Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 1 11/01/11 1:45 PM Whyte in his prime, cigar at the ready, in Moscow, about 1968 Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 2 11/01/11 1:45 PM Champagne and Meatballs Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 3 11/01/11 1:45 PM Working Canadians: Books from the CCLH Series editors: Alvin Finkel and Greg Kealey The Canadian Committee on Labour History is Canada’s or- ganization of historians and other scholars interested in the study of the lives and struggles of working people throughout Canada’s past. Since 1976, the CCLH has published Labour/Le travail, Canada’s pre-eminent scholarly journal of labour stud- ies. It also publishes books, now in conjunction with AU Press, that focus on the history of Canada’s working people and their organizations. The emphasis in this series is on materials that are accessible to labour audiences as well as university audi- ences rather than simply on scholarly studies in the labour area. This includes documentary collections, oral histories, auto biographies, bio graphies, and provincial and local labour movement histories with a popular bent. Series Titles Champagne and Meatballs: Adventures of a Canadian Communist by Bert Whyte, edited and with an introduction by Larry Hannant Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 4 11/01/11 1:45 PM Champagne and MEATBALLS ADVENTURES of a CANADIAN COMMUNIST Bert Whyte edited and with an introduction by Larry Hannant Canadian Committee on Labour History Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 5 11/01/11 1:45 PM © 2011 Larry Hannant Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011–109 Street Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Whyte, Bert, 1909–1984 Champagne and meatballs : adventures of a Canadian communist / Bert Whyte ; edited and with an introduction by Larry Hannant. (Working Canadians, ISSN 1925-1831) Includes index. Also issued in electronic format (ISBN 978-1-926836-09-6). ISBN 978-1-926836-08-9 1. Whyte, Bert, 1909–1984. 2. Communists — Canada — Biography. 3. Communist Party of Canada — Biography. 4. Journalists — Canada — Biography. 5. Soldiers — Canada — Biography. I. Hannant, Larry, 1950– II. Title. III. Series: Working Canadians HX104.7.W59A3 2011 335.43092 C2010-907657-5 Cover and book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design. All photographs courtesy of the Whyte family. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. A volume in the Working Canadians: Books from the CCLH series ISSN 1925-1831 (Print) ISSN 1925-184X (Online) Canadian Committee on Labour History Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 6 11/01/11 1:45 PM Dedicated to Bert’s son, Rick Whyte, and grandsons, Kevin Albert and Dylan Albert Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 7 11/01/11 1:45 PM Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 8 11/01/11 1:45 PM XI Acknowledgements 3 Introduction by Larry Hannant CHAPTER ONE Early Years 37 CHAPTER TWO The 1930s 107 CHAPTER THREE The War 177 CHAPTER FOUR Postwar Years 237 CHAPTER FIVE Letters from China 269 with a foreword by Monica Whyte 319 Appendix 321 Notes 331 Index Images following pages 168 and 250 Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 9 11/01/11 1:45 PM Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 10 11/01/11 1:45 PM Acknowledgements In my ongoing quest to interview communists of a certain age, in 2006 I made the acquaintance in Toronto of John Boyd. How I had missed him before that year is one of life’s oddi- ties. Then over ninety years of age, John sat with me for three hours answering my questions and engaging in a lively discussion about the inner politics of the Communist Party of Canada, which he knew intimately for decades. Towards the close of the conversation, he said to me, “You should look up Monica Whyte in Victoria. She has the manuscript memoir of her husband, Bert Whyte.” With that, I came — to my pleasure and instruction — to know Monica and to gain access, indirectly, to Bert Whyte. John has continued to offer assistance that has helped turn Champagne and Meat- balls from a manuscript into a book. Numerous other people have also contributed in many ways. Monica Whyte’s input is too comprehensive to begin to describe. Jon Rathbone transformed Whyte’s original typescript into clean computer copy ready for editing; he scanned photos, transcribed a lengthy interview with Monica, and has retained an endur- ing interest in the Whytes and their story. Bryan Palmer’s assistance has been invaluable. He will disagree — perhaps XI Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 11 11/01/11 1:45 PM quite strongly — with some aspects of the introduction. But the