Book Review by Sheldon Currie : J.B. McLachlan: A Biography, by David Frank

The Antigonish Review
Issue 121
J.B. McLachlan: A Biography, by David Frank, James Lorimer & Company, Toronto, 1999, 592 pp.
http://www.antigonishreview.com/bi-121/121-currie.html

This magnificent biography should be read by the many people who will never read it: journalists whose rhetoric reveal their belief that miners are no more than underground ditchdiggers. And those clergy who seem to think that allegiance to their enterprise should take precedence in a coal miner's mind over the welfare of his family. And politicians for whom the safety and economic security of the citizens they serve comes second after their allegiance to corporate bankers. And bureaucrats of the judiciary who create laws and have no idea that they create them in their own image for the purpose of offering security and riches to, well, themselves.

Alas, history is like money: those most in need are the least likely to find more than enough to stave off starvation. But unlike financial poverty, unfortunately, intellectual poverty is more likely to damage the pauper's clients than the pauper. In 1885 Emile Zola's novel Germinal, the first, best, and grandfather of all coal mining novels, outlined the plight of coal mining families at the mercy of denseheaded politicians and "industrialists," as they like to call themselves. Zola made graphically clear the consequences ofprofiteering stupidity. If Zola had lived to be 100, he might easily have rewritten his novel, setting it in Glace Bay during the first three decades of the 20th century, changing only the language and the names of the characters. Of course those who didn't read Germinal learned nothing from it. And had he written it in 1940, or even 1990, I don't imagine it would have altered the brief, devastating history of the Westray conspiracy to produce money and votes.

David Frank's biography of J.B. McLachlan is as clear and as devastating as Zola's fictional history of a coal town and no doubt quite as futile in its attempt to wam the future. As W.H. Auden said in his tribute to W.B Yeats, "Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its saying." But at least this biography, which is a clear and concise history of industrial Cape Breton, will serve to send the sinners to the Hades of history and secure for them a permanent location in Nova Scotia's Hall of Shame.

During strikes in the coalfields of Cape Breton and Nova Scotia an unwritten rule dictated that the miners would provide basic maintenance so the mines would not flood and when the strike was over, the mines would be ready for production. A correlative rule dictated that miners and their families would not be denied credit at the company stores and would not be turned out of their company houses, that is, left homeless and starving. The problem was that the company and the provincial and federal governments held the first rule to be sacred, but the correlative to be flexible. In spite of accusations against McLachlan that he was a communist, a bolshevist, that he was godless, and a host of other buzzword accusations, his real crime was that he considered both sides of the correlation to be sacred: if you are going to starve our children, we are not going to protect your mine.

In the lines of contemporary Poet Dawn Fraser, McLachlan's position was not only practical, reasonable and effective, but heroic. "Then Roy the Wolf began to weep/His tears fell fast, his groans were deep--/' I don't care what you do to me/But, oh, protect my property!/ All this was music sweet to Jim/ McLachlan only laughed at him/ Says he, "It's no affair of mine/ Go ahead and save your mine/ You never saved a worker's child.

Not everyone shared the poet's view. Roy Wolvin, known as Roy the Wolf, the subject of Fraser's lines referred to J.B. as "the concentrated cause" of labour unrest in the coal industry. James Burdock, Prime Minister MacKenzie King's minister of Labor, denounced McLachlan and all his miners as "un-British, un-Canadian and cowardly."Father A.M.Thompson warned his parishioners that trade unionism was acceptable only under the leadership of "people of sound mind"-"not irresponsibles whose sole purpose was to further the cause of Bolshevism, socialism and to keep the country in continual turmoil." (p276) John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers of America, appeared to be more depressed than impressed with Mc Lachlan's activity. In a letter to the District 26 president Livingstone he wrote: "The United Mine Workers is not a political institution Neither can it be used to sustain officers of perverted business morals or individuals suffering from mental aberration such as yourself and the aggregation of papier-mache revolutionists who are associated with you." (p.313) So much for support from the fearless leader.

Frank's biography makes pretty evident what any disinterested or fair minded person knew throughout J.B.'s career as a labour leader. He was a man of consistently high moral principles, and practiced the cardinal virtues he inherited from his parents and learned from his teachers and his avid reading. He was a man of courage, able to face the dangerous moment, and of patience for the long haul. He was the Eliot Ness of the labour movement who could be neither corrupted nor intimidated by power, money, or by "his betters," the bosses, lawyers, clergymen, politicians on the right or left, nor by labour leaders whose hidden agendas clashed with the welfare of Nova Scotia coal miners.

