ARTICLES Rebel Or Revolutionary? Jack Kavanagh and the Early Years of the Communist Movement in Vancouver, 1920-1925
ARTICLES Rebel or Revolutionary? Jack Kavanagh and the Early Years of the Communist Movement in Vancouver, 1920-1925 David Akers DURINGTHE1919VANCOUVERGENERALSTRIKE, the guardians of conventional 'law and order' in the city, the middle-class Citizens League, bemoaned the evils of "Kavanagh Bolshevism" and its "red-eyed vision of Soviet control."1 Jack Kavanagh — a member of the general strike committee, prominent "platform speaker" for the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC), and the provincial chairman of the One Big Union (OBU) in British Columbia — was a prime target for the establishment backlash against labour militancy in Vancouver.2 Red Scare hysterics aside, Kavanagh did, from October 1917, openly embrace the Russian Revolution and its "proletarian dictatorship," as he labelled the Soviet 'Vancouver Citizen, 25 June 1919. "On Kavanagh's role in the 1919 Canadian labour revolt, see Paul A. Phillips, No Power Greater: A Century of Labour in British Columbia (Vancouver 1967), 66-84; Martin Robin, Radical Politics and Canadian Labour, J880-1930 (Kingston 1968), 138-98; A. Ross McCormack, Reformers, Rebels, and Revolutionaries: The Western Canadian Radical Movement, 1899-1919 (Toronto 1977), 145-54; David J. Bercuson, Fools and Wise Men: The Rise and Fall of the One Big Union (Toronto 1978), 57-170; Gerald Friesen, '"Yours in Revolt' : The Socialist Party of Canada and the Western Canadian Labour Movement," in Labour/Le Travail, 1 (1976), 139-55; Dave Adams, "The Canadian Labour Revolt of 1919: The West Coast Story," in Socialist Worker, 161 (November, 1990). David Akers, "Rebel or Revolutionary? Jack Kavanagh and the Early Years of the Com munist Movement in Vancouver, 1920-1925, Labour/Le Travail 30 (Fall 1992), 9-44.
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