“While miners and longshoremen in the West were initially strong supporters of the One Big Union [OBU], the largest group of frontier labourers to sign up were those commonly known as "timber beasts," the loggers. Initially the work of unionists Helena Gutteridge and Birt Showler, the BC Loggers Union, renamed the Lumber Workers Industrial Union (LWIU), quickly came to be dominated by Ernest Winch, an ardent supporter of the OBU. Writers for the LWIU newspaper, the Camp Worker, published reports of camp conditions, warning working men to stay away from sites where they were treated not as men but "dogs." Following in the footsteps of the Wobblies in matters of religion, OBU men also ridiculed the travelling preacher who "runs around like his lord and master in a female night shirt."
Largely the work of editor Bill Pritchard, the pages of the Camp Worker articulated a symbolic economy of masculinities which differentiated loyal union men from "those unspeakable pimps that, feeding upon the working class movement, at all times act and speak on behalf of their masters." The working man who scabbed was a "lap-dog" who cast "literary bouquets into the bosom of his loving master." Pritchard offered a hierarchy of social problems in which class exploitation was the ultimate symbol of capitalist power relations, while issues he associated with women -- prostitution and fashion-oriented consumerism -- were trivial, even whimsical, in comparison:
We can feel sympathy for the poor femal[e] driven by the effects of the capitalist system to a life of shame upon the streets, and sometimes a pitying and amusing interest might be displayed in her who, bound to fashion's ridiculous whims, would impede the natural movement of her pedo-extremities by binding her nether limbs around with the horrible skirt of hobble design. But there can be nothing but contumely and disgust for the man mighty in his so-called wisdom, who sells himself so completely to capital, as to put hobbles on his brains and prostitute his mentality.
In contrast to the servile manhood of scabs stood representations of radical male loggers, the "timber beasts," as bearers of Marxist masculinity. Loggers were told to join the LWIU in order to "Prove your manhood! Think for yourself. Act for yourself!" With its emphasis on the physicality of work and features such as a weekly death count in the forests, the propaganda of the Camp Worker appealed to a particular sense of working-class masculinity rooted in life as a frontier labourer. The subjectivity of craftsmen was quite different in many respects, infused with traditional elements of skill, job control, and respectability which clashed with the transient and often brutal aspects of unskilled work. Craftsmen rooted their sense of manhood in the connections they made among their control of the workplace, their position as family breadwinner, and their collective morality of self-discipline, including sexuality.
The practices of artisanal independence were founded on the economic dependence and familial subordination of women as well as the maintenance of craft exclusivity through the system of apprenticeship. As a result, for many, entry into the craft fraternity was seen as marking the transition from youth to manhood. OBU supporter Alex Shepherd spoke glowingly of his entry into craft work, recalling that "the machinists in this plant were a wonderful bunch. They helped me in everything I had to do, showed me how to set up my work, and watched over me like a father would." These paternal figures also introduced Shepherd to politics, teaching him phrases to sing to the rhythm of machines such as "You're being robbed -- you fool." This feeling was echoed by fellow machinist Bob Russell, who connected his becoming a socialist with the successful completion of an apprenticeship and entrance into the union.
While craftsmen-in-crisis and unskilled workers held varying conceptions of manliness rooted in their different life experiences, they shared the almost complete absence of women in terms of political power within their unions. As increasing numbers of women became involved in wartime production, many skilled occupations became the site of conflict over the sexual division of labour. Skilled men clung to their power, which lay in their accumulation of craft knowledge and their ability to represent their interests as the interests of the wider labour movement. Indeed, socialists such as Bob Russell took part in the gender struggle of craftsmen to prevent the entry of women into the metal trades during the war. As editor of the Machinists Bulletin, Russell informed his membership, "we can assure you if they try the introduction of women taking the place of men in the shops of Winnipeg, we will fight." While skilled men associated the feminization of craft work with deskilling and lower rates of pay, their resistance was also deeply gendered, relying on a particular sense of "masculinity as a focal point for individual identity and collective loyalty." Consequently, the transformation of skilled work through Taylorism and other managerial strategies struck at the heart of the craftsman's sense of self in multiple ways.
The One Big Union drew upon the radical heritage of craftsmen and reworked this history of resistance in light of "the industrial changes that have taken place," launching a critique of scientific management and other new forms of bourgeois discipline. OBU advocates believed that the connections made between control of the work process, respectability and skilled unionism could no longer be forged because of the transformation of the work process under monopoly capitalism:
In the days gone by, when the skilled craftsmen produced an article by himself largely by hand work, the craft union organization correctly reflected his interests on the job, but with the introduction of modern methods of production, the skilled worker has been reduced to a large extent to the position of a machine tender or specialist, who contributes but one or two operations in the production of the finished article.
This contradiction between the practices of skilled manhood and "modern methods of production" was to be resolved, they believed, through the creation of an inclusive, revolutionary union which would bring about the end of class exploitation. In this light, the OBU was represented as the institutional expression of male maturity: "Unionism was in the evolution of Society and grew from babyhood to youth and is now approaching manhood. Naturally, in the baby condition it did not realize the fundamental nature of the struggle; it fought blindly and wildly." 1919 was the period of the new socialist man; "the man who knows his Marx and is in possession of the technology of industry as well ... is the man of the immediate future," opined Tom Cassidy.
