article by R. Curtis entitled “Section 98 of the Criminal Code” (cld 2.6: 10) formally introduces and explains the law that would become the primary focus of the Canadian Labor Defense League’s publications and class organization as a whole in Canada for the next four years.

The Canadian Labor Defender, as part of a network of pamphlets and periodicals circulating in Canada during the Depression years, is a fascinating and under-examined example of radical print. The dialogic connection between pamphlets as texts with their own formal and rhetorical patterns and the assemblage found in the pages of the Defender and other proletarian periodicals throws into relief the dense network of writers, artists, organizations, and labourers who worked to produce these forms of print and who hefted them as tools in an intensely focused agitational campaign. The Defender stands out as a location of intertextual and metatextual critique on the role of pamphlet publishing in the campaign strategies of Canadian radical organizations in the 1930s. This essay will consider the Defender as a site for both bibliographic recuperation and network analysis of these groups, which together work to support a new critical assessment of the Canadian radical print produced alongside the periodical’s run. I will be looking specifically at a set of reviews of co-circulating periodicals and pamphlets published in the Defender through 1932 and 1933, which lays bare the agitational concerns of the cldl and the proletarian movement suggested in its pages. Ultimately, the singular focus of the cldl on protesting and repealing Section 98 became the undoing of the print-based network...