Coal Black Heart (22 page)

By 1923 Jim McLachlan was fifty-four. My great-aunt remembered him as short, straight-backed and bandy-legged. He had a well-used face, a red, bristly moustache, shaggy brows that overhung deep-set eyes. He was a serious teetotaller, with an unexpected sense of humour and the eccentric’s distracted air. “He took no mind of what he was wearing,” Nellie McLachlan, aged one hundred, recalled, when I went to see her. “He would wear one red sock and one black one. I remember one time his wife Kate putting these formal white gloves on him to keep his hands warm. He went on the bus—they never owned a car—and didn’t care or seem to notice; his mind was always on other things.”

To supplement his income as a union official, the family grew cabbages and potatoes on their six acres of land on Steele’s Hill, toward the back end of town. They also raised cows, and sold the milk from a wagon going door to door. (They even kept a few geese, although that didn’t work out; Nellie remembered the fowl once getting loose and nibbling the tops off all of his prized potato plants. McLachlan butchered them and gave them to his three daughters for Christmas.) Money, other than the necessities it could buy, meant little to him: his daughter-in-law remembered
that he was forever hauling hungry strangers home for dinner. When his kids or grandchildren asked for money for a treat, he wouldn’t even look up from the book he was reading while fishing a hand into a pocket and offering them whatever coins happened to be there.

McLachlan knew who he was and what he was about; he had a core set of beliefs and a true believer’s honesty that left working people inclined to trust him. When this stumpy Lowlander took out his teeth and spoke, people would do the damnedest things. Not always “good” things, mind you. But under the circumstances, history seems able to forgive that. In 1923 Cape Breton’s steel-workers walked out, ostensibly in protest over the firing of a union leader, but really over Besco’s unwillingness to recognize their union. Wolvin’s words a couple of days before the walkout gave little hope of a quick resolution: “The policy of the Dominion Iron and Steel Co. is to maintain the open shop… trade unionism is wrong in principle… and will not be tolerated by the company.”

The first night, some one hundred strikers, mostly young men, made their way into the coke ovens and drove out the maintenance men who were keeping the furnace fires going. The chief of police arrived with sheriffs, deputies and the local magistrate in tow. “Surrounded by city and steel company officers,” read the story in the
Sydney Post,
the local magistrate “started to read the Riot Act to the mob, where he was assailed by a shower of missiles from a dozen different directions, one of which hit him on the head, knocking him unconscious.”

A similar scene ensued when thousands of men gathered at one of the boiler houses. The arriving police wagon was “greeted with a fusillade of stones.” The
Post’s
reporter on the scene added, “Detective MacDonnell drew a revolver which only seemed to aggravate the strikers. Deputy chief Anthony was knocked down
and his baton was taken. Sgt. Rannie Macdonald later reported that he was struck with stones several times during the fracas.” The mob broke through, took the Besco loyalists who were working there and “paraded [them] up and down Victoria Road, amid the jeers of the mob.” Mike Fedora, a “foreigner who often acted as an interpreter,” was “subjected to many indignities at the hands of his fellow countrymen.”

The next night the strikers were at it again; 1,500 of them massed outside the plant and then, using another “fusillade of rocks” as cover, rushed the gate. Inside, the
Post
reported on June 29, 1923, “they got a reception which made them wish they had never entered the plant”—an ambush by 400 strikebreakers armed with iron bars.

Two days later the first soldiers rumbled down the track from Halifax. A light engine arrived first to ensure that the railway spur into the steel plant hadn’t been sabotaged. Then came the troop train with an armoured gondola—the sides piled high with sandbags, the car decorated with machine guns—as added protection. Soon after, provincial police set up tents on company property and erected machine guns and searchlights at the plant gates. That night, when the strikers showed up, the police fired over the heads of the angry rock-throwing crowd. The strikers stood their ground. Nobody budged when one of the machine guns was trained on the crowd. Only when an artilleryman took his position and prepared to fire did the miners’ nerve fail and the crowd scatter.

“Armstrong’s Army,” the provincial police force mobilized by the new premier Ernest Armstrong, was ready when a mob of steel-workers gathered near the coke ovens the next night. “Provincial police read the riot act and asked them to disperse,” said a story in the
Halifax Herald,
“when they didn’t the Mounties appeared at the city end of Victoria Road and charged the mob, using their batons
freely.” What ensued was a chaotic blur: mounted police charging into the mob; steel-helmeted soldiers advancing with fixed bayonets; the strikers scattering, some of them heading up toward the Whitney Pier area, with mounted police in pursuit.

At that moment, Bernie Galloway Sr. and his wife were just coming back from evening service at the Polish church in the Pier. “When we got by the railroad we saw this bunch of horses coming,” Galloway recalled more than half a century later. “Men on horseback—provincial police—with sticks, something like a baseball bat. I don’t know how many of them there were. They lined up. They were coming down Victoria Road towards the Pier.”