Another writer encouraged workers to reject the "moss-covered and age-old institution" of craft unionism by appealing to modernist feelings of unity and progress: "Let us cut those strings which lead us apart and strengthen those cords which bind us together. A new day arises. New conditions produce new needs. New needs demand new ideas, new forms of organization are hammered out. In union there is strength." Thus, while the masculinity of frontier labourers and craftsmen in crisis differed in various aspects, OBU organizers appealed to shared ways of being a working man and attempted to bridge the racial and sectional disparities through new forms of class organization. Consider Brenton Braily's poem, "The Workers," which was published in several OBU newspapers. While ostensibly about "the workers," men and women, it is clear that working men were the only subject of the poem:
I have broken my hands on your granite, I have broken my strength on your steel, I have sweated through years for your pleasure, I have worked like a slave for your weal.
Braily castigated the "masters and drivers of men" for the pathetic wages which rendered male workers dependent and servile, forced to "beg for more Labor again." However, Braily was concerned with more than just the abolition of the wage system, for he had been alienated from more than his labour:
I have given my strength and my manhood, I have given you my gladness and youth, You have used me and spent me and crushed me And throw me aside without faith.
While Braily saw the gendered experience of working men in terms of class and production rather than race, skill or status, he envisioned exploitation, and its end, in terms of male entitlement:
I have built you the World in its beauty, I have brought you the glory and spoil ... Yet I suffer it all in my patience, For somehow I dimly have known That somehow the Workers would conquer,
In a World that was made for His own. Poems such as Braily's were shining examples of how OBU men were caught up in a gendered critique of capitalism. To work was to alienate one's manhood; socialism meant its restoration.
In seeking to reconstitute working-class masculinities by ending class exploitation, OBU men distinguished themselves from wage-oriented conservative unionists. As with the rhetoric of the Western Labor Conference, this conflict was mapped out through different masculinities, with weakness, passivity and servility signifying reformist organizers. Bob Russell assailed the "Jimmy willings or the wishy washy guys" who refused to fight class exploitation. Similarly, a writer in the OBU Bulletin informed readers that the "labor leader obsessed by the virus of status is ... a plastic, spineless, spiritless object." Yet another depicted labour bureaucrats as "a weak-kneed, spineless crew," while Matt Glenday attacked them for being "a privileged exclusive group" that was "coaxed, petted and fondled by the employing class."
Perhaps the most detailed analysis of the miserable masculinity of conservative union leaders was found in Frank Woodward's series entitled "Evolution," which began its run in the Bulletin in early January 1920. A future editor of the paper, Woodward provided his readers with a serial outlining the classical Marxist conception of economic stages and its relationship to social problems. Woodward's initial foray was a lengthy discussion concerning how an archetypal "labor leader" was subtly seduced to "betray his comrades" by the ruling class. Woodward suggested that, to undermine the independence of labour leaders, bosses used gradual pressure so as to not pose "an open affront to their manhood." Eventually, union leaders acquiesced, becoming class traitors while losing whatever positive attributes of manhood they previously possessed:
Any return of manliness reacts unpleasantly upon him ... The women-folk of his own household even reproach him, telling him to be careful what he says, and not to jeopardize their future and his own ... At times, he has to confront angry workers. Even the women at his meetings call him traitor and tell him he has "sold out."
The "labor leader" had lost his manhood, and all that it implied --independence, political integrity, and mastery over his world. Indeed, his patriarchal power was "even" challenged by "the women-folk of his own household" and "even the women at his meetings," implying that working women were typically less likely to protest against class treachery than men. In Woodward's mind, the One Big Union would enable working men to be men, to work, to provide for their families, and to control their future, a sharp contrast to the weakness of conservative unionists. In its simplest expression, radical manhood was centred around the belief that the workers "produce[d] all wealth" and possessed the knowledge to govern society without the "parasites" -- bosses, politicians, and union bureaucrats. Even opponents of the OBU such as David Rees remained "convinced that the overwhelming majority of the workers who do a little studying believe in the slogan --Production for use, not for profit." This idea was strengthened by a number of strikes which displayed the power of the rank and file. As Bob Russell later observed, if workers, through their collective strength, "showed they had the power to stop the wheels of industry [they] also showed they had the power to start the wheels of industry -- they couldn't start without them, you understand -- then you had shown economic sense."
Workers had no need for the bourgeoisie, the "other fellow," because they could "manage without managers." Nor did they need politicians, even those who were once workers, since they "are no longer working men. It is years since they had on overalls, or since they toiled at the bench, in the shop or in the mine." Drawing upon their collective power, working men could also overcome the limitations of international unionism, which was "a menace to every organization which has any wish to struggle for manhood and freedom of action in resisting the aggressions of big capital."
- Todd McCallum, " `Not a Sex Question'? The One Big Union and the Politics of Radical Manhood," Labour/Le Travail, 42 (Fall 1998), 34-37.
