|
|
| Launch of Ben Swankey autobiography What's New: Memoirs of a socialist idealist |
|
 |
 |
In this unique and extraordinary memoir, Ben Swankey sums up a lifetime of labour and socialist activism. He begins with a remarkable evocation of his Saskatchewan childhood in the farming community of Herbert. While still a teenager, Swankey hitchhiked and rode the rails to Vancouver, where he came in contact with the unemployed movement and made a lifelong commitment to socialism. This decision brought him into the Young Communist League and the Communist Party as an organizer in the massive protests that shook Alberta during the Depression, particularly the Edmonton Hunger March in 1932.He mobilized support for the On to Ottawa Trek . .  more
|
|
From the July 23, 2008 Globe and Mail: Historian remains engaged and outraged at 94 Click on the links below for webcasts.
|
Introduction, June Williams ( Ben's daughter ) RT: 1:07 |
 |
Geoff Meggs, What's New editor RT: 10:26 |
 |
Joey Hartman, Pacific Northwest Labour History Association RT: 6:12 |
 |
Bill Zander, Carpenter's Union, retired RT: 4:35 |
 |
Bettie Marchiori ( Ben's grandaughter ) RT: 2:00 |
 |
Raj Chouhan, MLA, Burnaby-Edmonds RT: 3:30 |
 |
Peter Julian, MP, Burnaby-New Westminster RT: 2:19 |
 |
Carleen Pickard, Council of Canadians RT: 3:20 |
 |
Ellen Woodsworth, former COPE Vancouver city councillor RT: 3:38 |
 |
Frances Williams RT: 1:49 |
 |
Ben Swankey, author of What's New: Memoirs of a socialist idealist RT: 4:26 |
 |
TOP
from the Globe and Mail, July 23, 2008 by Tom HawthornVictoria -- Ben Swankey's eyebrows are bushy like tumbleweeds. Even at rest, wispy white hair flows from his head as though he were facing a stiff prairie wind. His big hands and thick fingers are the legacy of his farming and labouring ancestors. In his own 94 summers, he has worked as a road builder, a bartender, a roofing inspector, an insurance salesman and a labour journalist. Mostly, though, he was a writer and researcher. To the delight of his comrades and under the scrutiny of the police, he was a political organizer. "I have been arrested three times for my left-wing political activities," he writes, "but was never found guilty in any court." Mr. Swankey recently self-published a memoir. He started it 35 years ago, but neglected to stop agitating for his causes - old-age pensions then, environmentalism now - and the project kept getting shelved. Now, he is hard of hearing and legally blind. The left side of his body has been limited by a stroke. He tackles physiotherapy as he once took on the bosses and vows to be out of his wheelchair by his 95th birthday in September. No one is betting against him. As it turns out, a recollection written for family includes cameos by the likes of the great American singer Paul Robeson and the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. He even met Norman Bethune, the Ontario-born doctor revered by Chinese Communists. Dr. Bethune has been dead for nearly seven decades. Like Mr. Swankey, all were Communists, a cause to which the activist devoted himself at age 18. A membership retained through the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact (1939), the revelations of Stalin's crimes and the invasion of Hungary (1956), the crushing of Prague Spring (1968), the imposition of martial law against Poland's Solidarity (1981), was finally ended by resignation in 1991. "Thanks to Gorbachev," he writes, "the mask had been torn off the ugly face of Stalinism and its legacy in the Soviet Union. The revelations were nothing less than horrendous. So many deaths, so much torture, so many lies, so many harmful policies and actions." He came of age during the tumult of the Depression. It was the witnessing of a police attack on demonstrators that set his life's course. He was born at Steinbach, Man., just months after his mother emigrated from Tsarist Russia. Two of his parents' eight children died in infancy. The boy was three when the family moved to Herbert, Sask., where his father eventually found work as a labourer on a railroad crew. At 14, the boy decided to ride the rails. He hopped a westbound freight, hanging out with hobos at a camp at Lethbridge, Alta. His first night in this province was spent asleep in a boxcar stationed at Yahk. At Wenatchee, Wash., he found work picking apples before returning to Saskatchewan to finish high school. By graduation, the Depression made unlikely any prospect of finding work. He and a friend decided to hitchhike around the world. They painted HERBERT, SASK. in block letters on their Boy Scout hats and hit the road. He learned about the mythical lake creature Ogopogo, but was more impressed by the bounty of fruit to be found in the Okanagan. In Vancouver, he stayed with an older brother who tried to feed a wife and two children, one a newborn, on relief. The brother blamed Prime Minister R.B. Bennett for the economic calamity. Ben disagreed. He held the anti-Communist sentiments learned in his hometown. The brother took him to an anti-war demonstration near Victory Square, which was attacked by police after those in attendance began to parade without a permit. Men, women and even children fell under police clubs. "I was appalled and angry at the brutality of the police, as was Rudolf," Mr. Swankey writes. "There was a service station next to the square with a wooden picket fence around it. Rudolf and I each tore off a picket and went after the police. I got one of the mounted police across the back and neck when I threw my picket at him." The riot changed his life. He studied books, became influenced by radicals. He moved to Edmonton soon after his 18th birthday after his mother sent him train fare. After joining the Young Communist League, he became an organizer, working with striking coal miners at Crow's Nest Pass. He homesteaded near Prince George, where he became a member of the Communist Party. He eventually found work wielding a sledgehammer on the building of a highway between Banff and Jasper. The job paid 45 cents an hour and nearly cost him his life when a dynamite blast sent a rock hurtling in his direction. In Calgary, he helped organize support for the On-to-Ottawa trekkers, the striking relief camp workers led by Arthur (Slim) Evans. In 1940, Canadian Communist leaders were rounded up and interned in prison camps for opposing the war. Mr. Swankey found himself sharing a hut with a dozen fascists at Kananaskis, Alta. He later was imprisoned at a camp at Petawawa, Ont. Soon after his release, Mr. Swankey enlisted in the Canadian Army. In 1945, he was shipped overseas, but the war ended before he saw action. He ran for Parliament in the Alberta constituency of Jasper-Edson in the 1945 federal election, finishing last of five candidates behind the Social Credit incumbent. The next year, he became the provincial leader of the Labour-Progressive Party, as the Communists had renamed themselves. To be a Communist in Alberta during the Cold War was as unwelcoming as it sounds. Mr. Swankey's family lived in near-poverty. The Gouzenko revelations and the spy trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the U.S. also gave rise to the terrible possibility of punishment greater than imprisonment in an internment camp. Mr. Swankey's daughter, June Williams, now 63, remembers those days. "I was six or seven years old when the Rosenbergs were executed," Ms. Williams said."I felt it deeply. I felt a fear. A somewhat justified fear." A fear of what? "That it could happen to my parents." As a girl, she had even written president Dwight Eisenhower asking him to spare the Rosenbergs for their sons. Her letter is one of several documents and photographs reprinted in What's New: Memoirs of a Socialist Idealist. The book can be ordered from Trafford Publishing of Victoria. It is not Mr. Swankey's first title. He wrote a biography of Slim Evans and is known as a prolific and popular pamphleteer. A biography of the M�tis leader Gabriel Dumont was published in 1980 in Moscow, in Russian. Mr. Swankey, who lives at a care home in Burnaby, has the newspaper read to him every day. He remains engaged and outraged. Five years ago, the city of Vancouver declared his 90th birthday to be Ben Swankey day. The city might want to start making plans for his 100th. |
 Home |
New On the Web |
Video Online
| Focus
On... | Order tapes | About working TV | Contact us | Links |
|