In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “Yours for the Revolution”:Communication and Identity in the Western Clarion
  • David Buchanan (bio)

The purpose of the Western Clarion (Vancouver 1903 to 1925) was nothing less than social revolution in Canada. A letter to the editor indicates the division fostered by such a stance:

Port Arthur, Dec. 11, 1911. Dear Sir:–Will you please stop sending your paper to my house, as I don’t think it is a paper any person would wish in their house; at least, I do not wish it in my house. If any more are sent I shall put the matter in my lawyer’s hands. I have burnt up the others as they have arrived. I looked over one and would not let anyone else in my house see them. H. Smith, 95 Cumberland St.

(“Mental”)

The title of “Mental Misfortune” given to this letter and the editorial response are no less indicative of the hard line that led to Smith’s reaction: “So long has the slave been in mental darkness that, like the entombed miner who, crazed by suffering, runs from his rescuers, he is enraged by the Truth, instead of welcoming it as his deliverer.—Ed” (“Mental”). The “Truth” was hammered home in issue after issue for over twenty years: wage slaves must self-educate, unite, and take control of the means of production. There was no room for ignorance, no justification for opportunistic [End Page 133] individualism, and no excuse for political half measures. The struggle to effectively communicate the idea of revolutionary consciousness and the practice of community based on an understanding of historical materialism and socialist principles was, however, more complex than such staged exchanges seem to suggest.1

A longstanding emphasis on conservative authors and upmarket forms has overshadowed literature by, representative of, and written or produced for working-class people in Canada. As Cary Nelson has described with respect to modernist poetry in the American context, institutional priorities have governed historical reading practices, obscuring most of what has been written as well as what most people read, thus transforming how we understand communication in the past.2 The historical gaps and distortions that result from omission and prioritization differ between disciplines. Histories of the “left” in Canada prior to the 1930s make excellent use of the labour press to document labour history,3 but there is no account of how the mixed format of the labour paper was used to communicate with working-class readers. Literary scholarship on working-class literature is scant in comparison4 and is dominated by major writers, middle-class novels, and the heyday of proletarian literature and arts beginning in the 1930s.5 Recent literary criticism is more inclusive in terms of forms and genres, but earlier periods tend to act as brief historical surveys to frame more detailed work on later periods, or are largely ignored. In James Doyle’s Progressive Heritage, for example, the first two chapters cover the pre-1920s period. The title of chapter 1, “The Progressive Heritage [End Page 134] in Canadian Literature: Beginnings to 1900,” would seem to suggest a far-reaching historical survey, but it is used to introduce the interests of literary critic and anthologist Margaret Fairley, a prominent member of the Communist Party of Canada. The eclectic inclusion of the Ontario Workman (Toronto 1872 to 1875) and Agnes Maule Machar’s Roland Graeme: Knight (1892) produce a limited survey of “progressive” literature in early Canada. Chapter 2, “Antecedents and Alternatives,” opens by stating that “By the early twentieth century there were several anti-capitalist and/or pro-socialist periodicals in Canada, the most literarily significant of which was probably the Western Clarion (founded 1903) of Vancouver, which was the official newspaper of the Socialist Party of Canada from 1905 to 1920” (37). There is, however, no significant follow-up with respect to either the labour press in general or the Clarion more specifically. This underestimates the extent of the labour press both before and after 1900. Further, Doyle seems to base the literary significance (whatever that might mean) of the Clarion on inclusion of the poems of Wilfred Gribble, which were supposedly “a cut above the doggerel of Phillips...

pdf

Share