Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment by Gerald Tulchinsky (review)

In Julius Caesar’s funeral oration, Shakespeare has Mark Antony pronounce the by now famous words dripping with irony: “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” In his biography of Joe Salsberg, senior historian Gerald Tulchinsky has drawn a portrait of his subject that is all chiaroscuro. On the chiaro side of the equation, there is the social activist who drew his primary inspiration from the Prophet Isaiah. For Salsberg was born into an Orthodox Jewish household in Łagów, a shtetl in Radom gubernia in Russian Poland, and was destined by his parents to become a rabbi. After immigrating to Toronto with his family, Salsberg, as the eldest son, joined the labour force at an early age. With a curious mind and an appetite for books, he soon abandoned any rabbinical ambition to become a labour organizer whose skill increased exponentially over the years. At first identifying himself with labour Zionism, he joined the recently created Communist Party when the 1926 general strike in England was crushed. He entered the political arena in the mid-1930s after the Party’s adoption of the Popular Front strategy. Elected to the Toronto City Council in 1938 and to the Ontario Legislature in 1943, he vigorously promoted various measures that “significantly influenced the course of Ontario’s human rights, social, and labour legislation” (p. 92) until his defeat in 1955 at the hands of Progressive Conservative Allan Grossman.

Tulchinsky depicts Salsberg as a very engaged opposition MPP whose interventions in the Legislature were always well prepared and documented, even earning him the “enormous” admiration (p. 79) of Conservative Premier Leslie Frost. A passionate and attractive orator both in English and Yiddish, the MPP delivered speeches at Queen’s Park or political rallies that dealt with concrete matters devoid of Marxist theory or Komintern doctrines. He maintained a very close rapport with his electoral base in Spadina riding, regularly strolling the streets of Toronto’s Broadway to meet with his constituents and listen to their preoccupations. Since most Toronto Jews hailed from the gubernias of Kielce and Radom, he spoke their language, both concretely and figuratively. Through his wife Dora who became head of Toronto’s Jewish Family and Child Services, he had an immediate appreciation of the social problems afflicting “the little guy,” a concern absent from today’s political discourses entirely focused on the “middle class.” Tulchinsky recognizes the important role played by Communists in general and Salsberg in particular in the revitalization of the trade union movement following the disastrous defeats of the late 1910s and early 1920s and in the civil liberties campaigns of the second postwar period due to the strategic position occupied by the two Communist MPPs in the minority Legislature.

On the scuro side is the long shadow cast by Stalin over Communism even after his death in 1953. In his early years as a Party member, Salsberg is described as a maverick. But the episode of his resignation/expulsion from the CPC in 1929 simply lacks clarity. Was the move prompted by disagreements over labour organizing strategies, internal CPC politics, or both? Readers are left in the lurch. On the first question, we are told that Sam Carr denounced the labour organizer for his “bureaucratic, rightist tendencies and penchant for one-man leadership.” (p. 31). No date or document is provided as evidence. On the second issue, we learn that Salsberg had actually challenged Tim Buck’s leadership at the sixth Party Congress held in Toronto in May 1929. But this fact appears four pages after Salsberg’s resignation from the Party in July. Problems of chronology aside, why did he attack the leader? Salsberg maintained that he was fighting against “a leadership cult with Stalinist tendencies emerging in the party.” This answer, given years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is what allows Tulchinsky to affirm: “Clearly, Salsberg was becoming aware of the dangers of Stalinism and was ready to stand...