As both union leader and newspaper editor McLachlan kept firmly in mind the two great needs of the coal miners he represented: money enough for their families to live healthy lives, and a safe environment to work in-the two great needs, of course, that the company did not want to satisfy. And it is sad to say that in his quest to satisfy these basic needs, J.B. got no help from church or state and damn little from the United Mine Workers of America. In 1929 he wrote in the Nova Scotia Miner, that District 26 of the UMW "had become a'dues collecting machine' for John L. Lewis, and a 'wage-cutting tool' for the company." (P445)

Indeed it would have been hard to find an institution whose representatives did not conspire against him, the newspapers, the courts, the politicians, the churches, and in spite of his superior intelligence, his iron integrity, his genius for tactics and strategy, they finally landed him in prison on a charge of "sedition." The charge turned out to be as flimsy as an old miner's lung; McLachlan was in Dorchester no more than a week when preparations were already in the works for his release, in spite of the great danger he posed for the entire nation. Me Lachlan himself said it all:

Sedition is when you protest against the

wrongs inflicted on working men; when you

protest against the resources of the

province being put in the control of men

like Roy Wolvin; when wage rates are forced

on you without your consent. If you say that

strongly enough, you are liable to get into

jail for sedition.


As a prisoner in Dorchester he spent his time as a book-keeper and a shoemaker, and in his spare time, reading from books they allowed him to borrow from the prison library (nothing seditious, of course) and from his own copy of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, one of his favourite books, a brand new copy of which his daughter Jean gave him to celebrate his departure for prison. Jean acquired the new copy by saving up Surprise Soap wrappers and sending them off to the company so she could replace the worn out copy of the book he kept in the house on Steele's Hill.

Among the J.B. Mc Lachlan prison stories, one claims he voluntarily stayed in prison an extra day to finish making a pair of shoes for a fellow prisoner. If the story is true it tells us something about the man. If apocryphal it tells us something about what real people thought of him. Another story records an encounter with an inmate in the recreation yard. When the prisoner asked him what he was in for, J.B. answered:

"Sedition."

"Is that something to do with women?"

[the prisoner] whispered.

"Sometimes.,' said Jim.

"How many times did you do it?"

"Dozens," said Jim.


Outrage poured from every corner of the country, mostly from labour organization and individuals. Where was the press? Where were the politicians? Where were the "industrialists" in the face of this transparent miscarriage of justice? Well, here is where they were:

The Toronto Globe rejected a letter to the editor with these revealing words: "We do not care to print your letter which makes a hero of McLachlan."

The president of BESCO, Roy Wolvin wrote to Prime Minister Mac Kenzie King with his views: "I certainly do not want any man in prison who does not belong there but our courts in refusing his appeal must have acted wisely. I have had much experience with this man's activities and I consider him a dangerously clever 'Red' with him away for a few years, possibly, his teachings will be forgotten."

Cape Breton Liberal MP George W. Kyte wrote to the Prime Minister. "If he is liberated now, without having served any portion of his sentence, it will be accepted by his friends as an admission on the part of the government that his trial was unfair and his conviction illegal." McLachlan had run against Kyte in the 1921 election. J. S. Woodsworth MP for Winnipeg had made a speech in Glace Bay comparing McLachlan to Joseph Howe and suggesting that if J.B. were to be freed the chances are good that he might soon become the MP for Glace Bay. We don't know if MP Kyte was in the Savoy Theatre to hear Woodsworth's speech so we will assume that his motives for keeping J.B. in jail were pure and probably patriotic.

But he was liberated, because the charge was so outrageous, and the outrage from the country so insistent, and the "piety" of his enemies so festered with self-interest and polluted with political and financial agendas that fear of exposure and embarrassment forced the issue. He was released on the hypocritical grounds that, as the Toronto Globe feared, his continued confinement might turn him into a hero, a martyr and thus hurt the cause of the "possessed," and aid the nefarious agenda of the "dispossessed."

J.B. Mc Lachlan never fully recovered from health problems that developed while he was in Dorchester, but he continued to work for his cause until his death. In his later life he was a man honoured by the people he fought for. After his death he became a legend and if he had blemishes they have been purged by the passage of time. And this book, clear, concise, and beautifully written in a vivid narrative style will elevate J.B. to the heaven of history from whence he can look down on the mess that was made in the coalfields of Nova Scotia from Springhill, to Westray, to Inverness, to Sydney Mines, to Reserve Mines, to Dominion, to New Waterford, to Glace Bay, and he can console himself if need be with the thought that he did everything he could to prevent it. As for the future. Well, we all know the oft repeated dictum about history, quoted, usually, by people who never read it.