I’ll leave it to Doane Curtis, now dead, whose voice survives on a tape kept at the Beaton Institute in Sydney, to explain what happened next.

The next day the
Herald
tallied up the carnage: dozens of broken heads, five rioters injured seriously enough to require medical attention, two steelworkers in jail and several wrecked automobiles.

If you lived in Cape Breton in 1923 you had to pick a side. The miners were with the steelworkers all the way. At midnight on
July 3, all ten thousand of them—including the maintenance men who kept the pumps working that stopped the mines from filling with water—went out in sympathy. The next morning, as more recruits were called for in Halifax to augment the thousand already patrolling the pit areas, picket lines formed around the collieries. The last ponies were led blinking from the mines. Coal was dumped on the tracks leading into the colliery yards. At last, I imagine McLachlan telling himself. At last it’s under way.

Silence Profound and Sinister

I
visited Dorchester Penitentiary once, to talk to a murderer. It’s the kind of place that sticks with you, rising as it does from the New Brunswick flatlands, its dark stone walls leaching the light from the sky You expect to hear Gregorian chant as you walk up to the entranceway, perhaps be greeted by a cassocked hunchback when you pry open the heavy front door. Instead, a uniformed guard was inside. My heart still sank as the sliding doors slammed shut behind me. I hadn’t spent much time inside prison. Then again, neither had Jim McLachlan.

The day after work stopped throughout the coalfields of Cape Breton, he sent a letter out to the union locals:

Two days later, Sydney’s chief of police and a deputy walked up the stairs into the UMWA offices on Union Street in Glace Bay and told McLachlan, the District 26 secretary-treasurer, and Dan Livingstone, the union president, to come with them. The charge: “unlawfully publishing false tales whereby injury or mischief was likely to be occasioned to a public interest, namely the government and provincial police of Nova Scotia, contrary to Sec. 136 of the
criminal code.” Expecting trouble, the chief had brought along a car full of deputies who waited outside. The two union leaders were surely surprised by the charges, but went along quietly anyway. Everything seemed cordial enough; along the way they stopped at McLachlan’s house so he could tell his family what had happened. Since it was late they went to a restaurant for dinner. “On the way there,” reported the
Sydney Record,
“Mr. McLachlan conversed with the chief of police and others in the car but confined himself to common place topics and made no reference to the charges against him.”

McLachlan and Livingstone spent the next weeks in and out of jail as the lawyers argued. But obstacles could not dispirit this pair, nor hardship humble them. Somehow, in the midst of the objections, bail hearings and legal wrangling, they trudged forward trying to reach some resolution in the strike—which is how, on July 17, they found themselves at the Pictou train station being ushered into a vice-regal rail car. Inside the long drawing room, Julian (Bungo) Byng—who had commanded the Canadian Corps to victory at Vimy Ridge and was now governor general—sat in an overstuffed piece of furniture. Also there were Dan Willie Morrison, the labour MLA and mayor of Glace Bay, and Senator John MacDonald, a Shediac, New Brunswick, businessman who had brokered the meeting.

I depend upon historian David Frank for the account of what followed. Lord Byng and Morrison had a drink; the union men, both teetotallers, abstained. At the end, everyone shook hands. Then they went their separate ways, the train on to Cape Breton and McLachlan and Livingstone to tell the miners that they had a deal to end the strike. All they need do was agree to return to work, and Byng would advise the provincial and federal governments to withdraw their troops. And that’s how it could have played out.

Except that Prime Minister King and the war hero would never exactly see eye to eye. Three years later a full-blown constitutional crisis erupted when Byng refused King’s request to dissolve Parliament and call a general election to spare the Liberal government an embarrassing parliamentary vote. Instead, Byng invited the opposition Conservatives to form a government. Tory leader Arthur Meighen accepted, but a week later lost a vote of non-confidence. In the election that followed, King’s Liberals won a clear majority. Once in power, they moved quickly to clearly define the role of the governor general.

King ignored Byng’s guidance on the coal standoff. Further complicating matters was mine union strongman John L. Lewis, who didn’t like UMWA District 26’s truculently independent path, or the way the Nova Scotia strike undermined his credibility with other union locals. His displeasure with the radical ways of the district’s leadership grew daily; a story in the
Sydney Record
a week after the arrest of McLachlan and Livingstone had him musing about ousting the pair “in an effort to purge district 26 of its vivid Red element.” A week later, Lewis telegraphed a letter excommunicating McLachlan and Livingstone and any other District 26 officials. With their ouster, District 26 officially ceased to exist. It was being replaced by a provisional district run by a temporary president.

The jailing of McLachlan and Livingstone was a huge blow to the union side. Before the summer was over, the steelworkers’ union had been broken and the coal miners were back to work. Still, the machinery of justice ground on. The trumped-up charges against McLachlan and Livingstone not only stuck but were upgraded from “publishing false news” to “seditious libel.” Instead of a maximum penalty of a year in jail, the pair now faced up to twenty years.