fact that, despite his objections, he read both the in- troduction and the manuscript carefully and made numer- ous insightful comments speaks to his dedication not just to scholarship but to Left politics in Canada and beyond. Oth- ers have read the introduction in various manifestations and offered important suggestions. Jim Hamm, Franca Iacovetta, David Lethbridge, Reg Whitaker, and an anonymous reader for Athabasca University Press are among them. Kim Wil- loughby encouraged me to persist in the project. All errors, of course, are my own. — LARRY HANNANT In addition to John Boyd, I would like to thank Lori Boittiaux for her assistance in organizing and copying the many let- ters that Bert wrote to Rick and to me, excerpts from which now form a final chapter to Champagne and Meatballs. If not for Larry’s driving force, this book would still be a manuscript sitting in a drawer. — MONICA WHYTE CHAMPAGNE AND MEATBALLS XII Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 12 11/01/11 1:45 PM Champagne and Meatballs Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 1 11/01/11 1:45 PM Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 2 11/01/11 1:45 PM Introduction Champagne and Meatballs is Bert Whyte’s account of how he navigated half a century of historical upheaval, mayhem, and catastrophe. Historians call it the twentieth century. Whyte cut a merry path through the Roaring Twenties, bummed across Canada like countless others during the De- pression of the 1930s, battled fascism in the Second World War, and held fast to communism throughout the 1950s, despite the Cold War. Communism and anti-communism marked much of his life. He lived through decades when people worldwide were expected to choose between being Red or White. Always the rebel, Whyte dared to be Red. Yet while his choice imposed a burden on him, Whyte was never weighed down by it, and his writing displays this ebullience. Champagne and Meatballs is by turns funny, irreverent, and revealing. Whyte considered it to be an “autobiography of sorts.” He thought it presumptuous to claim to write a for- mal autobiography, so he assembled a collection of engag- ing stories about a life of adventure. As we’re swept into Champagne and Meatballs we discover a man of action with considerable writing talent. True, it’s un- tutored. Whyte never spent so much as an hour in journalism 3 Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 3 11/01/11 1:45 PM school. But even the first articles he wrote for the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) press — “What I Know About Relief Camps,” “A Worker Is Dead,” and “Night Freight” — illustrate a capacity to use first-hand observation to vividly sketch the reality of life for common folk. Whyte began writing for the communist press in 1936 and continued to do so for almost forty years. Not only did he cover events across a good part of Canada, he also filed articles from Europe during World War II, and, as official Canadian Tribune correspondent, from Beijing, Moscow, and other parts of Asia and Europe. Like all of us, James Albert Whyte — known simply as “Bert” — was blessed and cursed by his birth and upbring- ing. Both his mother and father could trace their ancestry to Scots United Empire Loyalist settlers in eastern Ontario. In 1784, when the Loyalists came to what would become Canada, being Scottish was no special advantage in life, and might in fact have been the mark of McCain. But by 1909, the year of Whyte’s birth, Scottish ancestry had come to be a badge of honour. That didn’t pay the grocery bill, of course. Whyte’s father, Jack, was a skilled worker, but ill health and the vagaries of the boom-and-bust mining economy in northern Ontario, where his folks found their livelihood, cast a net over the family. It let them imagine prosperity but kept them from seizing it. Yet Whyte’s family also favoured him with a stable and nurturing nest. Despite — yet also in part because of — the stern Christianity of his mother, Edith, there was space for reading, inquiry, and the development of social conscious- ness. The last was sometimes abstract to the youthful Whyte. Where was Armenia, and why exactly would him finishing the food on his dinner plate help the starving Ar- menians? Nevertheless, as a boy he learned the simple fact that “there” and “here” are part of a dialectical whole. INTRODUCTION 4 Champagne_and_Meatballs_Interior.indd 4 11/01/11 1:45 PM Whyte had relatively little formal education, completing school just to grade eight. Still, he became and remained an avid and eclectic reader. In 1950, for instance, he gave a lecture at the Vancouver Book Fair comparing Soviet and Western novelists of the mid-twentieth century, then pub- lished the lecture.