Why The Failure Of The Winnipeg General Strike In Canada

The Winnipeg General Strike was one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. Over thirty thousand workers and World War 1 veterans joined in solidarity to obtain the right for collective bargaining. This massive strike paralyzed the city of Winnipeg, even as capitalists insisted everything was normal. Business owners and government officials scrambled to find volunteers and “scabs” to fill in the countless empty positions. Despite all that, the strike failed. Their leaders were imprisoned or deported. How did a strike that was supported by the majority of the working class and World War 1 Veterans fail? To begin to contextualize this historical event, the general environment of fear and paranoia later labeled as the Red Scare must be explored.

In the context of the Red Scare, newspapers were keen on depicting strikers as communists set on destroying Canada and the “West”. Many editors and correspondents genuinely believed that these strikers were subversive communists, and most never bothered to dig deeper. While the newspapers were influenced by this culture of fear, they were also contributing to this irrational fear at the same time. Another reason for such misleading reporting can be attributed to the elite owners of these papers, and their vested interest to maintain the status quo. They tried their best to delegitimize these strikers because they had monetary incentives to do so. Finally, the rich, local elites of Winnipeg ensured the failure of the Winnipeg strikers by opposing them at every step. They formed organizations to convince the Federal government to intervene by convincing them the strikers were influenced by Bolshevism and were a danger to the State. In other words, they politicized the Red Scare in their favour. It was the culture of fear and misinformation embodied by the Red Scare that allowed news organizations and local elites to demonize the strikers as Soviet sympathizers.
First off, it is essential to explore the Red Scare in the early 20th century. This first Red Scare in the West began after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communist Russia in 1917. Further compounded by anarchist bombings occurring in the West, fear and paranoia of Communists, Bolsheviks and Anarchists became rampant. Canada was no exception to this fear, and the Canadian government saw subversive Communist threats in foreigners, intellectuals and of course, worker unions. It was in this social context that the Winnipeg General Strike occurred. This meant that the cards were stacked against the strikers from the very beginning, as the social environment at the time was not amicable towards left leaning strikes for worker’s rights. How newspaper organizations and local elites took advantage of this unique situation while will be explored next.
Newspaper organizations from the beginning were highly critical of the strike. This criticism transcended national borders as British and American newspapers talked about the strike and conflating it with the international Communist movement. For example, the New York Times’ June 22nd, 1919 edition printed with the headline: “BOLSHEVISM IN WINNIPEG” “One Big Union” Assumed Entire Control of City, But was Ousted by a Bourgeois Committee.” Headlines such as this were printed by countless other newspapers in Canada, the United States, Britain and other Commonwealth nations. “In gripping headlines, flaming editorials and cartoons, almost every major newspaper, including powerful American dailies, dramatically reported and editorialized Winnipeg’s strike as a Bolshevik-One Big Union conspiracy to topple constituted authority.” Moving on from national syndications, local newspapers also became highly critical of the strikers as well. One example is the Manitoba Free Press, one of the largest local publications in Winnipeg at the time. “The [Manitoba] Free Press began blasting the strike organizers, labelling Russell, Veitch, Ivens, Robinson, and Winning as the red five. [They] also promoted the notion that the strikers were actually going to overthrow the government.” There are two reasons why these local newspapers wanted to discredit these strikers. First was ideological. Many reporters and their editors truly believed in the paranoia of the red scare. The second was more practical. The general strike affected the many cogs that made the printing industry run. The strike leaders convinced many of the workers working in the printing presses to join the strike. “The Strike Committee placed tremendous pressure on the typographers at all three [local] papers and on 17 May 1919, they walked off the job.” In short, the paranoid local newspaper companies went against the strike as it became evident that the strike was actively harming their business.
A way to see how the Red Scare, ideology and self-interest influenced most newspaper outlets to slander and criticize the strikers is to focus on one paper that did the opposite.

“The Toronto Star refused to accept [the mainstream] viewpoint. Instead, through news reports and editorials, the paper presented its readers with a different interpretation.” This is mostly due to the fact that the Toronto Star owner Joseph Atkinson “gradually transformed the paper into an advocate for social reform legislation focusing on minority rights, public ownership of utilities, and the right of labour to organize and strike.” In other words, the paper had a left wing bias, which allowed them to see past the Red Scare that gripped North America. Alongside this, “the Toronto Star editorialized and reported that for the majority of the strikers in Winnipeg the real issues were collective bargaining and higher wages, not conspiracy and revolution.” This further shows the ideological slant and self-interest most newspapers showed. Instead of investing real reporters to the region, most newspapers simply parroted the reports from other biased, paranoid news organizations. American newspapers’ “reports and editorial opinions of the Winnipeg General Strike… fanned the hysteria of the “Red Scare” in the United States.” More importantly, many smaller Canadian news organizations used these American reports “freely… and ultimately influenced their readers. American press reports and editorials even found their way back to Winnipeg appearing several times in May and June in The Free Press and The Citizen.” This showcases the extreme distortion the Red Scare brought. The major American and Canadian newspapers wrote misinformed and highly critical pieces on the Winnipeg strikers, and in turn, many smaller newspapers throughout Canada copied these

viewpoints.
Another factor that the Red Scare can explain is how the general public was so receptive of the distorted versions of the strike many news outlets gave them. The Red Scare was able to fill in the pre-conceived notions of labour movements and left-wing radicalism the public had. This conflation of left-wing strikes and international bolshevism was promoted by national papers and local ones alike. People were more willing to believe in crazy stories about communist revolutionaries taking over the Western world, and the newspapers were more than willing to oblige them. In the end, it was labour movements such as the Winnipeg General Strike that suffered from this environment of paranoia and irrationality.
Finally, one other faction who had great interest in the failure of the strike was the rich, local elites of Winnipeg. They strategized to convince the government to lend them support in supressing the strike. They did this by forming the Committee of the One Thousand. They were “the most powerful and effective opponent of the Winnipeg General Strike… [and] was formed in response to the strike.” One reason they were so effective was the fact they influenced the Federal government to make short sided decisions that helped the committee’s goal of quashing the strike. “No amount of special pleading could possibly avoid the conclusion that the state's response (especially on the federal level) to the Winnipeg General Strike was, on the whole, clumsy and malicious.” First and foremost, they pressed on the government’s fears of Communist inspired rebellions and subversive elements invading Canadian society. A.J Andrews, one of the heads of the Committee, often exaggerated the situation in Winnipeg to Arthur Meighen, the Minister of Justice. “After swallowing the Citizens' Committee position of rejecting negotiation and nipping “revolution” in the bud, Meighen agreed to appoint Andrews as a loosely defined, official “representative” of the justice department and gave him a great deal of latitude in deciding how to proceed against the strikers.” This was done as A.J Andrews often cited that the strike was a communist revolution, and that it was getting out of control. He “fed him information, sometimes exaggerated that led Meighen to believe conditions were worsening when in fact they were not.” Andrews did this to achieve his goal of getting the Federal government to send a special police force in Winnipeg to suppress the strikers. The committee succeeded. The Committee “not only had… convinced the general public that Winnipeg was in a state of revolt, but they worked to have the city police fired and replaced with “hired guns” who were essentially a group of anti-strike thugs.” This culminated in the now infamous “Bloody Saturday”, signifying the end of the strike and the resounding defeat of the movement.