Much was at stake, then, when McLachlan’s trial, one of the most fabled in Nova Scotia’s history, began in October 1923. It
lasted two and a half days. The prosecution tried to establish a direct connection between the confrontations in Sydney and McLachlan’s opinions, expressed in the July letter to the union membership, and, by implication, in a copy of the constitution of the Red International of Labour Unions seized from his home during a police raid. The defence countered that most of the allegations he made in his letter—including the assault on the pregnant woman—were true, and that he was only expressing the views of thousands of miners whom he was representing. (If McLachlan was “red,” argued his lawyer, then the miners who elected him continually to office were also “red.”)

Despite McLachlan’s celebrated gift for oratory, his lawyers declined to put him on the witness stand. Chances are that it wouldn’t have mattered. The trial, according to legal scholar Barry Cahill, “was a gross miscarriage of justice.” One fact says it all: presiding over the case was Humphrey Mellish, whom you have already met, who was appointed to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court while preparing to defend Dominion Coal officials against manslaughter charges laid after the 1917 New Waterford mine disaster. Four years later he was again there for the people who had once retained him; in a clear violation of judicial ethics, he wrote a decision rejecting union arguments for a stay in wage reductions by Dominion Coal until a federally appointed board could consider the situation—even though a delay was clearly mandated by the existing laws.

During McLachlan’s trial the old bias was evident. When the union leader’s lawyer asked for a change of venue from Halifax to Sydney because, among other things, they didn’t have the money to bring witnesses to the provincial capital, Mellish refused. A jury in Sydney, where McLachlan was actually charged, would have been unlikely to return a guilty verdict. Instead, the jury was out
for less than ninety minutes—part of which, according to the
Morning Chronicle
(Halifax), was spent eating lunch. McLachlan was found guilty on all three counts and sentenced to two years on each offence, with the sentences to be served concurrently. Upon appeal, one of the convictions was set aside. Early in 1924 he began doing his time in Dorchester.

It’s hard to think of him inside those grim walls: the indignities of the shaved head and upper lip, the prison uniform (he wore No. U-908), the cramped cell no bigger than the average bathroom. According to his biographer, he kept the books in the shoemaking shop, where he “learned something about the making and mending of shoes.” He was fifty-five years old, but looked far older. And as this aging, unyielding man sat there in prison, his legend was burnished until it glowed with white heat. Once he had been Jim McLachlan, local hero to some men and their families whose rights and welfare he had tirelessly championed. Behind bars he became… J.B., the near-mythic labour warrior; the fighter of many principled, hopeless battles; the man willing to go to jail rather than surrender to the rapacious monopolists who once again controlled the only thing his poor community had to offer.

You could see it in the way they rose to his defence, the union men and communists, the politicians, even the ordinary citizens who asked for his sentence to be commuted. When he finally was set free—on March 5, 1924, through a form of conditional release that meant he had to report regularly to the local chief of police until his sentence formally ended on eighteen months later—he received a hero’s welcome as his train chugged east. In New Glasgow the Pictou miners packed a concert hall where he described sedition as “when you protest against the wrongs inflicted on working men” and “when you protest against the resources of the province being put in the control of men like Roy Wolvin.” In Sydney, huge crowds
filled the railway station and poured into the steelworkers’ hall on Charlotte Street.

He was warmed up by the time he stepped on the stage in New Waterford. There he accused the attorney general of railroading him to Dorchester, and declared Wolvin a prevaricator who couldn’t be believed.

Then he left for Glace Bay, where throngs of thousands waited and cheering crowds followed him through the slush-filled streets into the Savoy Theatre, just blocks from where he had been arrested.

Like many people who visit industrial Cape Breton, I wanted to see the most famous shrine to the struggles of the island’s coal miners. So I drove down frost-riven streets, past tired company homes and boarded-up stores, until I reached what was once the town of New Waterford’s colliery lands. In February, the view is bleak and blasted across the frost-dusted, ice-puddled grass. I walked straight to one end of an abandoned rail line and stopped in front of some old cars, which looked freshly painted and were coupled together as if just waiting to take another load of miners underground.

Next thing you know, it’s 1925 and you can almost see the emaciated faces—jaws set hard, eyes flinted with pain and anger—of
the men, women and children moving like a gathering storm through the streets of New Waterford. The steelmaking slump after the First World War meant the Besco plant sat idle for long stretches, removing the coal industry’s single largest market. American anthracite had displaced a big chunk of Nova Scotia coal in the Quebec market, where increased use of hydroelectric energy was also eating into sales. By 1925, Nova Scotia’s coal production sat at just 3.8 million tons, a 40 percent drop from two years earlier. Some mines were hardly working. In the colliery towns, people were literally starving. And a fatalistic, aggrieved temper hung like smoke over everywhere where coal had once been king.

London, Ontario, businessman Hume Cronyn—father of the esteemed actor bearing the same name—summed up the mood in a personal appendix he attached to a report by a Royal Commission into the state of the Nova Scotia coal industry struck in 1925: