“When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend”: Commemoration and Labour Politics

Mark Leier - Professor of History (Simon Fraser University)

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a 1962 western, Ransom Stoddard is a revered politician from the US west. Stoddard had held several political positions, and now the vice-presidency is within his reach. He returns to the small town where his political career was launched when he shot and killed the town bully, Liberty Valance. Returning to the town twenty-five years after the shooting, Stoddard reveals the truth to the editor of the local newspaper: he did not kill Liberty Valance. In fact, his friend shot Valance then insisted Stoddard take the credit and use the killing to settle the town and begin his political career.

When Stoddard concludes his revisionist history, the newspaper editor throws the interview notes into the fire. Asked why, he informs Stoddard, “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” 

The film has a warning for labour commemoration. Who decides what is to be commemorated and how it is commemorated can turn legend into fact and distort important historical lessons. The strike for the 9-hour day in Toronto, Canada, just five years after the nation-state was confederated and launched, is an example. The strike is often cited as a foundational episode in Canadian labour history and labour law, and a plaque put up to commemorate the event reads;

This is, on the face of it, a straightforward, reassuring story of liberal democracy. If profit-seeking capitalists exploit employees, the collective action of workers can push the state to intervene and ensure justice and reform. But the reality, and the lessons, of the Nine-Hour Movement are very different.

Craft unions, that is, unions organized around specific crafts and trades, such as carpenters and printers, were the most significant working-class organizations in this period. Typically, they functioned by creating an artificial scarcity of labour, by controlling training, apprenticeships, and even hiring. In large part they succeeded in improving working conditions by keeping people out of the trade. Their sense of solidarity was often restricted to those in the same craft or trade, and their actions were directed against individual employers. The 9-Hour Day movement represented an important step forward as unions tried to coordinate their efforts to win broader reforms. But this new, more inclusive solidarity was hurt when the printers, believing they could secure an advantage, went on strike on their own, rather than with the other unions. That ultimately weakened the movement. 

George Brown was not just any newspaper publisher or employer. He was a “Father of Confederation,” one of the political operators who engineered the new federation of Canada in 1867. As a Liberal, he was the political foe of the Conservative prime minister John A. Macdonald. The two men differed largely on who should be in charge, not what policies the new government should enact. Both shared the view of Canada as an expansionist, settler-colonial state that would expropriate land from Indigenous peoples. Both aimed to create conditions favourable to capital, from genocide to protective tariffs to a legal regime based on private property. As Brown put it, “It is an empire we have in view.” Unlike Macdonald, an attorney and career politician, Brown was primarily a newspaper publisher, that is, a capitalist. Where Macdonald curried favour with working-class voters, Brown insisted “it is utterly ridiculous to talk of the rapacity and despotism of the employer. The tyranny of the employed over his master would be an infinitely truer version of the case.” Brown went so far as to argue that keeping his employees at work for 10 and 12 hours was doing them, and society, a favour, for any free time they gained would be devoted to noxious pastimes such as drinking and gambling. 

The fight for the 9-hour day pushed Brown into a political blunder. When the Toronto printers went on strike, Brown had them charged with criminal conspiracy to restrain trade. This law was intended to prevent businesses colluding to fix prices. Brown argued that by acting together to reduce the hours of work, his workers were similarly conspiring to restrain trade. As a legal claim, it was slim. Brown’s own lawyers warned him it would almost certainly fail, for the law was clearly aimed at businesses and had never been used against workers seeking higher wages. 

Brown’s ill-considered legal action gave Macdonald an opportunity to win working-class votes. Posing as labour’s friend—Macdonald joked that he should be considered for membership in the carpenters’ union, for as a politician, he had framed a constitution and made several cabinets—his government quickly passed the Trade Union Act to signal his opposition to Brown and the Liberals. 

But the act did not make unions legal, as the commemorative plaque claims. Workers had formed unions, organized, gone on strike, and signed contracts with employers long before Confederation; there was no doubt they were legal entities. The Trade Union Act only specified that unions were exempt from prosecution under the restraint of trade laws Brown had tried to use. At best, the act merely acknowledged longstanding precedent and practice. It was political performance rather than substantive politics, and the commemoration of the strike does not recognize that.

Worse, the commemoration plaque ignores the anti-labour action Macdonald took at the same time. Along with the meaningless Trade Union Act, his government made changes in the criminal law that made union organizing and striking more difficult. Violence against persons and the destruction of property were of course illegal under the criminal code. The new changes, however, singled out for particular punishment violence against people and destruction of property in the context of union organizing and strikes. Now the criminal code specifically defined as harassment and intimidation any “persistent following, hiding tools, watching and besetting” that sought to coerce workers to leave employment, to refuse to seek employment, to join or leave a union, or to pay a fine imposed by a union. The changes made it much easier to categorize attempts to convince workers to join a union or respect a picket line as criminal offences. The effect of these amendments was, as one legal scholar has concluded, to “seriously undercut important methods trade unions could have employed to enhance their bargaining position.” Despite his political posturing around the Trade Union Act, Macdonald’s other revisions to the criminal code made it clear that trade union activity would be constrained by the state in the interests of capital. 

Labour unions were keenly aware of this at the time. The Toronto Trades Assembly and the labour newspaper the Ontario Workman attacked the new legislation as “unnecessarily harsh and oppressive” and worked, unsuccessfully, to have it repealed. Even a subsequent government committee found the new labour law “unsatisfactory and that it is capable of being administered oppressively.” 

Attention to the facts dispels the legend of the 1872 strike. A more careful examination prompts us to conclude that labour law is about controlling protest and disruption, not empowering workers. “Printing the legend” can do great harm when it pushes workers and unions to draw the wrong conclusions from history.

The British historian E.P. Thompson raised this point in his famous “Preface” to The Making of the English Working Class when he critiqued two orthodoxies common in labour and left history. The first is “the Fabian orthodoxy, in which the great majority of working people are seen as passive victims…with the exception of a handful of far-sighted organizers….” This tends “to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed by conscious effort, to the making of history.” While the 1872 strike commemoration notes the mass demonstrations, it portrays Macdonald as a far-sighted politician responsible for improvements in working conditions. Subsequent generations of labour leaders have taken the legend as fact and have been quick to portray themselves as that “handful of far-sighted organizers” who should not be challenged by union members.

Thompson’s second orthodoxy is “the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners,” including “exemplars of rational industrial relations.” Thompson’s objection to the “Pilgrim’s Progress” approach “is that it reads history in the light of subsequent preoccupations… Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered.” 

Thus a website of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), the equivalent of the US American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), tells readers that as a result of the 1872 strike, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald “introduced the Trade Union Act on April 18, 1872, legalizing and protecting unions.” A more useful lesson to commemorate might be, “he who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon,” for subsequent labour law in Canada has followed the precedent of the 1872 struggle: government legislation gives with one hand when pressured by workers’ collective action, but it takes away with the other. At best, workers may expect “golden handcuffs” from the state, though for the last 50 years, the gold has flaked off.

My argument is not that we should choose between printing the legend or the facts. My argument is that we need to choose carefully what we commemorate and how, for the lessons we choose to impart will have important consequences. When we choose, let us err on the side of encouraging militancy, radical criticism, and democracy, for the chief tool of the labour movement—solidarity—is built on these.