The province’s liquor laws were still based on a fundamentalist Christian belief that drinking was sinful, and thus should be undertaken in surroundings as unpleasant as possible. By law, windows in beer halls were forbidden, as these would permit passersby to observe unrepentant reprobates consuming alcohol. By law, patrons were forbidden to carry their drinks if, once seated, they subsequently elected to join acquaintances at a different table. Such a transfer had to be effected by a usually begrudging waiter. A PA system blared over the often-deafening roar of conversation in the hall: “Phone call for Dave Ronson, Dave Ronson” or “Taxi for Arnie Black, Arnie Black.” The only sanctioned activity, besides drinking oneself insensible, was a table shuffleboard game. A few pubs had also installed a jukebox, but the music could scarcely be heard over the swirling bellow of sound.
Yet on a hot summer evening in Vancouver, the Waldorf bar was our regular destination after a solidarity meeting or a protest rally, or simply when we had a night off. If we were at the ’Dorf the evening of the weekly meeting of the Vancouver and District Labour Council, we invariably would link up with activist delegates. Our tablemates would have adjourned to the pub to rehash the defeat of yet another of their motions.
The Labour Council, I quickly learned, was dominated by a bloc of representatives from unions whose leadership was under the sway of the Communist Party. The CP played a conservative role: its concern to appear respectable resulted in muted official union pronouncements against the war, or in weak expressions of support for beleaguered independent unions excluded from the Labour Council. On social change issues, CP members resisted endorsing Vancouver organizations outside the party’s control, such as ones that supported U.S. draft evaders and deserters from the military, or a nascent local anti-poverty group that was garnering headlines with its confrontational style. The exceptions to this CP timidity were in areas where Moscow had flashed the green light. An annual antinuclear peace march, and petitions to have Vancouver declared a nuclear-weapons-free zone, received enthusiastic approval and financial aid from the council.
The military suppression of the Czechs the previous summer, occurring only a week before the attacks on protesters at the Chicago Democratic Convention, had further undermined the Communist Party’s credibility — especially among young people — since the CP locally had followed Moscow’s lead in “explaining” why the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been necessary. Yet according to the union activists I was getting to know, the party had a long tradition of manipulation and anti-democratic manoeuvres inside those unions where it could muster a large enough presence.
“Your Birch Society member may think he’s anti-Communist,” I was informed by an angry construction tradesman, who had relayed a tale of a motion being railroaded through his local, and who had somehow misheard the details when I was introduced and thought I was American. “Your Bircher probably doesn’t even know any fucking Commies. If he did, your Birch Society guy would really be anti-Communist.”
One of the residents at the house, the one employed in the paint shop at Hayes Trucks, had applied to join Progressive Workers, a Vancouver Maoist labour organization. The founder of this outfit, a veteran CP member, had been expelled from the party for his persistent support of Red China after the Soviet Union’s leaders had parted company with their former ally. Despite the similarity in name to Progressive Labor, which had been one side of the SDS split in June, Progressive Workers had no connection with the American organization. The new Vancouver group, besides regularly undertaking solidarity picketing alongside strikers enmeshed in difficult disputes, promoted the formation of independent Canadian unions. Over a few rounds in the ’Dorf with some PW members who sat at our table one night when their weekly meeting let out, I was reminded that the majority of Canadian unions traditionally have been locals of American ones. “No country in the world besides Canada, not even in the Soviet system, has its unions controlled from another country.” Through my truck plant housemate I met his friends in PW, an electrician and railway brakeman, who had recently returned from an invited excursion to China. The news was conveyed to me with pride that during their visit they had met and shaken hands with the chairman himself. “Yeah, and the first thing Gordie here said to Mao was: ‘You know anyplace around here I can get a beer?’”
I was sure Dr. Bulgy would be fascinated by my widening firsthand knowledge of the Canadian labour movement. I was impressed myself to be on easy terms with men — and a few women — who appeared to have leaped off the pages of the books, pamphlets, and articles on revolutionary theory I was reading as an SDS member. And I could certainly assure Dr. B. that I now understood better how my thesis related to the present. Around the somewhat sodden tables of the Waldorf beer parlour I first heard the term business unionism. Much of what was spoken between sips of brew echoed Big Bill Haywood’s condemnation of the aims and practices of the American Federation of Labor at the IWW’s founding convention in June 1905 — Haywood being secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners at the time, as well as one of their delegates to — and chairman of — the Chicago gathering.
I remained aware that, while Dr. B. might be thrilled by my summer’s discoveries, such field research was tangential to the content of the thesis. My hope was that his pleasure at what I had absorbed might distract him from the shortfall in my page count.
I was resolved, however, not to mention my growing conviction that alcohol consumption might represent a factor in the failure of many of the unionists I met to achieve their aims. I had been excited to meet genuine Red workers, and found in turn that most had been following the student unrest in the U.S. closely and were interested to hear about my experiences, to listen to my opinion on what might develop next. But even the labour militants expressed a black humour with regard to their drinking. “Call me as soon as the revolution starts,” one plumber joked at our table on a Friday night at the ’Dorf. “You’ll find me right here.”
Dr. Bulgy also didn’t need to be informed, I had decided, that among the younger left-wing workers I met, the “revolutionary discipline” touted by both the CP and Progressive Workers fatally clashed with the attractions of the counterculture. Endless meetings dedicated to adopting a “position” on a plethora of social issues at home and abroad — an analysis that henceforth all group members were bound to support, even if they disagreed with it — held no attraction. Progressive Workers’ part in successfully organizing a city cable manufacturing plant earned praise, as did their efforts among smelter employees farther inland who were disillusioned with the United Steelworkers union currently representing them. But PW meetings endlessly dissecting the finer points of Quebec separatism or sectarian violence in Northern Ireland were far less appealing to many of the labour activists I encountered over the collection of full and empty glasses crowding our table. The SDS slogan of “Less talk, more action” was enthusiastically endorsed. My recounting of my unease at the surreal chanting at the recent SDS convention also struck a chord with the unaffiliated Red workers, since PW’s use of Maoist phraseology seemed alien to my usual table companions.
In addition, I didn’t plan to mention to my thesis supervisor that among Vancouver’s young Maoist freaks, PW was regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned in its approach to bringing about social change. Progressive Workers’ strategy was to engage in the lengthy, arduous task of building an independent Canadian union movement as the first step toward winning adherents to revolutionary socialism. Whereas the loose alliance of pro-Maoist young people who called themselves the Vancouver Liberation Front had no desire to undertake the dreary business of leafleting parking lot gates at the city’s factories and mills in the name of nascent unions or of union reform. Negotiating union contracts or processing a grievance on the shop floor were rated as distractions from the sweeping social changes both envisioned and urgently desired by VLF adherents. Instead, they believed socialism would be won by direct action. The latter was defined as every sort of anti-establishment activity from be-ins to rock concerts, and from street protests to — eventually — armed guerrilla columns on the Cuban model.
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